Out in front...

Nicolas Sarkozy is once again on the road…
In Brazil on Thursday to meet with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Trinidad on Friday to attend a Commonwealth Summit at the invitation of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the French President intends to stress the paramount importance of taking concrete measures in order to reduce global warming. The United Nations Climate Conference, is to take place December 7 to 18 in Copenhagen.
President Obama announced on Wednesday that he would be attending the climate talks on December 9.
Presidents Lula and Sarkozy had already conferred on climate issues recently, signing an agreement which they called their climatic bible, the aim of which being a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
In Manaus, in the Amazonian jungle, the two presidents (who are meeting for the ninth time this year) will seek to rally the support of the other nations invited, including Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Surinam and Guyana, two weeks before the important Copenhagen summit.
These two days away from France, no doubt, will provide a much needed respite from the more mundane political controversies currently swirling around the nation (the national identity debate, the Pantheonization of Camus, law and order issues, and rising unemployment, to name but a few…), with regional elections looming.
Furthermore, Nicolas Sarkozy thrives on international events.
He is able to display fully his drive, ambition, energy and command of the issues of the day, under the gaze of the international media.
From the outset, after his election victory in May 2007, Sarkozy conducted an ambitious and vigorous foreign policy, in the European Union (he succeeded in imposing the Lisbon Treaty after the rejection of the European Constitution had paralyzed Europe),and in Eastern Europe (negotiating, as President of the European Union, a truce in Georgia after the Russian invasion in August 2008), for instance.
Sarkozy also initiated the G20 economic summits of Washington and London in order to address the issue of financial regulation, following last year’s economic meltdown.
The environmental issues provide Sarkozy with a further opportunity to play a prominent part and assert himself on the international scene.
One additional advantage for Sarkozy is the US reluctance to take the lead on the issue, although President Obama finally outlined on Wednesday some concrete objectives ahead of the Copenhagen summit.
The Chinese quickly followed suit.
France’s proposals however, are much more ambitious and advanced.
Sarkozy has been working on the subject for several years and had launched an initiative in France in 2007 called the Grenelle de L’Environement.
Environmentalists and government officials held a series of discussions concerning pressing environmental issues.
Though the French President does not expect all the issues to be resolved by December 18, the last day of the conference, he does hope that concrete proposals and objectives will be adopted.
His aim, shared by Lula da Silva, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% (of the 1990 level) by 2050. The goal, Sarkozy said, is that coherent and comparable objectives are reached relatively soon, so that genuine efforts are not undertaken only in 2048.
France also demands that the needs of the poorest countries, often victims of the effects of global warming themselves, are taken into account.
Though they will need to contribute to the global effort to reduce these emissions, Sarkozy and the European Union are proposing to contribute 100 billion Euros in order to help them make the necessary adjustments, which should cost some 450 billion Euros overall.
Finally, Sarkozy advocates the creation of an international environmental organization.
Its mission would be to monitor compliance with the treaty, which Sarkozy hopes will be signed in June 2010.
Obama’s objectives are more modest.
The US is to reduce its emissions by 17% in 2020, 30% by 2025 and 40% by 2030.
His point of reference however, is not the emission levels of 1990, but 2005...
As such, if the former benchmark were adopted, the 17% decrease would dwindle to a meager 4%.
This is due to the fact that, between 1990 and 2005, US emissions increased by 16%…
Yet, even the more modest goals depend on the Senate’s willingness to endorse them.
So far, only the House has done so.
Sarkozy and Obama differ on other issues as well.
The G20 meetings revealed a difference in emphasis.
Sarkozy is a fervent supporter of financial regulation to ensure that banks are never again in a position to provoke a similar economic crisis.
Obama prefers to focus primarily on economic growth.
Specifically, Sarkozy is clearly intent on what he calls moralizing capitalism, and preventing traders from devising daring and irresponsible financial products and earning millions in the process.
This interventionist creed is not widely shared in Washington.
On the Afghan issue, Sakozy sent an additional 800 soldiers last year, and 150 gendarmes to assist in the training of Afghan forces earlier this year. That is as far as he intends to go.
France will not send one additional soldier, he declared in October.
Obama will announce his plans for Afghanistan next week, and is expected to
increase the US military presence by some 30,000. He hopes NATO will contribute an additional 10,000...
On Iran, although Sarkozy publicly supported Obama’s outreach to the Iranian government, he does not believe that such a policy can succeed, and is much less patient with the current regime. He visibly loathes Ahmadinejad, and asserted after the latter’s fraudulent election victory had provoked mass street demonstrations, I must say how much I admire the courage of the Iranian people. They deserve much better than their current leaders.
It is the French who, during the recent negotiations with Iran concerning the latter’s nuclear program, insisted that the Iranians transfer all of their uranium to Russia in one shipment (thereby preventing them from enriching it further should they indeed have a military nuclear program, as is widely suspected), and not several…
If both espouse the same policy vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sarkozy has been determined to improve France’s relations with Syria and its president, Bachar el-Assad. Jacques Chirac had spurned the latter due to Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, a close friend.
Obama has taken few initiatives in this area, engrossed in domestic affairs, such as health care reform, and the Afghanistan conundrum.
There are also obvious stylistic differences as well.
One perceptive observer humorously described the pair this way, watching the two of them onstage together, as when they appeared at D-Day anniversary commemorations in Normandy in June, is like watching the diminutive tough-guy actor Joe Pesci—all twitches and attitude—playing against Denzel Washington, all dignity and reserve.
Sarkozy is also wondering if the President of the United States is sufficiently aggressive and decisive to be successful (Roger Cohen and Richard Cohen have also been musing about Obama of late).
At first, Sarkozy was surprised by Obama’s prolonged rock star popularity around the globe, which he found excessive and irritating.
Just before the Normandy D-Day commemoration, he had quipped, I shall ask him to walk across the English Channel, and he’ll do it…
Yet, he finds Obama too often indecisive. Perhaps this is because he is still a novice in politics. Sarkozy, now 54, won his first election, as a city councilman, in 1977, at the age of 22...
His first became a member of the government of France in 1993, as Budget minister (he was then 38).
In fact, he lacks experience, Sarkozy said of Obama last spring. He was never Treasury Secretary (both Sarkozy and Brown were finance ministers before reaching the top). Politics is more than appearance and glamour. There are the issues.
In addition, he believes that a genuine reformer does not tackle one issue at a time, one after the other, but must be on the offensive on all fronts, the level of pressure that a society can exert is the same, whether you undertake one reform or ten simultaneously. If you only initiate one however, then all the pressure is applied to that lone reform. This is what is now happening to Obama with health care, Sarkozy said recently.
Hence, Sarkozy’s recommendation is to be everywhere at once, the French ought to know this: I have a passion for action and I want to act, he said in January 2008, eight months after his election.
These divergences would not matter, or would be attenuated had the two presidents developed a personal relationship.
Sarkozy is disappointed that the American has not considered worthwhile to cultivate a closer rapport with him.
Sarkozy initially had great hopes for the relationship.
A few days prior to the new president’s inauguration, he had declared, I can’t wait until he gets to work so that we can change the world.
Sarkozy has always been ambitious…
In the beginning, he never had the slightest doubt that their relationship would be the most dynamic, the most significant that either would have among world leaders.
He was convinced that Obama would want to make the most of his drive, ambition and passion for achievement.
However, with time, Sarkozy discovered that Obama did not have any particular consideration for him. He was a partner the US could rely on undoubtedly, but simply one among many others. In fact, his hyperactivity may have been a handicap, on the one hand, here is this American with a cool head, nicknamed «no drama Obama» during the campaign. On the other, we have this emotional and erratic Frenchman.
The White House, which has a consensus-building approach, likens Sarkozy to a lone wolf who is too brutal to be able to deliver European unity on issues important to the US, observed Charles Kupchan, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In addition, Europe, wealthy, stable and at peace, is no longer a foreign policy priority for an American president.
The US has much more pressing business to attend to elsewhere…
Franco-American relations are sound and friendly it should be said, much more so than earlier in the decade, now everything is operating very smoothly. Sarkozy is an activist we can work with, one US official told Newsweek.
That is undoubtedly true, but far from sufficient.
After all, Sarkozy wants to change the world…
Even he could use a little help…
(all the translations from the French are mine; the photograph on top is by Nicholas Kamm, AFP)