ABSTRACT
France found itself at the forefront of East-West concerns, much more than during the prior seven-year presidential term. The country was propelled into the center of the European strategic debate. The situation between East and West in 1981 was characterized by what one might call a crisis of models. It was easy to rationalize a posteriori, thirty-five years after the war. The 1970s brought the widespread manifestation of an apparently reasonable coexistence model between East and West, for which Henry Kissinger appeared as the strongest theoretician. One might prefer the unanimous ostracism of the developed countries, condemning Nicaragua to being nothing but an object in the East-West conflict, squeezed between Russian support and the American counteroffensive. The Soviets sought to exert the maximum direct and indirect pressure on France to make it yield on the Euromissile issue and on the inclusion of its nuclear forces in the calculations of the East-West balance.
