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The President, like more traditional French conservatives dating back to Charles de Gaulle, would like to see France, or at least a France-dominated Europe, become a world power to equal the U.S.

Afghanistan, almost everyone agrees, has become the fulcrum around which this pendulum of expansive logic swings, the iron upon which a new Franco-European role can be forged.

"The President of the Republic is interested in making a big statement in Bucharest and everything else is subordinate to that," says an official at the Foreign Ministry. "This is his moment and he wants to put France on the map."

The Bucharest NATO summit, in early April, will be a decisive moment. It will be there that the Afghan war will have to be resurrected, or it will fail. And it is there that long-unresolved questions about the alliance's leadership, its larger role and its membership will come to a head.

Mr. Sarkozy has seen a way to make these two needs work to his advantage — by offering a French way to prevent the Afghan-war coalition from collapsing (his plan would require other European countries to provide fighting troops to support France's big offer; Germany has already begun considering this). In exchange, France would rejoin NATO's leadership council, which it left in an anti-American huff in 1967. But the condition for this package would be a far more European-led NATO.

That timing is important. In July, Mr. Sarkozy will become the president of Europe, under the EU's rotating system. He will be the last such president: After him, the new EU constitution installs a permanent president elected by member governments. Mr. Sarkozy is lobbying for Tony Blair, and many people close to him believe that his condition for this is French leadership of Europe's new foreign ministry (and therefore defence).

If these stars line up correctly, then Mr. Sarkozy will be the author of a new European role in the world. In this sprawling tableau of power and influence, Canada's moment of need will be little more than a minor decoration.

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First, many countries are uncomfortable with a German leadership role, but France has not tried to dominate Europe since the Napoleonic era.

Second, while many countries like Austria and Hungary see German as their first or second language, or are more at home in it than in French, or have more German tourists than French tourists, others are more at home in French:

Country, population
United Kingdom 61,270,283
Italy 59,578,359
Spain 45,257,696
Belgium 10,660,770
Portugal 10,633,006
Ireland 4,414,797
Malta 410,494

Added to France's 63,779,059, that's 51.5% of the EU's 497,198,740 people.

But with all those new Eastern members, France's sphere has been shrinking. Time to make a move before it's too late.

As the EU increasingly becomes a single super-power, it's right up there:
China 1,313,552,038
India 1,152,342,278
European Union plus Switzerland and Norway 509,529,903
United States of America 305,072,714
Indonesia 227,070,492
Brazil 192,047,523
Pakistan 155,360,000

[ 17 February 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ]