"For decades France has viewed the United States as a unique threat"

Antoine Audouard's double-standard whining is neutered by John J Miller's column on neo-Gaullism in the IHT…

… Shortly after Bush's re-election, the current French president, Jacques Chirac, called the post-Saddam Hussein world "more dangerous," announced that the United States doesn't "return favors" to Europe and even accused Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of "a lack of culture."

Chirac managed to stuff all these comments into a single interview, which happened to coincide with Bush's firm support for a French military crackdown in the Ivory Coast, where antigovernment insurgents have endangered French citizens.

Yet it's a mistake to assume that Chirac's rhetoric was just a clumsy expression of pent-up frustration with American voters. French foreign policy in the 1960s was not driven by a leader's personal antipathy for a brash Texan in the White House, and neither is today's. For decades France has viewed the United States as a unique threat. …

Before the invasion of Iraq, Paris didn't just express reservations — it tried to sabotage American goals in every feasible venue, from the chambers of the Security Council to the committee rooms of NATO. Since then, it has issued a raft of demands, including the hasty transfer of sovereignty to an ad-hoc Iraqi government, as well as a date certain by which the United States will remove its troops, no matter the circumstances.

Chirac's diplomats even spent October lobbying unsuccessfully for Iraqi insurgent groups — the ones now killing American troops and Iraqi civilians — to be represented at the international meeting in Egypt in November. It is difficult to see how French interests are furthered in any way by this behavior, unless France is understood to believe that its own aims are advanced whenever American ones are thwarted. …