What an odd turn of events! Suddenly the leaders of Britain and France are fawning on each other as they join in a military alliance supposedly to last 50 years!

What is going on here? For the better part of the previous six centuries, these two have been bitter enemies. For the past century they’ve been grudging partners at best.

Their national interests have gone in opposite directions far more often than they’ve lined up. As recently as the Iraq War in 2003, Britain sent 45,000 troops while France actively worked to keep Saddam Hussein in power.

Now the leaders are instant buddies. Last week they signed up to share aircraft carriers; collaborate on technology for nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines; work together on cyberwarfare; and commit troops to a joint rapid reaction unit, among other things.

“It’s an unprecedented decision that shows a level of confidence between our two nations,” Nicolas Sarkozy glowed—“two great European nations that are adding up and combining their efforts.” “It is about defending our national interest,” David Cameron claimed—“It is about practical, hard-headed cooperation between two sovereign countries.”

And they act like anyone who doesn’t embrace the agreement for its innate logic and “perfect sense” is crazy.

“From a purely practical military perspective,” explained the head of Britain’s Armed Forces, Gen. Sir David Richards, “we have been working very closely with the French ever since the First World War, but particularly in nato.”

Uh … not quite. As historian Andrew Roberts responded, “If filling in the gaps on the Western front after the French Army mutinied in 1917, sinking the French fleet at Oran in 1940 and being bombed in Gibraltar by the Vichy air force in retaliation, capturing Lebanon and Syria from the French in 1941, invading French North Africa and Madagascar in 1942, opposing French policy toward Bosnia, Rwanda and latterly Iraq, while watching General de Gaulle expel all nato forces from France, can possibly be described as ‘working very closely with the French ever since the First World War,’ then General Richards is right. If not, then it is—like the defense pact itself—merely wishful thinking.”

What are France and Britain thinking? Even if Sarkozy and Cameron see eye to eye, what could possess them to believe their successors will—until 2060, no less?

In reality, it isn’t fellow feeling or shared interests driving these nations into each other’s arms. Britain has long eyed France, and the rest of Europe, with a certain suspicion even when it wasn’t fighting it outright.

But what is trumping such considerations now is beggary. Both Britain and France are strapped for cash and desperate. Though their militaries are Europe’s two largest, they’re shrinking and falling apart, getting slammed by budget cuts.

This awkward alliance is their effort to maintain some semblance of power. But it reflects terrible weakness—and remarkable lack of vision.

How’s this for wishful thinking: President Sarkozy says—with a straight face—that it’s impossible to imagine a scenario where Britain’s and France’s interests would diverge. Impossible to imagine? For whom, pray tell?

But he couldn’t even make it through a press conference without raising eyebrows about France’s dependability. When a bbc reporter asked if Britain could borrow France’s aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, in case of a crisis in the Falklands, the president responded, “It would take a h—- of a crisis.” Then he dodged and went political: “Do you imagine our British friends facing a crisis and France folds its arms and does nothing?” Again, how much imagination does it take?

Well, maybe that was a trick question. After all, in 1982, Britain faced a crisis in the Falklands and France didn’t do nothing: It actually supplied the Argentineans with missiles to use against Britain!

The notion that these two divergent countries would actually be able to agree on just where and for what to deploy their joint forces is difficult to swallow.

Even since the split over the Gulf War, French leaders have repeatedly voiced their contempt for the UK. They have snootily derided Britain for its incessant niggling over regulations and procedures, for dragging its feet on European integration, for slowing the EU’s progress. Their disdain only intensified when the global economy tanked: They looked down their noses and blamed London for its loose fiscal practices. They dropped the regulatory boom in punishment. Britain’s relationship with Europe, always prickly, has looked wobblier than ever—even up to quite recently.

It all makes the sudden camaraderie, the handshakes and grins, a bit surreal.

For Britain, this pact represents a lurch away from the United States in favor of Europe. American insiders are warning that U.S. cooperation and intelligence-sharing with Britain is going to be curtailed out of fear of the wrong information reaching France and spreading from there. David Campbell Bannerman of the UK Independence Party concurred: “In a nutshell, the closer we get to France, the more we risk losing the support of the biggest military power in the world—the usa.”

If history is any guide, this portends disaster for Britain.

As former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wisely said in 1989, “In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations who have kept law-abiding liberty for the future.”

In a very shallow sense the British move is unsurprising, considering the poor treatment they have received from the current American administration, not to mention the declining trajectory of American power. Nevertheless, France is hardly a prize substitute.

Leave aside the decrepitude of its present defense capabilities (the French government has admitted that “most” of its tanks, helicopters and jets are unusable; the Charles de Gaulle, its sole carrier—upon which Britain will solely rely in a few years—has had an almost comically bad maintenance record). Just judging by France’s uneven history as an ally and as a military power, this seems a very shortsighted decision indeed. There is a reason this modern nation is described in biblical prophecy—after its patriarch, Jacob’s son Reuben—as being “unstable as water” (Genesis 49:4).

The biggest issue, though, is how this deal casts Britain’s fortunes together with those of the Continent.

In a sense, one can view the deal as an extension of the Entente Cordiale, the agreement Britain and France forged in 1904 in response to Germany’s burgeoning power potential. Today, once again, Germany is clearly the strongest nation in Europe, and one could view this alliance as France trying to establish its military leadership to counterbalance Germany’s power. That’s the view of the analysts at Stratfor. And apparently, despite widespread mistrust of the EU within the UK, some Euroskeptics are hoping the bilateral pact “distracts France from pursuing military cooperation at an EU level” (Wall Street Journal, November 3).

But such thinking only goes so far before it smacks into the reality of today’s European Union. The simple fact is, no independent alliance between EU states will remain beyond the purview of Germany and the EU for long.

Britain’s leaders may view this purely as an agreement with France. They have slapped down any suggestion that it will require giving up even a smidgen of British independence or sovereignty.

But France is inseparably entangled with Germany in the European project. And as much as it has tried to fight this reality, Germany is the senior partner. France has already sacrificed its sovereignty for the sake of the EU collective; it simply is no longer free to act purely as a sovereign military power.

Does anyone really believe that Germany is going to be content to allow France and Britain to seize the initiative on European defense?

Just watch! Like everything else happening in Europe, Anglo-French military cooperation is certain to become prey to the encroachment of EU regulation and bureaucratization, and eventually subsumed wholly into the common European defense.

“From now on, neither [Britain nor France] has any independent defense policy. Both have handed it to the EU,” wrote Peter Hitchens. This alliance “is intended as the beginning of federal European armed forces. These will be controlled by the new post-Lisbon ‘legal personality,’ the European Superstate they keep telling us doesn’t exist.”

As I described a couple of weeks ago, Britain allowing its military to become swallowed by a European empire is of enormous prophetic significance. For not only does Scripture foretell Britain’s loss of prestige and power and the severing of its relationship with America, it also tells of its foolishly seeking salvation from its false European allies—and of the shocking double-cross it will then suffer at their hand!