I think we backed up too far after shortselling what the French did in WWI.
They acquitted themselves very honorably then.
But that was their last shot. They have done poorly since.
I reckon the poison infected their culture in The Great Terror after the French Revolution and they have never recovered.
Worse, their intellectual toxin has infected the rest of western civilization to the point where it cannot even reproduce or even deal effecdtively with attacks by idiot barbarians on a mission from a very twisted god.