Resetting terms of engagement
IF the French were expecting a deferential guest, they did not get one. When Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim rose to speak at the Sorbonne on July 4, his address was both a nod to France's intellectual tradition and a measured challenge to its strategic assumptions.
Woven with references to Sartre and Montesquieu, Camus and Tocqueville, and the Pirenne thesis to boot, it was a tour de force in intellectual diplomacy – at once appreciative and unsparing, gracious yet audacious.
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