#Reason for freedom fries tv

Sarkozy and Cameron gave a passionate speech together in the Libyan city of Benghazi, newly united after the divisions prompted by the war in Iraq.įrance’s involvement didn’t do much to help Sarkozy’s re-election effort the following May, when he lost out to Hollande, but it did perhaps indicate a willingness by France’s leaders to re-engage with international diplomacy. More recently, Hollande told President Barack Obama during an Oval Office meeting days after he was elected to the French presidency that he would stand by his campaign pledge to withdraw French combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year.įrance was one of the bigger contributors of troops to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, making its withdrawal a blow to the Obama administration.īut when Gadhafi was again in the sights of the international community in 2011, as Libyan rebels fought for his ouster, then-President Nicolas Sarkozy was an enthusiastic participant in the conflict.įrench fighter planes bombarded pro-Gadhafi forces as part of a NATO effort also spearheaded by Britain, while the United States kept a low profile. At that point, Francois Mitterand was in the presidential palace, while Chirac was prime minister. The aircraft instead took off from Britain. planes access to its airspace, according to news reports from the time. When former President Ronald Reagan launched air strikes back in 1986 on sites connected to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, after an incident in which Libyan agents had bombed a disco in Berlin, killing two Americans, France denied U.S. “The United Nations has just been through one of the most grave crises in its history.” “The war, launched without the authorization of the Security Council, shook the multilateral system,” he said. Undeterred, Chirac’s tone was no softer six months later, when he addressed the U.N. His opposition earned him then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s scorn, as he dismissed France as belonging to “old Europe.” “Iraq today does not represent an immediate threat that justifies an immediate war,” he said in March 2003. While France has been a historical ally of the United States, going back more than two centuries to the Revolutionary War, in more recent times the French and their American cousins have not always marched to the beat of the same drummer.įrench President Jacques Chirac was sharply critical of the Bush administration as it tried to drum up support to invade Iraq in 2003 without a U.N.

So did Kerry’s words signal a new era in French-American relations? Meanwhile, Britain - whose Parliament voted against military intervention in an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister David Cameron - was relegated to an unfamiliar backseat position as Washington gears up for potential combat. Hollande, in turn, described the two nations as “close friends and allies.” Yet on Friday, as the United States tried to rally support for military intervention in Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry had only fond words for the French, calling them “our oldest ally.”

#Reason for freedom fries tv

Some Americans bandied around the term “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” coined by TV show “The Simpsons,” for their Gallic cousins, while then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair became George W.