the only danger
greater than not helping was
not helping enough
Adapted from the Opinion Piece, America Was Once the Country Begging Richer Allies for Help By Stacy Schiff.
Ms. Schiff is the author of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.”
She writes of the French Foreign Minister during the American Revolution that, “Vergennes engaged throughout in a familiar calculation: The only danger greater than not helping the Americans at all, he insisted in discussion after discussion at Versailles, was not helping them enough. He carried the day. The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga had been French. The surrender four years later at Yorktown would be to troops that were equal parts French and American, supplied and clothed by France, all of them protected by a French fleet.“
Ms. Schiff continues, “Some 250 years after Franklin’s French errand, Congress is again debating the entanglement of a young republic — one that actually does border the Black Sea — with a wealthy benefactor. Political considerations aside, it pays to remember that the United States itself was, with its own bid for freedom, once the infant republic in dire need of munitions. No one at Versailles knew that the man waving about a 38-page shopping list would be remembered as one of the greatest diplomats in our history. Nor did anyone suspect that granting his requests would help to create an “arsenal of democracy,” a power that might one day, for the most high-minded and the most self-serving of reasons, assist another nation in its struggle for autonomy. Neither mattered when it came to the French calculus, based on something more fundamental. As one French gunrunner reminded Congress in September, 1776, “The enemies of our enemies are more than half our friends.”
No Haiku For You 