France wants to get back into NATO

[tigershark]

I have to ask with all the cut backs and down sizing why now?  What do they want to control or lead from the front on? 

France to re-join NATO core
By Toby Vogel
11.03.2009 / 19:16 CET
Nicolas Sarkozy officially announces end of four decades of arm's-length relationship with the transatlantic alliance.

France will re-enter NATO's integrated military command, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy announced this afternoon. He said that the move was “in the interest of France and of Europe”.

France's return after more than four decades had been expected for some time, but the president's speech at the École militaire in Paris – a defence college – was the first explicit announcement. The step is to be formalised at NATO's sixtieth anniversary summit co-hosted by France and Germany on 3-4 April.

“The moment has come”, Sarkozy said, for France no longer to “exclude itself”. “Those who are not there are always in the wrong,” he said.

France's national assembly is to debate the step next Tuesday (17 March). It faces opposition from both left and right. France left the integrated command – though not the alliance itself – in 1966, when General Charles de Gaulle was president, because it was unhappy with the US's predominant role in the alliance.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's secretary-general, “warmly welcomed” the announcement, made at a conference he also attended. De Hoop Scheffer, whose term in office ends later this year, said that Sarkozy's move represented “both the culmination of a steady rapprochement with NATO on France's part over the last 15 years and a new boost to relations between France and the Alliance just a few weeks away from the Strasbourg/Kehl Summit, at which NATO will face strategic decisions about its future.”

Source
http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/2009/03/france-to-re-join-nato/64252.aspx

[F-111 C/C]

Yeah, that's fine UNTIL they're asked to support NATO with troops, etc. then they'll back out like they always do.

[Gripen]

Yeah, that's fine UNTIL they're asked to support NATO with troops, etc. then they'll back out like they always do.

Thats coz France has a brain. Or smart politicians..

[tigershark]

There's something dirty that they need help in, it will start with them involved but there slip out when the time is right.   Look at the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia and they say the Americans mess things up?