When French president François Hollande addressed France’s ambassadors to foreign countries, assembled in the red velvet and gilt reception rooms of the Élysée Palace yesterday, the usual boasting about France’s influence in the world rang hollow. His hour-long overview of the sorry state of the world was long on observation and very short on remedies.
The country that fostered the Enlightenment has, it seems, little more to offer than its skill at organising international conferences. The UN COP 21 climate change conference in December "will be a major event," Mr Hollande said. "We must succeed because the stakes are global, because France is the host."
Paris will host a conference on Christians of the Middle East next week, and Mr Hollande also offered to stage a meeting of parties who are fighting Boko Haram extremists in Nigeria.
Confronting terrorism
The world “is not only threatened by global warming, it is confronting terrorism that had not reached such levels of barbarity in decades,” the French leader said. The August 21st attack on the Amsterdam-Paris high-speed train was “new evidence that we must prepare ourselves for further attacks.”
Islamic State is the greatest danger, Mr Hollande continued. Alluding to the beheading of Khaled al-Asaad, the former director of the ruins of Palmyra, and IS’s destruction of the temple of Baalshamin, he said the intention was “to erase all traces of humanity, terrorise through images . . . show that there is no limit to barbarity. We must act.”
But no, Mr Hollande was not about to send in the legionnaires. In connection with the Unesco convention on cultural diversity, he has asked the president of the Louvre to undertake a study mission on the protection of cultural treasures in armed conflicts.
Nor did Mr Hollande offer succour to the victims of Boko Haram, “10,000 since the beginning of the year . . . 14,000 last year, most often women and children”. He expressed France’s “faultless solidarity” with Nigeria and surrounding countries.
In Mali, he said, France, with the help of the African Union, the EU and the UN had "made terrorism step back".
Terrorism must be fought with force, Mr Hollande continued, but “military commitment will never be sufficient alone, for terrorism feeds political chaos”. It was up to French diplomats “to find exits from the crises we are living through”.
In the lurch
Mr Hollande remains bitter over the way president
Barack Obama
left him in the lurch two years ago, when Washington backed out of military retaliation against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons.
"The inaction of the international community, after the red line was deliberately crossed, cost a great, great deal," he said. "Islamic State, which didn't then exist in this form, in Syria, established itself, and Assad continued massacring his people."
IS now holds one-third of Iraq and half of Syria, but Mr Hollande insisted that Iraq, like Syria must preserve its "state structure". A state was not consolidated in Libya after the fall of Gadafy "and we are paying a high price" for it, he said.
The “disorder” of the Middle East has created “the greatest migratory crisis since the second World War,” Mr Hollande said.
Walls rising
He estimated that 350,000 migrants have arrived in the EU in recent months. “One sees walls rising up again within
Europe
, armour being mobilised, barbed wire being set down, refugee centres attacked. This is the situation today, and it is likely to continue . . .”
An opinion piece in Le Monde newspaper, written by Jean-Marie Fardeau, the director of Human Rights Watch France, accused Mr Hollande of "burying the diplomacy of human rights". Mr Fardeau particularly criticised France's cosy relationship with president Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi of Egypt. Mr Hollande devoted three sentences of his speech to Egypt.
Nor did the French president explain why France has abandoned a UN Security Council Resolution that would have recognised the state of Palestine within two years. Mr Hollande told the Presidential Press Association on July 27th it was because the Obama administration had threatened to veto the resolution.
Mr Hollande challenged those “who foretold the end of the credibility of France as an exporter of military materiel to look at the figures. French products – not only the Rafale [fighter jet] – have never been so sought after,” he boasted.
