French president Francois Hollande heads to the White House on Tuesday, calling for urgency in the war against Islamic State but also attempting to smooth ruffled feathers over his next diplomatic stop.
Hollande’s decision to follow talks with Barack Obama with a trip to Moscow two days later to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin is not likely to go down well with his American hosts.
“There is dissatisfaction on the US side about the optics of going from the US to see Putin,” a source in Washington said. “If Russia is serious about this effort, they should really be coming to the coalition.”
The talks may also be complicated by Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian warplane on Tuesday, claiming it had violated Turkish airspace and had ignored repeated warnings. Russia said the SU-24 was downed by artillery fire, but Turkey claimed that its F-16s fired on the Russian plane. The Russian ministry of defense said the plane was over Syrian territory “throughout the flight”.
The US has repeatedly condemned Russia’s intervention in Syria for propping up President Bashar al-Assad, whom it says has lost popular support, and for becoming a recruiting tool for Isis. On Monday, Putin visited Assad’s other key backer, Iran, for talks with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“The Americans have a long-term plot and are trying to dominate Syria and then the whole region,” Khamenei was quoted as saying. “This is a threat to all countries, especially Russia and Iran.”
The 13 November attacks in Paris on a concert hall, restaurants and near the national stadium killed 130 people and thrust Hollande into the role of war president, eager to end a crisis that threatens to drag on for years, causing refugees to press into Europe.
Last week he pleaded for the US and Russia to set aside their policy differences over Syria and “fight this terrorist army in a broad, single coalition”. Aftermeeting Britain’s David Cameron on Monday, he is expected to ask Washington and Moscow this week for greater military cooperation and intelligence sharing.
Ahead of Hollande’s arrival, US vice-president Joe Biden hosted senior diplomatic representatives from 59 of the 65 members of the anti-Isis coalition at the State Department. “The French ambassador said he thought President Hollande would bring a message of ‘urgency’ from Paris,” reported one diplomat present at the meeting.
“Biden said everyone knows what needs to be done and there’s no doubt we’ll prevail, but we need to do a hell of a lot more. ‘Increased focus’ was the key phrase. We all have to step up our level of engagement: more troops, more planes, more money. This thing will go on for years unless we do.”
The meeting was addressed by Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter Isis. The diplomat said: “McGurk talked about how tough the fighting is in Iraq, but the Iraqi army is now showing bottle and taking a lot of casualties as it takes back territory metre by metre.
“He also said the Russians have been more focused and reasonable since the Sinai atrocity,” a reference to the apparent bombing of the Russian airliner in October that killed 224 people.
Hollande faces an uphill task to bring the cold war rivals closer together, however, as a fundamental division remains. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said on Monday: “I think the president has been pretty blunt about what Russia is doing. Right now, what Russia is doing is they are undermining our effort to reach a political settlement, and they are doing is they are undermining our effort to reach a political settlement, and they are doing that because they are concerned primarily with propping up the failed regime of Bashar al-Assad.
“And those efforts only undermine our ability to engage the moderate Syrian opposition in a discussion about the long-overdue political transition that even Russia acknowledges is needed and long overdue inside of Syria.”
Earnest gave little clue as to what Obama and Hollande would discuss beyond expressions of solidarity and support. “This is a time when the French people are grieving,” he added. “And knowing that they can count on the most powerful country in the world to have their back as they determine what’s necessary to strengthen homeland security in their own country but also to take the fight to Isil [Islamic State], I think that will be a source of significant comfort to the French people.”
France joined the US-led coalition against Isis in Iraq last year and expanded its campaign to Syria in September. After the atrocity in Paris,France sent its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle with its 26 jet fighters to the Mediterranean to help combat militants in Syria.
France shares the US’s position that a transition that would lead to the departure of Assad. “A political solution means to be able to create a unity government in Syria and clearly say that Assad cannot be the future of the country he has helped to butcher,” Hollande said on Monday.
He is likely to pressure Putin to prevent Assad from targeting civilians, focus on Isis rather than the moderate Syrian opposition and work towards a process that would lead to Assad’s departure.
The French president will also meet with German chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday and Italian premier Matteo Renzi on Thursday in Paris.
