The United States has fought wars with Germany, with Italy and with Spain, but never a war with France. And yet it is the relationship with France that is most often most strained, confrontational, and difficult.
And it is so yet again. A few days ago a number of newspapers ran a picture apparently taken when President Bush and French President Chirac were both at the United Nations in New York. The two men appear to be standing about two feet from each other, each of them looking off in opposite directions. The picture seemed to symbolize the current state of relations between these two great nations.
Anti-Americanism in France, especially among the intelligencia, has long been with us. Anti-French attitudes in America, however, are for the most part something new.
A few weeks ago for family reasons I made a trip back to my corner of East Texas, a place not much given to concerns about foreign affairs. And so I was genuinely surprised at the anti-French sentiments that I kept hearing. On one occasion I said to a member of my family, Why are you going on so about the French? You don’t even know anybody French. How about the Germans. His response was that he liked the Germans, he had served there as a young man in the U.S. Army and besides, he said, the Germans this time have simply been mislead by the French. So there!
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote that Americans need to understand that France is not just our annoying ally. It is, and I quote Mr. Friedman, Our enemy.
Well, now, that does seem a bit much. But it does focus the mind.
One might think that the French President would get on well with George W. Bush. Chirac is, after all, a conservative, a French version of a Republican, if you will.
But that is completely overridden by other issues many having to do with the collective French self-image, an image in which France epitomizes all things fine, urbane and cultured. But that is now a view out of sync with the times both in America and in some quarters in France.
Some French intellectuals, long noted for their virulent anti-Americanism, are now challenging the validity of their country’s self-image saying that France continues to behave as thought it is a world power when that is clearly no longer true. And so Chirac has his own problems at home.
When he positions himself and France as the chief counterpoint to Bush and current American foreign policy, it may well be a principled stand but is also politically convenient for him.
The Bush Administration, however, seems never to miss a chance to make the situation worse. Condoleezza Rice is now widely quoted as having said that this administration’s policy is to punish France. This dear friends is not helpful.
France and the French may well suffer from an inflated self-image, but the United States must, over time, go forward internationally hand-in-hand with Europe. That is not and will not be possible without a productive relationship with France.
To lose sight of that basic fact is very short sighted. And it definitely is not good foreign policy.
This is Olin Robison.
Olin Robison is president of the Salzburg Seminar in Salzburg, Austria and Middlebury, Vermont.