Yet more evidence emerged just last week that France played a crucial role in abetting the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Rwanda, it should be noted, does not maintain diplomatic ties with France. The French, characteristically, have called the well-researched accusations against them "defamatory insinuations," and Nicolas Sarkozy's election night declaration, as explained by David Bell, that France ought to "finish with repentance," does not bode well for an honest reckoning of that country's history in Rwanda. For decades, the French supported the Hutu regime even when it became Nazi-like in its racial nationalism. It may be difficult for Americans to comprehend such imperialistic motivations, but the main reason for French support of Hutu power was that the Hutu are Francophone and the Tutsis Anglophonic, and that the latter group was aided by the former British colony of Uganda. France, continually humiliated by the rise of Great Britain and the United States, has always sought to protect whatever spheres of Francophone Africa it once possessed. Gerard Prunier, the French journalist and historian, explains all this in his excellent Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide and shows that Rwanda was, in part, a consequence of the century-old "Fashoda syndrome," sparked by the 1898 French defeat to the British in the Sudan. Even during the genocide itself, France participated in Srebrenica-like activity. In their discussion last week on American Francophobia, Peter and Jonah missed the greatest reason for why Americans ought be skeptical of French foreign policy: not necessarily because of French delusions of grandeur or attempts to place themselves as the benevolent alternative to American hegemony, but because the French foreign policy establishment is still nakedly imperialistic in its outlook. It has not moved past the nineteenth century. Indeed, French foreign policy elites refer to Africa as "le pré carré," or "backyard." France's foreign policy, in Africa at least, has not been motivated by any sense of moral duty or even the more selfish cause of "national interest." Rather, France acts out of the pathetic conviction of linguistic preference: Preserve "la francophonie" at all costs. In light of Rwanda, France's recent complaints about American imperialism are ridiculous. It takes one to know one. --James Kirchick