The headline in the Economist declares the current French government as “beyond saving.” Throughout France, the public senses that their government is in disarray and their elected officials are paralyzed.

The Gallic nation has been through a tremendous amount of upheaval in the past year – the unexpected widespread rejection of the EU Constitution, the car torching ethnic violence of last fall, the huge strikes and protests by young people opposing economic liberalization earlier this year, a growing and complicated corruption scandal, and in recent weeks, the collapse of public confidence in their elected officials President Chirac and Prime Minister de Villepin are so widely disliked that they could envy Mr. Bush’s current approval numbers.

An American conservative may be tempted to smile. Since at least 2003, and perhaps earlier, France has been the rhetorical punching bag of choice for American conservatives. My National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg popularized the nickname for the French from the Simpsons (“cheese-eating surrender monkeys”); elsewhere the Gallic nation was nicknamed part of a “Axis of Weasels” or in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s dismissive phrase, a part of “Old Europe.”

But Mr. Chirac’s current political impotence and the foggy, gloomy outlook for his nation’s future are not good signs for Americans who prefer a hawkish and conservative foreign policy.

The France that will emerge from next year’s presidential election (tentatively scheduled for April) is likely to be very different from the France of the recent past or even today. The post-Chirac nation is likely to either be paralyzed by internal fights and ethnic rivalries or committed to a quieter, more consensus-oriented, more isolationist identity. They are likely to cease to be, well, French, at least as we’ve come to know it.

Today, many of the world’s elites – the Davos attendees, the political, academic, and media leaders in the U.S. and Europe – revile patriotism, tout cultural relativism, and embrace cosmopolitanism – an assertion of an identity as a citizen of the world. The elites as well as the common folk of France are an odd exception to that; they’re proud to be French, believe that their culture is the world’s finest, and that really, there’s not much for them to learn from other cultures.

Assimilation includes an element of welcoming immigrants, and adding a bit of their native culture to their own – creating an America where just about every town has Italian, Chinese, Mexican and Lebanese restaurants, U2, Shakira, and Sean Paul are heard around the radio dial, and your favorite NBA team’s roster looks like the United Nations. One of the reasons the French don’t assimilate their immigrants is that they don’t really want any cultural gifts from their immigrant population. French culture is already perfect; they don’t need any Algerian, Moroccan, Vietnamese or central African flavoring.

Sometimes this sentiment is expressed in an ugly manner, but more often it just reflects honest pride. Much of Europe is awash with the largely empty and dissatisfying rhetoric of multicultural we’re-all-one-world kumbaya blather; when this watery pudding of a worldview meets militant Islamism, it tends to get obliterated. France’s leaders and people have stood boldly and said, “this is our culture, and we apologize to no one for it.” It is not surprising that many of the loudest debates about the Islamization of Europe are going on in France.

In more concrete terms, a quieter, more internally divided France will mean the loss of an often-useful, if contrarian and iconoclast American ally. As often as the French disagreed with the U.S., they often inherently agreed with the same assumptions behind our policies – the need for national pride and a unified national and cultural identity, a right to act in a national interest, the justification for projecting military force in far-off locales to defend those national interests. As much as they were a pain in the derriere on Iraq, they proved themselves to be useful allies in pressuring Syria over Lebanon, as well as in the war in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and the first Iraq war.

Even today, the French are demonstrating that there are some dangerous world leaders they’re not willing to snuggle with. You’ll recall that the fight at the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war was frequently portrayed the U.S. and the United Kingdom on one side, opposed by France, China, and Russia – all of whom were frequent Iraqi business partners. Today, France is much closer to the U.S. position in dealing with President Ahmadinejad; they’ve declared the Iranian nuclear program is “military”; dismissed Iran’s claim of civilian use as a “cover-up,” and repeatedly demanded that Iran cease its nuclear activity. Of course, what the French government is willing to do beyond words has yet to be seen.

The French were never as bad as the mockery suggested; but they may quickly turn into a less confident, less active, less influential state – a shadow of its former bold self. That’s bad for America, and bad for the foreign policy vision of Republicans. Looking ahead to the dangerous, unstable world of the coming years, our leaders in Washington will need its traditional ally – not a larger Belgium.

Mr. Geraghty is a contributing editor at National Review.