Resetting terms of engagement

Measured challenge: Anwar delivering his speech at Sorbonne University, where he let it be known that South-East Asia is done being spoken for, let alone spoken down to. Bernama

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.