Word: chirac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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French president Jacques Chirac is fond of certain things American: junk food, his summer-school days at Harvard, the South Carolina belle he almost married, Bill Clinton. Campaigning in the spring of 1995, Chirac enthused about the prospect of working with his U.S. counterpart; the two men, both gregarious, backslapping extroverts, had hit it off from their first meeting in Paris a year earlier. But how, a reporter asked, would sensitive Franco-American relations fare? "They will be excellent," Chirac predicted. Pause. "And contentious...
Right on both counts. The first six months following Chirac's election were a lovefest. When France's leader touched off a worldwide furor with his decision to resume nuclear testing, Clinton refused to make an issue of it. The two Presidents cooperated to break the military and diplomatic logjam in Bosnia. Then the Gaullist Chirac gave NATO a welcome surprise by declaring he would bring France back into the military structures from which his political idol, Charles de Gaulle, had so haughtily withdrawn in 1966. But then the second part of Chirac's prediction kicked...
...Paris' re-entry into NATO came with a condition: that the organization "Europeanize" its command structure. Last summer Chirac insisted that the alliance's southern command in Naples, which includes the U.S. Sixth Fleet, be assigned to a European officer instead of the traditional American admiral. Washington said no way, Chirac dug in his heels, and the honeymoon was over. Suddenly the U.S. and France seemed to be butting heads all over the globe. Cases in point...
...embark on his own peace shuttle. Then, in September, when Clinton launched missiles south of Baghdad after Iraq violated the Kurd's northern haven, the French pointedly refused to patrol an expanded no-fly zone in southern Iraq and recently pulled out altogether from surveillance flights over the north. Chirac seriously annoyed the U.S. again in October with a high-profile Middle East tour to seek a role in the peace process presided over by Washington...
...more political note, French president Jacques Chirac was awarded the peace prize for "commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific." Chirac, who was not present at the event, was congratulated by Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in an audio message played at the ceremony...