Here’s a really interesting piece about French interior minister Manuel Valls and the network of friends around him from his days as a student activist. They include Alain Bauer, Nicolas Sarkozy’s security adviser and the man who got the contract to install Vitrolles’ CCTV surveillance network for its FN mayor.
Hubert Vedrine, former minister, was asked to prepare a report on NATO and France’s return to the integrated command structure. Olivier Kempf blogs it. The recommendations are that NATO stays very much in its classical form, a military alliance with a nuclear dimension centred in Europe and the North Atlantic, that France assert itself in the alliance more, and that the European Defence Agency and NATO Supreme Allied Command-Transformation, which are both headed by French officers, should coordinate more closely on industrial and scientific issues.
He seems to be more suspicious of the UK than of NATO as such, and is very critical of the EU defence initiatives as mostly creating duplication, committees, and complexity.
History is made at night records the moment when “discotheque” became a word in English.