It was in a short but scrupulously polite letter to Lyndon Johnson 43 years ago that Charles de Gaulle announced his decision to pull France out of NATO’s integrated military command. His country, the French president wrote to his American counterpart, needed “to recover the full exercise of her sovereignty across her entire territory.” He shut down NATO’s headquarters in Paris and expelled American military bases from France. Ever since, the French have seen their semi-detached status in NATO as a guarantor of their strategic autonomy and a totem of their refusal to accept American supremacy.

　　President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to reverse de Gaulle’s decision and reintegrate France fully into NATO’s military command is, therefore, both bold and unsettling. On April 3rd and 4th Mr Sarkozy and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel will jointly host a summit to mark NATO’s 60th anniversary. Mr Sarkozy is expected to use the occasion officially to announce France’s full return. But he needs to prepare the ground at home for a decision that is contested both by the opposition and by many in his own party. Next week he is expected to make the case in a speech in Paris. The French parliament plans to debate the issue shortly.

　　For decades, in school textbooks and diplomatic lecture halls, the French have learnt that de Gaulle’s decision and the creation of the nuclear force de frappe form the cornerstone of France’s independent defence policy. NATO came to be regarded with instinctive distrust. The Americans saw France’s plans to build an independent European defence capacity as an effort to undermine NATO and create a rival to what the French have termed American “hyperpower”. Such mutual mistrust reached its zenith under President Jacques Chirac, who repeatedly called for Europe to be a counterweight to America.