Compared with French President Sarkozy’s response to the economic crisis, Bush has been a model of diplomatic reticence, wrote The Washington Post in an editorial. Excerpts:
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is in a hurry. With the global economy in crisis, and his own tenure as temporary head of the European Union expiring at year’s end, he wants multilateral action to fix the financial system, and he wants it now — or at least not later than Nov. 15, when leaders of 20 major nations assemble in Washington for an economic summit. “We demand to be heard, and quickly,” Sarkozy said Friday.
It seems like only yesterday that the European Union was bemoaning President Bush’s my-way-or-the-highway approach to international affairs. But compared with Sarkozy’s response to the economic crisis, Bush has been a model of diplomatic reticence. Sarkozy believes either that publicly excoriating the host nation will lay the groundwork for a useful summit or that, even after Barack Obama’s election, there is political mileage to be gotten from exploiting anti-US sentiment in Europe.
Rather than issuing demands and pointing fingers, Sarkozy — like other G-20 leaders — should be soberly assessing what can be achieved. But the summit could set up working groups to study practical methods of coordinating liquidity and capital requirements for banks, making derivatives trading more transparent and the like.
