French army to return under U.S. command

You may have missed this, but Nicolas Sarkozy has just announced that the French military will reintegrate into the NATO military command structure. France left NATO's military command structure under General de Gaulle in 1966 in part over misgivings over the Vietnam war and to maintain her sovereignty.

NATO has both a civilian and a military command. The civilian command is always led by a European, the military command by an American. To reintegrate the French military into the NATO military command is thus to reverse De Gaulle's earlier decision to keep the French military strictly under French control. This decision not only affects France, it also affects the rest of Europe and the U.S. because France has the largest standing army in Europe, and the U.K. is the only European country with a comparable military projection.

All of this comes against the larger backdrop of the future of European defense. Since the early 90s, there has been a discussion about whether Europe should build up its own defense capability independent from NATO or whether to continue to build a closer alliance with NATO (thereby embracing the cold war pact whereby Europe swore allegiance to the U.S. in return for protection under the U.S. military umbrella).

I am on the fence about this. On the one hand, the annual military budget for the U.K., France and Germany combined is not even 20% of the annual military budget of the U.S., and pooling resources among allies and friends makes sense. On the other hand, over the past 8 years, the Bush administration has repeatedly treated those alliances and friendships with contempt and placed them in doubt at the slightest suggestion of disagreement (over very disagreeable and, as we increasingly learn, very illegal practices).