With Friends like These

By Richard Brookhiser

In geopolitics, even the best of friends sometimes fall out. Consider the case of the U.S. and Turkey, whose Prime Minister met with President Bush on Nov. 5. The U.S. initiated the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to provide Turkey and Greece with the economic and military support necessary to keep them out of the Soviet sphere of influence. Turkey fought side by side with the U.S. in the Korean War. And the two nations have been NATO allies since 1952. But recently the relationship has come under strain. First the U.S. Congress threatened to pass a controversial resolution condemning Turkey for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. Now Turkey's Islamist government is feuding with the pro-American Kurds of northern Iraq because it wants to smash anti-Turkish guerrillas the Kurds have failed to control. It's no surprise that old allies may disagree on individual issues or even go their separate ways, but as the U.S.'s up-and-down relations with France show, they can still find ways to deal with each other.

Franco-American relations began with a marriage of convenience and a blaze of emotion. When the U.S. declared independence, France was still smarting from its defeat by Britain in the Seven Years' War, which ended in 1763. France wanted to even the score; the U.S. wanted French money, supplies and military help. Together they beat Britain (there were more French soldiers than Americans at the battle of Yorktown). Their hardheaded transactions were sweetened by personal alliances. America's most important diplomat in Paris was the scientist and wit Benjamin Franklin, who became such a celebrity in France that his image graced snuffboxes and inkwells. The hero the French sent in return was the Marquis de Lafayette, an ardent young nobleman who passionately embraced the cause of liberty and was regarded by George Washington as a surrogate son.

National self-interest quickly drove the two countries apart. In 1800 Napoleon Bonaparte compelled Spain to give him the Louisiana Territory, which he planned to make the hub of a New World empire. President Thomas Jefferson was so alarmed, he considered making an alliance with Britain to drive the French out. But when the French troops en route to occupying Louisiana died of yellow fever in Haiti, Napoleon decided to cut his losses and sold the territory to the U.S. for the bargain price of $15 million. By 1861, however, Napoleon's nephew Napoleon III was ready to try another New World power play, sending an army to Mexico to collect debts and later installing an Austrian archduke as emperor. The U.S., distracted by the Civil War, did nothing at first. But in 1866 it demanded that the French withdraw and offered moral and diplomatic support when the Mexicans overthrew the imperial puppet regime soon thereafter.

The U.S. and France fought together again in both world wars of the early 20th century, but national interests and personalities always complicated the picture. At the Versailles Conference after World War I, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau scorned U.S. President Woodrow Wilson for his reluctance to punish defeated Germany; in the early years of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt worried that the Free French leader Charles de Gaulle had "all the attributes of a dictator." The past 60 years have had several rocky patches. The low points were 1966, when De Gaulle took France out of NATO'S military command, and 2003, when Jacques Chirac declined to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In response to Chirac's decision, the restaurants and snack bars of the House of Representatives began calling sliced, fried potatoes "freedom fries" (they reverted to "French fries" in 2006 as enthusiasm for the Iraq war cooled).

Conflicting sovereign interests are a perennial source of potential trouble in nation-to-nation relations. One way to deal with them is to wait until more congenial leaders gain power. France's newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy spent his summer vacation in New Hampshire and even visited the Bush family in Maine. Until such thaws come, allies at odds have to be honest--and vigilant for areas of common ground. While the U.S. and Turkey may be at loggerheads now, they should remember that doesn't have to last forever.