Not only does this event help confirm Dan’s thesis that the E.U. is, at its core, a regular international organization, it should also give pause to those Americans and others who urge the United States to commit to international agreements involving France and other states. Surely if France cannot be trusted to comply with its obligations to the European Union and to its fellow member states—obligations that are backed by a legal framework in both European and French law, decades of tradition, and a supranational authority with, at least on paper, the power to force France to comply with them—what possible hope can countries like the United States have that France will accept its commitments to the international community under the Kyoto protocol, where no credible enforcement mechanism exists short of the use of military force? And, with this precedent, what hope can we have that other European states will not see France’s behavior as an excuse to flout their own, self-imposed obligations to other nations?

“Do as I say and not as I do” leadership is not going to cut it on the world stage in this era. Unfortunately, however, that’s apparently the cornerstone of French foreign policy.

Dan Drezner (trackback below) points out that France is less likely to defect from its commitments in agreements it has that involve the United States. This is undoubtably true—and I was being just a tad hyperbolic. Nonetheless, if France wants to be taken seriously as a negotiating partner in international agreements where (a) the U.S. already has serious reservations about signing on and (b) France has a self-declared national interest in getting the U.S. to participate (as applies in the cases of both the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court), it might want to consider whether handing a loaded gun to its most fierce critics in the United States is going to be effective. When a hypothetical President Dean sends those treaties back to a Senate already skeptical about the motivations of France and other signatories, it's not going to look very good when critics point out that France has already violated commitments to its closest neighbors and trading partners.