1. Do They all Do This? A good argument could be made that Jacques Chirac was deeply unpopular (along with his foreign minister Dominque de Villepin) in the US and the UK. Even more so was Gerhard Schröder, and to a lesser extent his postmodern foreign minister Joschka Fischer, veteran of the 1960s Days of Rage. No need to comment on the controversial career of Vladimir Putin. But one rarely sees Mr. Sarkozy trash Chirac, or Merkel dump on Schröder, or Medvedev reject Putin. Is the trashing of your predecessor an Obama phenomenon? Why do transnationalist, internationalist European leaders not attack...
