The City of Light was consumed by darkness Friday night, with six terrorist attacks across Paris killing more than 100 people in France's most violent day since World War II. French President François Hollande called the attacks an "act of war" committed by the "terrorist army" ISIS.
At times like these, it's best to lay your allegiances on the table, not least because of what you discover about where your true loyalties lie.
I love France. No, I've never been. Yes, my French is terrible. But I take it as an article of deepest faith that Europe is finished without French leadership, and if Europe is finished, the U.S. is doomed.
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I won't pretend to have seen this latest "unpredictable" massacre coming. But for many years, I have doggedly and publicly counted on France as an ally, and urged U.S. policymakers, in my minor way, to orient our foreign policy strategy around unreserved aid and encouragement toward French preeminence in Europe.
This vision has not been flawless. But years before terrorists and butchers began inflicting attacks on Paris, I warned that only France supplied Europe with a vision of its own civilization particular enough to make real — and grand enough to inspire.
"Rather than virtuoso banking or a latticework of bureaucracies, it is the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the motto of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, that can orient Europe toward a future whole and free," I said in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. Three years before that, I said much the same thing: "Europe today is more a product of France's political creed than of any other nation's. In Europe, there is no closer cognate to America's 'We the People' than 'Liberté, égalité, fraternité' — a phrase that captures France's attitude not only toward the French, but toward Europe and the world."
The U.S. and France are alone in sharing the most unique and consequential relationship in modern history. They are the two nations that, perhaps cosmically, reconciled the abstract and particular human imperatives present at their revolutionary founding. But since 9/11, the U.S. has been all but obliged to carry the torch of Western civilization alone. The experience has been as unnatural as it has been traumatic. Like an orphaned adolescent, the U.S. has been too aggressive one minute and too weak the next, all the while hurting for a validation from the ancient past that has never fully come. It is just too much for a young nation, reviled for its coarse vulgarity and materialistic preoccupations, to singlehandedly represent a multi-thousand-year-old civilization around the world.
And yet, France's steps toward greater confidence on the global stage have been halting and tentative at best. Napoleon Bonaparte famously said he found the French crown in the gutter. Today, the rich and urgent potential of America's relationship with France sits, if not quite in the gutter, perilously close to the curb.
That is one reason why these attacks on Paris matter so acutely. It's not just because of "senseless violence," not just because of the "loss of innocent life." Of course those things are a curdling outrage. But there is more at stake.
Let me be blunt: We beneficiaries of Western civilization have got to take our own side in today's most pressing argument, and unless France and the U.S. do this together, openly and deliberately, I am greatly afraid that the result will be further massacre and abject disaster. Either the U.S. will continue to lash out alone, trapped in a grasping and anxious present, or we, like most of Europe, will opt to play dead rather than be dead.
The Franco-American mission we must carry out is not to wage war against Islam, or to kick off a new Christian crusade. At the same time, and under the circumstances, it is equally plain that the particularity and universality of the French and American creeds is a license to hunt and destroy the perverse and barbaric Muslim extremist groups waging war against us and our civilization. This we must do at times and places of our choosing, and without forfeiting our own cherished principles, but with a sharp awareness that time is of the essence.
It is also essential that France and the U.S. stand together against fatuous and self-indulgent anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiment, especially but not exclusively prevalent in parts of Europe. It is one thing to discourage Israel from pursuing its settlement policy to a cruel and bitter end; it is another to side with the European Union's absurd and malicious new policy mandating special labels for goods imported from parts of Israel that can't date back to 1966. This is just one example. The West's founding political principles oblige Europe and America to mount a determined and friendly defense of Jews in Israel and in our own countries, through good times and bad, full stop.
If any of this strikes you as a bit much, I would caution that a tidal wave of extreme vengeance and blind wrath is right around the corner. If the party of stern but controlled action is shouted down, outraged so-called liberals on both sides of the Atlantic are sure to awaken to a much stronger force crashing down all around them — every bit as Western, but immeasurably less civilized.
