"Is France an ally or an adversary of the United States?" Cheney demanded to know
U.S. and France Find Making Up Is Hard to Do
The Iraq war was coming and relations between France and the Bush administration were growing colder on Feb. 17, a federal holiday, when French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte made his way through the snow to Vice President Cheney's house.
Levitte is a close adviser to President Jacques Chirac, who was lobbying hard to prevent the U.N. Security Council from authorizing the United States to use force against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration felt betrayed, but Levitte was unprepared for what Cheney asked him.
"Is France an ally or an adversary of the United States?" Cheney demanded to know, according to U.S. officials.
It was an extraordinary question to direct at a putative partner in the transatlantic alliance, a government that dispatched troops in support of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and the Balkans, and a reliable participant in the anti-terrorism war. Levitte, who protested that France was indeed a partner, was stunned by Cheney's directness.
Relations between France and the United States, often tense, have rarely been less friendly than this year. Only months after the diplomatic blowup over the invasion of Iraq, which became so personal that French toast on menus on Capitol Hill and Air Force One was renamed freedom toast, the two countries are dueling again, this time over who should control Iraq's reconstruction.
President Bush and Chirac will meet in New York today in a search for common ground on Iraq's future. It would be significant if they melded their distinctly different approaches into something workable -- or even agreed to stay out of each other's way.
"We're getting mixed noises, but not all negative," said a senior U.S. official who described himself as "very cautious" about the meeting and the overall relationship.
"Chirac is going to have to make some judgment calls as to what he wants," the official said. "There's a certain point at which people look at the French and say, 'What the hell are you doing and how much are you going to contribute other than rhetoric? Either you stand up and kick in or you don't.' And we're getting to that point."
In remarks in New York yesterday, Chirac acknowledged tension between France and the United States, saying there is a need for "open and candid" dialogue that is respectful of differences.
A warm reconciliation is not expected. It is no accident that Chirac will have a short meeting at the U.S. diplomatic mission in New York in the same week that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be treated to an overnight visit to the Camp David presidential retreat.
"It's very hard being on the wrong side," a French official said. "We were painted as strategic enemies of the United States. Any kind of nuance or criticism was not tolerated."
The current irritations of U.S.-French relations owe much to the competing worldviews and ambitions of the nations' leaders. Bush has molded himself into a foreign policy activist who perceives an American mission to spread democracy and free markets. He has strong ideas about how to proceed and insists that countries choose sides.
Chirac preaches his desire to build a counterweight to unilateral U.S. superpower dominance. While seeking to regain for France a measure of influence lost with the ebb of its empire, he fought to slow Bush's march toward war, a move that had the strong backing of French and European domestic opinion.
"This is about power politics. The French want a multipolar world, and that world doesn't conform to reality," said John C. Hulsman, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "But some unilateralists in Washington see the world as a tabula rasa to be written on, and that doesn't correspond to reality, either.
"From an American point of view, we think they've been freeloading and carping from the cheap seats for a long time. We see them as a 'Wizard of Oz' character that, when push comes to shove, has delusions of grandeur," Hulsman continued. "And they see us as a bully . . . that, although powerful, is also wrong-headed."
Chirac government adviser Francois Heisbourg said the Bush administration, which contends that France is almost pathologically uncooperative, has a curious view of partnership.
"You don't want allies, you simply want people who are at your beck and call to do your bidding," Heisbourg said from Paris in a telephone interview. "It's a very strange reading of the word ally."
The dispute has taken some turns that seemed to reflect playground politics as much as statecraft.
When then-Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine dismissed Bush's January 2002 axis of evil speech as "simplistic," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell replied that Vedrine was "getting the vapors."
As American protesters dumped French wine, causing exports to drop 17.6 percent in March compared with the previous year, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who dismissed France as a relic of "Old Europe," declined repeated social invitations from Levitte and his wife Marie-Cecile, although they live across the street from him.
The Bush administration chose not to ask France to contribute troops or other personnel to the struggling postwar occupation of Iraq, according to French officials, despite active U.S. efforts to persuade Pakistan, India and Turkey to send large contingents.
"There's something childish about it," Simon Serfaty, a specialist on France at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of the administration's behavior. "This is not the way one does foreign policy when the issues are as serious as they are today."
Serfaty sees reasons for U.S. anger at the French leadership, particularly because Chirac before the war "was being not only obstructive, but was attempting to build a coalition of the unwilling. The Americans overplayed a strong hand. France overplayed a weak hand."
Bush and Chirac met in Evian, France, during a summit of the world's most industrialized countries in June. The two countries have worked together on such issues as Liberia and Afghanistan and teamed up in the search for terrorism suspects. Their $50 billion in annual trade makes the United States France's largest trading partner outside the European Union.
Yet, despite professed allegiance to common goals, the U.S. and French governments this month have again taken different sides again on a Security Council resolution. This time, the issue is an attempt by the administration to win a U.N. mandate and more troops and money for Iraq.
The French believe the United States should give more authority over Iraq's political future to the Iraqi Governing Council and the United Nations. The Americans, unconvinced that the United Nations could do a better job and certain that the Iraqis are not nearly ready for self-rule, are balking.
French diplomats have said they have no intention of vetoing the U.S. resolution, but the sense of déjà vu is strong -- and probably inevitable. A senior U.S. official, who thinks Cheney was right to challenge Levitte, said "The French have always known how far to push their differences. They crossed the line and most of them knew it."
Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, however, see nothing to apologize for, said James B. Steinberg, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution and deputy national security adviser to President Bill Clinton.
"They are very self-confident about their views of the world," said Steinberg, "and very much in the mode of saying the best way to be a friend to the United States is to be brutally candid about the world and to pull no punches."
The French did get a good piece of news from Washington last week. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) circulated a letter to her House colleagues calling for cafeterias in Congress to return the rightful names to French toast and French fries.
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