Is France Now The Leader Of The Free World?

France: Leader Of The Free World -- Philip Delves Broughton, Daily Beast

The French are a decisive, manly superpower. Unlike America.

In the early afternoon of January 12, four Rafale jets roared out of St-Dizier, 125 miles east of Paris, angling south toward the Mediterranean and their targets in West Africa: the training camps of Islamic fighters in northern Mali. Four hours later they struck.

It had already been a long day for France’s president, François Hollande. His laborious domestic struggles over tax rates and spending cuts had been replaced by the dark and dangerous glamour of special operations and airstrikes.

At 4 a.m., Hollande had been woken at his apartment in the 15th arrondissement, to be told that a French commando raid in Somalia to rescue a French agent, Denis Allex, kidnapped by the Shabab rebel group in 2009, had failed. Not only had they not recovered the hostage, but two commandos had been killed in the process. Mali was a very different situation. “It doesn’t matter if it was the right or wrong decision to intervene,” says Philippe Moreau Defarges, the director at IFRI (Institut Français des Relations Internationales). “It was the only decision.”

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My Comment: With the exception of the French .... and to a lesser extent Germany/Britain .... everyone's military in Western Europe is just a shadow of it's former self, and more to the point .... no one has the will to intervene in foreign conflicts like Mali. But the French military is still a force to consider .... and more to the point .... the will to confront adversaries who need to be confronted still exists in the French government. And while I do not know how long this will last .... for the moment the French are on top.