Fusion cuisine flavour-of-the-month, or, "Whatevar annoys ze Americains mast be geud!"

[muckefuck]

Hey, a new reason to hate Shrub! He's been such a big meanie to the French, he's driven them into the arms of the Red Chinese! La Dame belle sans merci, she is planning to hold joint manoeuvres with Mainland China today. (Oh, and by some small coincidence, neighbouring Taiwan is holding a electoral contest this Saturday between a pro-independence president and his KMT challenger. France must've overlooked that, since I'm sure the home of Liberté, égalité, et fraternité wouldn't want any part in intimidating voters in the free and fair elections of a fellow democracy.)

I suppose when you're convinced of the need for a military counterbalance to the USA at any cost, there's no telling whom you'll embrace. So the USA has taken down your client state and now cowardly Germany spurns your advances? Fine, look to the Far East! Of course, an ally without teeth is not worth having, so you'll have to pressure your partners in the EU to end the ban on weapon sales to the world's largest dictatorship. After all, if you can forgive and forget Halabja, what sense does it make to hold a grudge about Tiananmen Square?

What were we thinking, not bending over backwards to patch up relations with la belle France? We've completely forgot "Babette"'s advice on SNL News! Uncle Sam should be saying, "You slut! You whore! Come back to me! Throw away your new Asian boy toy and all is forgiven!"

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

You're looking at things much too negatively. This could be the provocation the Washington warmongers are waiting for. Under the doctrine of pre-emption, they could finally put those lazy American troops in Germany to work and, by this time next year, they could be marching down les Champs in the shade!

Ah

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

but when ShrubCo stated far and wide that unilateral preemptive measures in the name of a country's own self interest are a Good Thing(tm), well, what's so surprising if someone else follows his lead? This sort of thing is exactly whats to be expected when you play unilaterally in the sandbox- all you can expect from others digging around is sand in your shorts...

S'all about marketshare, kiddo.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Doesn't this seem kind of delusional on France's part? I mean assuming they expect to be the dominant partner here, as they tend to do, and given that China could kick all of Europe's ass 12 ways to Sunday if it wanted to. Whatever Chirac et al think they're up to with this, I think China will probably be getting a lot more out of this alliance than France will. On the other hand, princeofcairo has been known to wonder, "So what is China going to be doing with all those extra boys aged 18-25 it's going to have after 20 years of the one-child-per-family policy?"

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Er...swap to France for inadequately-assimilated Muslims from the banlieux?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

and given that China could kick all of Europe's ass 12 ways to Sunday if it wanted to.

I started thinking about this. (Though I'm handicapped by not being one of those people who can rattle off military statistics from memory.) China's force projection capabilities aren't terribly great at the moment, though they're trying to ramp them up long term. And IIRC, they don't have enough nukes to cripple Europe. (And vice versa, discounting US nuclear forces.)

If the Alien Space Bats made the US completely neutral in a war between Europe and China, I genuinely wonder what would happen. Europe has something like eight times China's GDP (and builds more advanced armaments), China has four times Europe's population. China is almost certainly better able to get itself on a war footing than Europe, but Europe probably has a better capability of getting its forces to points near China than vice versa. (It will probably be a few years before those joint maneuvers are taking place off the coast of France, after all.) Something for the wargamers to work out, anyway.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Hmm. So what would lifting the weapons ban on China do to that?

Bah

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

It's all about the money, kiddo. France likes to pretend that they are still world class power, and they still see a bilateral race between english and french speaking worlds. Fie, say I, they did dick all when Rwanda went down in flames, and it's not like they've ever been able to hammer out any manner of working relationship with thier former colonial holdings a la Commonwealth that had any value. And it's not like their opinion on GWII mattered, right? Well, screw that lot if they can't take a joke; China has all the markets and then some to make up for that, and they really want friends, especially ones with Security Council seats and some token military force. Bonus points if they have telecommunications and high tech companies who keep losing market share to more english friendly companies- why not go where english is already a second language at best?

Tweaking Shrubco's nose is just icing on the cake- wanna bet that some sort of trade pact shows up between the two within a year or so?

Re: Bah

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

No one brings people of opposing viewpoints together like the French!

heh- I suspect

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

that it's more a difference in perspectives than view points between us, meself. Betcha some big franco-chinese telecom deal is gonna be announced by summer, or some such; gods, the money china must be paying for this...

Didja catch that Japan announced that they are switching the primary focus of their foreign aid programs from China to India this week? Mind, many of the big ticket projects they were funding are nearing completion, but still, the timing is... interesting.

[zompist.livejournal.com]

I've only just started reading here, so I'm not very clear on where you're coming from. But why the animosity toward France? I wouldn't defend its friendship with Iraq or China, but isn't our house, allied with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and dependent on China for leverage against North Korea, extremely glassy in this regard? At the actual time of Halabja, it was all realpolitik, as I recall, and anyone talking about democracy was considered hopelessly naïve. And why exactly is France supposed to have given up its apparently foolish sovereignty and follow wherever Bush led?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize that George Bush was the only one in the world whose lead would mitigate against joining up with a tyranny to militarily intimidate a democracy, on the eve of its election. If he is, it makes my vote in November that much easier. But there seem to be a lot of sovereign powers that have been able to express their independence, and their displeasure at our foreign policy, without doing that. I'd also thought that our own exercises in subverting democracy during the Cold War were generally regarded as excesses to be regretted or condemned, not examples for other countries to follow in 2004.

If we did some obviously aggressive fleet and aerial maneuvers off the French coast during their next election, would that be okay? What if we'd just made a subtle point of how much more an American SLBM could do to Madrid than any terrorist bombs last weekend, while pointedly praising Aznar and the PP? Fair exercise of American sovereignty, or unconscionable interference in a democracy's internal affairs?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Oh, btw, Mark, meet Mike; Mike, Mark. I don't think y'all have meet before. At least, I don't remember lhn being at Café Ibérico when you met princeofcairo and mollpeartree.

If France is allying with a distasteful undemocratic state in order to serve some strategic security goals of the kind that have driven us into association with Pakistan and the Saudis, I'm unclear on what they could be. However, you read the French press more than I do, perhaps you can elucidate. On the face of it, they seem to be taking a hard stand against the imperialist aggressions of Taiwan, which I did not previous realise had threatened to undermine French national security.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That's shift, not shit; the latter is what you pull out of your ass when you don't have anything worth contributing.

I'm sorry, we haven't been properly introduced. I usually like to know where the fuck someone gets off before flaming them. But then, I usually like it when people don't presume to know more about me (or my friends) than they actually do.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Apology accepted. And I'm sorry for blowing my stack at you.

Why don't you try reading some of my Friends before generalising about them? Then you can mock with authority! If you like politics, I can't recommend mollpeartree and lhn more highly.

[zompist.livejournal.com]

Dan, you know Daniel? Or vice versa?

As for France, I'm not interested in defending Chirac. Many of the comments here do seem a bit of an overreaction to an exercise involving four boats and 700 men, and joint military exercises don't mean a grand strategic alliance. (And if they did-- oh boy, France plus China, that'll sure cow the Taiwanese more than China alone.)

Most likely the French want to sell weapons; if this is an ugly business, it's one that the US is even more deeply involved in.

As for those "strategic security goals" that lead us to alliance with Saudi Arabia, I'd say it's well past time to rethink them.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Dan, you know Daniel? Or vice versa?

Boy, I do now.

I think a France-China alliance against Taiwan is worrisome for the later, which is already quite diplomatically isolated. The last thing it needs is for France to use throw its diplomatic weight (still hefty relative to its importance in other areas) behind China's foreign policy goals. When it comes to PR, symbolism matters, and this is nothing less than a PR coup for China.

Okay, so the French want to deal arms with the Chinese. What, they can't follow the US' example and do that stealthily? It's one thing to sell somebody a gun, quite another to go marching up and down arm-in-arm with him in front of his neighbour's house while he shows it off.

[zompist.livejournal.com]

OK, I don't disagree too much with this. I agree that symbolism matters (and if the French story that it's just coincidence is true, then their timing sucks)... but guns and the Chinese estimation of what the US will do matter more.

As for being stealthy, the US mostly only manages to hide its military activities overseas from its own people.