Back To The Fold?

摘要

It was in a short but scrupulously polite letter to Lyndon Johnson 43 years ago that Charles de Gaulle announced his decision to pull France out of nato's integrated military command. His country, the French president wrote to his American counterpart, needed "to recover the full exercise of her sovereignty across her entire territory." He shut down nato's headquarters in Paris and expelled American military bases from France. Ever since, the French have seen their semi-detached status in nato as a guarantor of their strategic autonomy and a totem of their refusal to accept American supremacy.