The French Revolution

But Sarkozy's best-laid plans could well go awry in Afghanistan, which has become a crucible for the whole alliance. "This is where the future of NATO is at stake," says Etienne de Durand at the French Institute of International Relations. If the alliance fails there, he warns, NATO could wind up like other vestigial cold-war bureaucracies—"international organizations that never die, but are actually sort of zombie organizations." Victory is far from certain. The Taliban keep coming back. Casualties are rising, and while the Canadians, the British, the Dutch and the Americans are fighting a tough war in the south and east, the Germans, Italians and others originally dispatched as peacekeepers and nation-builders have been reluctant to plunge into combat.

France is not quite in either camp. "The French are at war with themselves in Afghanistan," says a senior NATO official in Brussels. On the one hand, if Sarkozy sends troops into the fighting, he helps shore up U.S. support in other arenas—like his plan to build an all-European defense structure that can coordinate with NATO in different parts of the world. Previously, Washington saw any such EU force as a distraction competing for resources. But with so many troubles and so many wars, there's growing recognition that some conflicts—in Africa for instance—may be of more interest to the EU than to the whole alliance. On the other hand, it's hard for Sarkozy to go too far in Afghanistan because the war there is unpopular with both the French public and the military.

The crunch came at the beginning of this year, when Canada threatened to pull out of the fight unless more troops from other NATO allies joined it on what pass for front lines in Afghanistan. Finally, at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, Sarkozy promised to send a battalion of some 700 soldiers to the east of Afghanistan, in addition to the 1,500 already in the country, so the Americans could deploy more forces to the embattled south. In an impassioned defense of his decision during a television interview last week, Sarkozy warned that not only Afghanistan was at stake, but Pakistan. "It has the atomic bomb, and if we let Afghanistan fall, Pakistan will fall like a house of cards." Meanwhile, Somali pirates seized a Spanish fishing boat last week and took its crew hostage. Madrid sent a reconnaissance aircraft to the French military base at Djibouti. It seems the little wars affecting big alliances go on and on—and France is ready for action.

With Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris and Benjamin Sutherland in Treviso, Italy

© 2008