Heather Horn: France's Lesson for the U.S.: Don't Let Election Politics Ruin Foreign Policy

Heather Horn is a writer based in Chicago. She is a former features editor and staff writer for The Atlantic Wire, and was previously a research assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Politics stops at the water's edge," Republican Senator Arthur Vanderberg reportedly pronounced in 1952. An admirable aspiration. As a statement of fact, of course, it's demonstrably false. A vote in France this Monday was a stark reminder of that.

The French parliament late Monday approved a bill making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide, the killing of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I. Though the general consensus among historians in Western European countries and the U.S. holds that these killings qualified as genocide, the label is strongly rejected within Turkey, especially by its government.

Even before the vote, it was apparent that the move could have profoundly adverse consequences for relations between France and Turkey. Sure enough, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already called the bill "racist," according to the Associated Press, and has threatened sanctions against France should French President Sarkozy sign the bill into law. Following an earlier French vote towards this policy in December -- on a draft law that didn't mention the Armenian genocide specifically -- Turkey also suspended economic contracts with France, along with military cooperation. Turkey is a rapidly growing economy with ties across Europe, and France could lose out on a number of important trade deals or other badly needed economic opportunities if it approves this law. France could also alienate Turkey at a time when it's becoming an increasingly prominent global player....