French perfidy - a Taiwanese view

The Taipei Times ran an editorial today slamming the French effort to lift the arms embargo on China. Especially relevant since the PRC just put through a law authorizing war to prevent Taiwanese independence.

France's Defense Minster Michele Alliot-Marie, last week said: "France has the strictest, most stringent rules applying to the sale of weapons of the European Union and probably in the world." As the American writer Fran Lebowitz once said: "To the French, lying is simply talking."
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The English poet Coleridge, of Ancient Mariner fame, once said that ""Frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder, -- each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed." How well the arms embargo case illustrates this. The desire to sell arms to a tyranny like China is smutty and contemptible indeed. But when those who have influence can persuade the government to do their bidding, the result may quite possibly be terrible -- France conniving at the destruction of a liberal democracy simply to enrich its "merchants of death" and their politician friends.
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Deeds, as well as words, should also be considered. The arms ban is EU-wide, but the pressure to lift it is almost entirely driven by France, with a little help from the Germans. Taiwan should let it be known that should the ban be lifted it will immediately act against French interests in Taiwan and will subsequently do the same thing with any other EU country that sell weapons to China.

What sort of actions should be taken? The immediate cessation of visa-free privileges and an astronomical raising of visa fees, the closing of cultural institutions, the ending of scholarships for French students, refusal to grant or renew French nationals alien residency, refusal to accept documents authenticated by the French government, the severing of air agreements -- most of these measures are quite feasible and were used against South Korea in the early1990s.

But Taiwan should go further and impose a massive tariff, say 100 percent, on all goods made by French companies; the proceeds, such as they might be, should go to the defense budget. That this violates WTO protocols bothers us as much as the UN bothers US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. That the French might retaliate makes us laugh. Let them double the price they pay for information technology if they want; much of it simply cannot be sourced elsewhere. Taiwan, however, will survive more expensive Louis Vuitton bags.

Amen.

HT: Realclearpolitics