I was really worried about President Obama. He seemed to have no real friends in the world. One commentator picked that up and talked about how Bush had Blair and Reagan had Thatcher. Clinton had good personal relationships with many foreign leaders. But President Obama was aloof and distant, and had almost none that shared his worldview. In fact, promptly after entering office, he sent the bust of Winston Churchill back to Great Britain and recently declared us neutral in the Falklands dispute with Argentina. With Israel, our other close ally, Obama publicly abandoned Netanyahu at dinner and, wagging his finger, told him to retreat back to his 1967 borders. Our new friends in Eastern Europe, the Czechs and the Poles were treated to a midnight call telling them that the political capital they expended to become part of a missile defense system was for naught, because hitting the reset button with Russia was a higher priority. None of our old friends or new friends seemed to hold the same values, values deep enough to forge a lasting partnership.
All that is better now as a result of the victory of Francois Hollande over Nicolas Sarkozy in France last week. Mr. Hollande is vowing to "initiate a change in society in the long term" and explicitly tells the world that he "does not like the rich" and that "his real enemy is the world of finance." He vows to reverse fiscal responsibility and instead push the accelerator on "growth creating spending."
Does all this have a familiary ring to it? Of course it does. Our enemy is not totalitarian regimes, terrorism or fundamentalist Islam (Eric Holder can't even utter the phrase). It's the world of finance and the rich that threaten the West.
After 3 1/2 years adrift without any real close ties abroad, I see potential for a whole new Franco-American alliance, so badly damaged by the tension between George Bush and Dominique de Villepin over Iraq. These two are blood brothers, soul mates. I bet they can even complete each other's sentences.
As Humphrey Bogart once famously proclaimed to another Frenchman, "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
