Russian President Dmitri Medvedev arrived in Paris on Monday for a three-day visit and to launch a new strategic partnership with France. The new Franco-Russian embrace is marked by major arms sales, a space deal, lucrative energy contracts and greater market access—all under the banner of a blossoming personal relationship between President Nicolas Sarkozy and Medvedev. But the blossoming Franco-Russian friendship appears poised to come at the expense of European security.
We’ve been to this show before. The historical connection between France and Russia dates back before World War I. France and Russia consummated an alliance in 1894. This was a military pact, based on mutual protection guarantees, and aimed against the rising Germany. It did not survive World War I, nor did the 1935 Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance. This time, Paris is playing catch-up with Germany for a privileged relationship with Moscow.
Seemingly oblivious to NATO members’ objections and Russia’s continued violation of the August 2008 ceasefire agreement in George (brokered by President Sarkozy), Paris is moving ahead with the sale of four Mistral-class assault ships to Russia. The Mistral is one of the most advanced helicopter carriers in the world and would be a formidable power projection tool for Russia. Building two Mistrals under the license in Russia will also boost the Russian industrial capabilities. This dynamic should concern the U.S. as well as Europe.
In addition to arms sales, the two leaders presided over the signing of an important accord between Gaz de France Suez and Gazprom. GDF will acquire a nine percent stake in the Nord Stream gas pipeline, and in exchange, Gazprom will provide France with up to an additional 1.5 billion meters of gas annually from 2015. This follows a close pattern in Russia’s diplomatic playbook: Moscow grants selective access to Russian energy resources as a reward for political cooperation—and often times lobbying on behalf of the Kremlin.
The two countries are also venturing into space: France will spend about $1 billion to buy 14 Soyuz carrier rockets from Russia. The new deal marks another step in cooperation between Russia and France in the space sector after Arianespace signed a contact with Russia’s space agency in 2008 for the launch of 10 Russian Soyuz-ST rockets.
There may be an internal Russian political angle to the visit as well. Medvedev may be jealous of his mentor and ex-boss Russian Premier Vladimir Putin in pursuing a close relationship with Sarkozy. Putin has strong ties with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi and was close to the German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac when the two were in office. Until now, personal relationships and lucrative business deals were reserved to Putin. The trajectory of Medvedev’s and Sarkozy’s friendship appears to be a new dynamic which signals Medvedev’s “coming of age.”
One can only hope that Sarkozy will use his leverage to counter dismemberment of Georgia and promote the rule of law. Paris would also be wise to remember that its gains from a Franco-Russian business ties should not come at the expense of European security. Unfortunately, judging from Paris’s business-better-than-usual approach, the future for Russia’s expand clout in Europe never looked better.
C0-authored by Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Policy and Owen B. Graham, Research Assistant at the Katherine and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
While our recession looms and nightly newscasts highlight rage over Wall Street bonuses, we’re missing a larger and most formidable storyline. The only class warfare worth mentioning is between the citizen class and our ever burgeoning political class; the latter, intent on a tyrannical control over our everyday lives by those who purportedly know best.
Our founders spoke of this very possibility. They said that the demise of the United States and our way of life would not emanate from an external force, but from a soft tyranny eroding from within. It’s sometimes our very prosperity and resultant apathetic political non-participation that affords this political creep room to infest our Constitution and our way of life.
As we drove our kids to school, took in a football game, texted our friends, and shopped on Main Street, our elected representatives and the massive bureaucracy that follow them got in bed with big business. Don’t get me wrong, big business is fine when smartly regulated by sensible policies and law, but when those government regulators turn a blind eye, we’re all in trouble. Furthermore, while we slept, our Federal government bought our banks, our car companies, our insurance companies, and our mortgages. Enough is enough.
This divergence from our Constitution has already been played. During the fear and strife of World War I, Woodrow Wilson, nearly our first prominent liberal progressive steered our nation in a path that our founders never intended. Wilson’s notion of a Constitution that was not keeping up with the times, and his contempt for its restraining powers on the Executive branch, was thankfully thwarted by Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover in the roaring 20’s – 30’s. However, by the stock market crash of 1929 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first of four Presidential terms commencing in 1932, Wilson’s ideas had pervaded the minds of many in Washington D.C. The mindset that government can or should seek to solve man’s problems instead of good old common sense solutions that only man can best devise for himself became a dominant theme in the 1930’s and early 1940’s.
It seems all too fitting that a narcissist politician such as FDR, bent on power at all costs, spearheaded a flurry of entitlements designed to control rather than aid our citizens. In the liberal progressive’s utopian world, our citizens were best cared for from cradle to grave by experts in government. FDR spoke of a Second Bill of Rights, one in which every man had “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation” Do you see how quickly we jumped from need to desire? Where would that subjective path take us?
An often overshadowed point in the discussion over how much governmental interference is right is the fact that government didn’t enable the greatest nation on Earth to flourish, our people did. Our Constitution was unique among the World’s political documents of it’s time and now. It essentially spoke of limits on government as opposed to what its citizens could or could not do.
While government slept in our nation, we harvested resources from a bountiful Earth, forged steel, steamed commerce across our nation, and exported the fruits of our labor on ocean-going vessels built by the hands of Americans in our shipyards. While government slept, America prospered.
I’m all too sorry to say, however, that the goliath of Washington and Wall Street together, has awakened with a vengeance. It needs to be fed and its appetite is vociferous. The bigger it gets, the more it consumes, the more it consumes, the bigger it gets. You get the picture. While we slept, a tyrannical creep swept into our lives.
In reliable fashion, however, the American people have begun to respond. That’s one spirit that may become distracted from time to time, but it never dulls. For the pride the American people gain from doing for themselves feeds this ongoing spirit in a way that a handful of politicians in Washington could only dream of restraining much less containing .
You see, at the end of the day, each and every American gets to choose with whom they’ll climb into bed. We all likely learned when we were young that no means no. Right now the American people are shouting NO to big government because they know that what makes their possessions valuable are not the material items themselves, but, the effort put forth to achieve those items. America was built brick by brick with the sweat and tears of its citizens and thank God the spirit of 310 million Americans will always be sufficient to battle tyranny at home as well as abroad.
