PARIS — Beneath France’s angry outbursts about a secretive “knife-in-the-back” American deal to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia lay a single question that, as the French say, put the finger where it hurts.
After much tiptoeing in France around the issue, the newspaper L’Opinion asked at the top of its front page a question familiar to anybody who knows “Snow White.”
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, tell me if I’m still a great power?’’
Europe is speckled with fading former imperial powers. But France has clung more than most to its past as a great power, still seeing itself as having global interests partly because of territorial possessions in the Indo-Pacific and the Caribbean. Imbued with a sense of grandeur, France harks back to the Enlightenment to speak about fighting obscurantism in the world today and proffers its secular universalism as a model for modern societies. It often punches above its geopolitical weight, though it also overreaches.
