“Old Europe” comes to Washington
28 April 2018
Fifteen years ago, in the run-up to the US-British invasion of Iraq, the US media was ferociously denouncing Germany and, in particular, France for failing to line up behind the US war drive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld excoriated “Old Europe,” the French were painted as cowards and back-stabbers, and media pundits called for changing the name of French fries to “freedom fries.”
In an article titled “How to deal with America? The European dilemma,” the World Socialist Web Site observed,
Officials in the Bush administration have become increasingly blunt in laying out the consequences of a European refusal to fall into line behind the United States. As one official told the New York Times on Thursday, “Our goal is to rub their nose in reality, and then proceed to discuss what we do about it.”
And what is this reality? The Bush administration has indicated not all too subtly that French and German companies will be excluded from participating in the carve-up of Iraq’s oil industry in the aftermath of war. Even more serious, there have been suggestions that the United States, after occupying Iraq, will exert pressure on Iran, which is a critical supplier of oil to Western Europe.
From the standpoint of France and Germany, the behavior of the United States is utterly reckless and raises the danger of a complete breakdown of whatever remains of the entire legal and institutional framework that regulated the affairs of world capitalism. For the Western Europeans to submit to the diktats of the United States would mean to accept their relegation, in the words of the conservative French daily Le Figaro, “into a simple protectorate of the United States.”
Fifteen years later, French President Emmanuel…