It is the fervent hope of this writer, that this Easter season, you find yourself spending time with your families. When they’re being obnoxious and you need to step away, here’s something not so serious about our geopolitical family, Five Eyes.
Five Eyes is like a family. Great Britain is our mom, though she isn’t so great anymore. We, the United States of America, are the oldest and just an all around bona fide success story. We are the provider of this illustrious feast. Canada is a depressed second-born frustrated with not getting better results with more wholesome approaches. Australia is the resentful third child with a mullet, way too into race theories but they’re fun to shoot guns with. And New Zealand is just kind of there, reading a Tolkien book, wishing they weren’t a part of the family.
India is our half sibling from that time when mom got hooked on tea and had a tryst in the jungle. Pakistan is the “I need to find myself” phase of mom’s existential crisis. China is an opium dealer that still owes money too. But I digress. The Five Eyes are Britain and her four punitive wilderness anglophone colonies.
But what is France? France is our crazy aunt. When we got mad and wanted to leave our cushy home in the British realm we moved in with our weird aunt in Versailles. She’s cooky. We smoked pot with her and got drunk with her for the first time. Great times but a bad influence.
And that’s our pattern with our crazy aunt in this western values and culture family. We love her, she is there when we need her, but she does irresponsible stuff, and it hurts the larger family brand. We all know the highlights: caving to the Nazis, Vietnam, Africa, bilateral covid research labs in China, and now Iran.
For the second time in a decade, France is positioning itself as the European broker between the US and Iran. Iran, beaten and humiliated by Israel in the proxy wars after 10/7, is refusing to give up their nuclear program, and intends to continue to evade sanctions and fund more terrorism. Our crazy aunt France wants to give negotiations another whirl to avert direct war with Iran.
They slithered their way in by inviting Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff for general talks that were scheduled in February when France wanted to be the negotiator for the Ukrainian war as well. After weeks of a trade war and now Iranian negotiations, Paris kinda lumped it all in together. The allied optics are sound, but Rubio shouldn’t let these pre-planned talks drive the narrative for the discussions in Rome with Iran, mediated by Oman.
Witkoff definitely needs to tamp down his eagerness, after his saluting and pleasantries with Russian President Vladimir Putin just before Putin struck civilians in Sumy, Ukraine. He didn’t go there and get straight to business to find peace. No, he wanted to compare tattoos with our crazy aunt, comparing the interior design of the French to that of President Trump’s personal esthetics. His French counterparts seemed unimpressed.
It appeared that Rubio left with little incident and the usual rumors continue to fly, but we should continue to keep our weird aunt at arm’s length for the time being. Like your own weird aunt at Easter, just politely change the pleasantries, maybe even smoke a joint out back, but don’t ask her for life advice right now. She’s going through her own stuff.
