In a widely expected move, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced today that France would return to NATO's military command. France left the command in 1966, as part of fromer President Charles De Gaulle's drive for French foreign-policy independence from the United States. The actual impact of French withdrawal was somewhat less striking than the political maneuver implied, as France continued to collaborate with West Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States on defense planning in case of a Soviet attack. The French withdrawal did, however, give defense analysts in the United States ample opportunity to "juke the stats"; if you wanted to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was a greater or lesser threat to NATO, you could play with assumptions about French participation in order to get the desired political effect. The joke, of course, was that if you wanted to make an especially dire pronouncement about the threat of Soviet power, you'd assume that the French would fight on our side...
The practical effect of French reintegration into the military command remains unclear. Some have suggested that this is part of a longer-term French effort to de-emphasize NATO in favor of European security institutions. By taking a less oppositional stance, France could quiet fears that it wants to do away with NATO, and instead slowly co-opt the organization from inside. That may credit the French with more cunning than is deserved, however. There's certainly some immediate political capital to be gained for Sarkozy in celebrating the French return at NATO's 60th birthday party in April.
For my part, I hope simply that French re-integration facilitates cooperation with the United Kingdom over ballistic missile submarine deployments; nobody needs another crash.
--Robert Farley
