FRANCE: If France has an iron lady, it is Michèle Alliot-Marie. As the country's first woman defence minister, mam (58) has won the loyalty of the macho military establishment by performing parachute jumps and dangling from helicopters, partying with troops in the Ivory Coast and Afghanistan every New Year's Eve, and fighting like a tigress to preserve the defence budget.
With Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's government stuck in the low 30 per cent approval range, mam and the Interior Minister, Dominique de Villepin, are front-runners to replace him before a referendum on the European constitution in June.
Until she took over the Defence Ministry in 2002, Ms Alliot-Marie headed President Jacques Chirac's RPR party for three years. She sees the president at the Elysée Palace every Monday, and has repeatedly turned down the foreign minister's job.
Now she is playing a part in Franco-American efforts to patch up relations. The new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, is scheduled to deliver an important address on European-American relations in Paris next Tuesday.
At the NATO defence ministers' meeting which Ms Alliot-Marie will host in Nice on Wednesday and Thursday, all eyes will be on the gaffe-prone US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his sometimes caustic Gaullist counterpart. Europe's more diplomatic approach to the Iranian nuclear programme and the EU's desire to resume arms sales to China are possible areas of friction.
If you listen to mam, all is sweetness and light between NATO and Europe. France is eager to start training Iraqi police and gendarmes - outside Iraq - and there is now "convergence between the French line and that of NATO" on Iraq policy, she says. In a two-hour talk with the European American Press Club, Ms Alliot-Marie seemed to criticise the US only once, when she said that US intelligence services "had given proof that they needed to be overhauled". Unlike the French DGSE, which continuously developed "human intelligence" (for which read: good contacts among Arabs), "the US had relied totally on technological information gathering," she said.
In the two years since mam took office, "defence is certainly the area in which Europe has advanced most", she said, listing the decisions that will come to fruition this year: "European battle groups; the European gendarmerie force; the civil-military command cell, which already has personnel and locations; the European defence and armament agency . . . "
Ms Alliot-Marie squashes any suggestion that Europe's increasingly autonomous defence capacities are being developed in competition with NATO. "We believe that NATO is indispensable when Europeans and Americans want to work together," she says.
"European defence and NATO are complementary . . . With a strong defence, Europe will enable NATO to concentrate on the most serious threats, by allowing it to disengage from theatres like Bosnia. And European defence will deal with some crises simply because NATO will be too busy elsewhere."
The three most salient characteristics of European defence are the "very high reactivity" of the EU's 1,500-strong battle groups, to be deployed for a maximum of 15 days; the fact that European military operations are "relatively limited" (Ms Alliot-Marie cited the six-month intervention in Macedonia and a 90-day deployment to the Congo); and "a certain type of easy relations with the local population".
At the moment, France commands the NATO forces ISAF in Afghanistan and KFOR in Kosovo. French prominence in the alliance seems surprising when you consider that Gen Charles de Gaulle pulled Paris out of the integrated command in 1966. "In 1996, France envisioned returning," Ms Alliot-Marie said.
"We wanted the southern Mediterranean command to be given to a European - not France, but to a European. The Americans refused. Today, I would say quite frankly that it's no longer a problem. What is better? Someone who is totally inside and does nothing, or someone who is officially not in all NATO bodies, but who is the second contributor to NATO after Germany?"
France's "determination to fight the dissemination of nuclear weapons" has no bearing on another Gaullist legacy, the force de frappe. In a debate that is dividing French defence policy-makers, Ms Alliot-Marie is firmly in favour of the new M-51 inter-continental ballistic warhead, to be deployed on French nuclear submarines in 2010. Development of the warhead costs €3 billion. With a 9,000-km range, it could threaten China.
Critics of the M-51 say the money would be better spent on conventional forces. They're wrong, Ms Alliot-Marie says; if she gave up the warhead, the budget minister would grab the money. "It is a question of nuclear deterrence," she says.
"It's about psychology. Potential adversaries know our concern for human life, and they might think we would hesitate to use a weapon that would create a great deal of collateral damage. The trend among all nuclear powers is towards more precise weapons that make it possible to limit damage to a pre-determined target. We would hesitate to send an atomic bomb that could wipe cities and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people off the map. If we have a weapon that can hit precisely the command centre where they are, our defence is more credible."