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When the French began withdrawing Afghan personnel and their families in May, even friends accused them of defeatism and precipitating the regime’s downfall. Their August evacuation effort (of 2,834 people, on 42 flights) was flawed and left a few vulnerable Afghans behind. As the allies scrambled to get their Afghan workers out of Kabul, the French found themselves as dependent as anyone on American security. Yet there was a quiet satisfaction in Paris. Their plans showed “impressive foresight,” said Lord Ricketts, former British ambassador to France.

If the French acted early, making their own assessment of shared intelligence, that was in part due to a smaller footprint. France fought in Afghanistan alongside NATO allies from 2001. “We are all Americans”, launched The worldthe front page of after September 11. He then withdrew all of his troops in 2014, in part to focus on his own counterinsurgency efforts job function email database in the Sahel. Yet the Kabul decision was also easier to make as the French have less qualms about doing their own thing, even when it annoys America. As Europeans reflect on the troubling implications of the Afghan fiasco and what it says about reliance on a one-sided America, the mood in Britain and Germany is both shocked and hurt. For the French, who learned from the Suez Crisis of 1956 the lesson that they could never fully trust America, a conclusion reinforced under the Obama and Trump presidencies, Afghanistan served to confirm what they suspected for a long time.

It’s no secret that not all Europeans share France’s point of view. When Emmanuel Macron took the stage in the paneled amphitheater of the Sorbonne shortly after his election in 2017 and pleaded for “European sovereignty” and a “capacity to act autonomously” in matters of security if Europe does needed, his voice was alone. In Germany and the east, Mr Macron’s plea was viewed with irritation: yet another pesky Gaullist attempt to undermine NATO and supplant America as the guarantor of European security.