France Bristles In A U.s. World

WASHINGTON - Let's try for a moment to see the world from France's point of view.

For nearly half a century, the French have tried to recapture their former greatness by creating a united Europe with France in charge. The European Economic Community was headquartered from the beginning in Brussels, a predominantly French-speaking city. For a long time it excluded Britain, because -- unlike the guilt-ridden Germans -- the British refused to take orders from Paris. When at last Britain was admitted, it had to accept a deal that transferred billions of dollars a year from British taxpayers and consumers to French farmers. Today, no country in Europe pays more and gets less from the European Union than Britain.

In the 1980s, French hopes for the future seemed on the verge of being realized. More and more powers were transferred from the member states of the EU to the bureaucracy in Brussels. Ingenious non-tariff barriers locked cheap U.S. food and superior Japanese products out of the European market, to the benefit of inefficient French producers. The European Union developed its own European law, largely based on French law. There began to be talk of the development of a European army (to be commanded, naturally, by a French general) and of a European foreign policy, more independent from America.

This highly satisfactory situation collapsed when the Soviet Union did. And since 1991, the world has evolved in directions that the leaders of France find frustrating and even dangerous.

First, the 1990s revolution in personal computing destroyed all those 1980s illusions that Europe and Japan would soon go "head to head" against American technological dominance.

Next, the overwhelming American victory in the Gulf War -- and the inability of Europe to match it in the Balkans -- underscored the immense disparity between U.S. and European military power.

Then the economies of continental Europe slumped into a decade of stagnation. Between 1990 and 2000, the U.S. economy created 30 million net new private-sector jobs. The continent of Europe failed to create even one.

Finally, the liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe began joining the EU. And guess which language it is that every ambitious young person from the Baltic to the Black Sea wants to learn? And guess whose companies they want to work for? And guess whose military they expect to protect them from danger?

Sinister as these developments are from from the French point of view, the events since 9/11 have been far worse. Official Paris could not feel more threatened by the War on Terror if U.S. President George W. Bush had added France to the Axis of Evil.

The outcome in Afghanistan destroyed any lingering French hopes of persuading the rest of Europe to accept French military leadership. As wide as the military gap between France and the United States was in 1991, it is 10 times wider today.

Central European countries such as Poland and Bulgaria treasure their new NATO membership -- and look for opportunities to prove themselves loyal NATO allies. The reason that French President Jacques Chirac invited German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to Paris to make a joint anti-American statement was precisely that he knew he had no hope of getting such a statement adopted by the EU as a whole. In fact, nearly two dozen European nations have now pledged their support for whatever the United States chooses to do in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the impending overthrow of Saddam Hussein threatens to make obsolete France's traditional Middle Eastern policy of befriending and arming the region's dictators. France has courted Saddam Hussein for three decades: In fact, it was Jacques Chirac who made the decision to sell Saddam the nuclear reactor that the Israeli Air Force destroyed in 1981.

Now Saddam is about to be overthrown and replaced by new leaders who will regard Saddam's former friends as their worst enemies. Nor is the future looking much healthier for France's other pet despots in the region, Bashar Assad and Yasser Arafat. No wonder France seems determined to sabotage America's Iraq policy, at almost any cost.

At almost any cost -- but not quite at any cost. The brute fact is that in the end, France needs the United States a lot more than the United States needs France. France's veto at the UN Security Council has certainly complicated America's hopes of winning the propaganda benefits of obtaining another Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. But President Bush has made plain that a veto will not stop the United States from doing what he feels it must do. Meanwhile, the terror networks that threaten the United States threaten France even more directly. France cannot afford to isolate itself from U.S. intelligence information. Nor will the French government want to be locked out of America's decision-making for a post-Saddam Middle East.

So in the end, despite all their envy and resentment, the French will do what they have so often done in the face of superior power: knuckle under and kiss up. And it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of fellas either.