France likely to suffer reprisals from America
Joseph Fitchett International Herald Tribune
Saturday, March 15, 2003
Fears include consumer goods boycotts
PARIS France seems bound to suffer a wave of economic and political losses at American hands, U.S. and French officials said Friday.
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The U.S. backlash against France is likely to range widely, they said, from moves to reduce the importance of the Security Council and other international bodies that buoy French prestige to blows against trans-Atlantic industrial cooperation that infuses American technology into French companies.
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Most uncontrollable of all the responses, they said, might be consumer boycotts that hit French products and services.
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One official suggested that Washington may press for reforms at the Security Council to downgrade France's role. One example might be an enlarged Security Council in which a veto would require "no" votes from at least two members - and in which France and Britain would give up their permanent seats in place of a single seat for the European Union.
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A sense of foreboding is palpable among French business leaders, several of whom, speaking anonymously, fear a determined U.S. campaign to hurt French industry, not only by refusing to buy aircraft and other items manufactured in France but also by actively trying to supplant France in other world export markets.
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The outlook for industrial cooperation - in defense-related technologies, for example - will be chilled, Bush administration officials said.
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That would hurt major French companies that depend partly on cooperation with U.S. manufacturers - Thales with Raytheon in electronic warfare, for example, or Snecma with General Electric in aircraft engines.
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Even worse, according to these executives, some American investment is likely to flee, depriving the Paris stock market of investments that until recently accounted for up to a quarter of the total value of shares on the exchange. Right now, several major French companies desperately need fresh capital after drastic slumps in their sectors.
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The most obvious economic risk for France is exclusion from the opportunities in a postwar Iraq, starting with the country's major oil fields. The French oil giant TotalFinaElf SA has signed colossal drilling contracts, reportedly worth as much as $50 billion, with the current Iraqi regime that would go into effect at the end of international economic sanctions against Baghdad.
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In the event of U.S. military victory in Iraq, that French foothold would probably be lost.
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"The contracts, signed while Iraq was a pariah state, are so lopsidedly favorable to France that no successor regime would respect them, and a new team in Baghdad brought to power by Washington will certainly want to think again," a Bush administration official said.
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The Pentagon can prevent French defense companies from getting access to U.S. technology, but its leverage has to be viewed against wider U.S. interests, officials said. France's military establishment is considered to be the wing of French government most favorable to forceful U.S. policy on Iraq.
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"Do we want to cut military and intelligence cooperation and alienate a potentially influential lobby in France or do we hope to see the military play a role in a rethinking of some attitudes in the Chirac government?" a diplomat said.
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President Jacques Chirac has publicly brushed aside threats of U.S. retaliation, and American diplomats agree that Washington needs to be wary of moves that may be disallowed by the rules of the World Trade Organization. In the globalized world economy, many U.S. jobs depend on American sales to France and even French-owned companies in the United States.
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Richard Perle, head of the Pentagon's defense review board, said: "I think pinpricks can be counterproductive, but I also think that the time will come when France wants help from the United States and they will find no sympathy."
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U.S. officials recall that when Chirac triggered international indignation by resuming French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1995, the Clinton administration voiced no criticism but gave French military scientists access to U.S. technology for simulating nuclear explosions.
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Today, the Bush administration might be unwilling to help France with its nuclear deterrent, U.S. officials said.
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While French officials take a reassuring line against any economic warfare, they also, unofficially, discount U.S. retaliation by saying that Washington already was waging an undeclared commercial war on France. Last year Washington successfully pressed the Czech Republic and Poland, both prospective members of the European Union, to buy warplanes from the United States instead of Britain and France. After the Gulf War a decade ago, France got only a tiny part of the reconstruction contracts in Kuwait even though French forces had played a combat role against Iraq.
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A State Department official in Europe said that the problems with France will dictate a future U.S. crisis approach based on bilateral deals with major allies instead of multilateral cooperation inside alliances and international institutions.
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"We will want to make sure that the United States never gets caught again in a diplomatic choke point in the Security Council or in NATO," he said.
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