As well it should be. Now get some more LNG facilities on the south coast and take over the leadership of Europe as Germany goes retro and heads back to the Coal and Steel Community days.
From Palladium, July 12:
“The Mediterranean must be exclusively the French sea. Its entire trade belongs to us, and anything that tends to distance other nations from it must be part of our views.” So said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, one of the most celebrated and distinguished diplomats to serve in the name of France. Like the career of Talleyrand himself—which spanned the regimes of Louis XVI, the years of the French Revolution, Napoleon’s empire, Louis XVIII’s restoration, and Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy—this statement of manifest destiny transcended both ideology and regime. It could hardly be otherwise; the Mediterranean has served as a conduit for France’s power, development, and identity for its entire history.
Today, that connection has been frayed by several generations of abandonment. Following defeat in the Algerian War in 1962, many French elites began to instead pursue a desperate focus on European integration as a way to retain a path toward international influence. While France would persistently maintain a presence in Africa, the pursuit of a close relationship with Germany would take center stage.
During this period, France’s postwar influence in Europe was seemingly at its height. French was overwhelmingly used as the working language of the European institutions up until 1995, with pained British diplomats even agreeing to use French in order to join the European Communities in 1973. President Georges Pompidou went so far as to claim that if Europe were to ever use English as a working language, it “would not be completely European,” and attempted to codify French as the official language of the European institutions. France was not alone in its views. Before the end of the Cold War, nearly every member state of the EU also preferred French to German as a foreign language, with many even preferring French to English. As a collection of only a handful of states that mostly shared foreign policy priorities, it was easy to conceive of a Europe with the coordination and means to develop into a superpower.
However, following the successful reunification of Germany in 1990, and the mass accession of much of Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union, French foreign policy elites saw their position erode. The 2004 expansion of the European Union, spearheaded by German Chancellor Gerard Schröder and supported by Scandinavia and Britain, solidified this unfavorable new reality. Eight new EU members east of the Elbe were brought in, and their geopolitical proximity to Berlin meant a vastly deeper connection to Germany than to France. This policy was aligned with Schröder’s remarks illustrating the will to govern Germany “as a great power in Europe” oriented toward “fully acknowledged self-interest.” With French policymakers ultimately finding themselves outmaneuvered, German economic, geographic, and cultural leverage now had the advantage in the European Union, and English prevailed as the new lingua franca.....
....MUCH MORE