When asked in an April 22 television interview if Paris would suffer consequences for opposing Washington’s assault on Iraq, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell answered, "Yes. We have to look at all aspects of our relationship with France in light of this."

"I think some of the papers have described ‘yes’ as ‘war,’" State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the following day, referring to Powell’s remarks. Calling such reports "exaggerated," Boucher said that nonetheless the consequences for the French government would be more than "philosophical."

"In France," said an article in the April 29 New York Times, "there is a widespread skittishness over American calls to boycott French products."

Such measures would strengthen the U.S. rulers’ economic supremacy over their competitors in France, as well as other imperialist powers in the EU, and reinforce Washington’s role as the number one economic and military power in Europe.

"I doubt he’ll be coming to the ranch anytime soon," said U.S. president George Bush, referring to French president Jacques Chirac, in an April 24 interview with NBC television. The "ranch" is the 574-hectare estate in Crawford, Texas, where Bush wines and dines foreign heads of state. "It appeared to some in our administration and our country that the French position was anti-American," Bush said.

The same week Bush administration officials told the press that the U.S. president will spend his nights in a Swiss, not French, hotel when he attends an international economic summit meeting in the French Alps later this spring.

"We are not forcing anyone to spend the night in France," a senior French diplomat responded. He noted that the Swiss government had also opposed the U.S.-led assault on Iraq. "They didn’t even allow overflight rights for American planes," he said.

Paris has up to now been iced out of the bidding for the lucrative contracts in Iraq being doled out by the U.S. occupation regime. Washington is also seeking to exclude the French government from military decisions in NATO, and from international meetings where Paris has enjoyed privileged status over weaker European imperialist powers.

In February, Washington effectively sidelined France in NATO as it pushed, over Paris’s objections, to use the military alliance’s resources to aid the U.S. military buildup in Turkey. Washington bypassed NATO’s governing body, the North Atlantic Council, which includes France, and rubber-stamped the decision with the Defense Planning Council, of which France is not a member. U.S. officials say they will employ this method of shutting Paris out of NATO decisions in the future.  
 
EU military force
For his part, Chirac will travel to Brussels April 29 for talks with the German and Belgian governments on a Belgian proposal to bolster military collaboration among these imperialist powers. Plans for this EU military force have so far not included London, Washington’s closest imperialist ally.

U.S. government officials are taking steps to downgrade Paris’s place at other international meetings. "We want to find places where France has special privileges and ask whether it is smart to continue those," said a U.S. official.

At one such gathering, an annual conference between representatives from the United States, Britain, Germany, and France, Washington added diplomats from Spain and Italy to the list of envoys. The governments of the two countries backed Washington and London in their invasion of Iraq.

The Bush administration plans to introduce a resolution in the United Nations Security Council proposing to lift sanctions Washington imposed on Iraq in 1990 and maintained through the 12 years after the Gulf War. Under Washing-ton’s proposal, profits from Iraqi oil production would no longer be handed over to the UN to divide up through the so-called oil-for-food program, but would be channeled through the Pentagon-run occupation regime.

In contrast, Paris has argued for suspending, not abolishing, the sanctions until UN "inspectors" certify that Iraq is free of "weapons of mass destruction." The French rulers continue to plead for a central UN role in the occupation.

French companies profited handsomely from the UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s. With the U.S.-led overthrow of the Baghdad regime, billions in loan and investment deals between the Hussein government and French firms and banks--many of them granted through the United Nations--are threatened.

Washington announced April 25 that it will oppose Paris’s "bloated" request for 250 UN troops to be stationed alongside the French military forces in the West African nation of Ivory Coast. Paris currently has 4,000 troops in the former French colony, enforcing a cease-fire agreement brokered in January by French officials.

As Washington has accelerated its course toward a military assault on Iran, accusing it of sending agents into Iraq to foment rebellion among the Shiite majority, Paris has taken steps to build its influence in Tehran. French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin made an unannounced trip to the Iranian capital April 25, and was at the side of his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi, when the latter denied the U.S. allegations of meddling in Iraqi affairs (see front-page article).

At the same time French officials have added their voices to U.S.-initiated demands for Iran to submit to UN weapons "inspectors."

De Villepin’s visit to Iran was part of a Mideast tour that also took in Egypt, Syrian, and Lebanon--countries which have been, and remain, sources of massive profits to French imperialism.

As Paris tries to counter the blows dealt to its interests in the region, and more broadly by Washington’s assertion of its military and economic superiority, the French rulers are also confronted by the relative weakening of the European Union as a counterweight to U.S. power.

The Franco-German alliance at the core of the EU has become weaker in the context of the deepening crisis of the German economy and the associated crisis of confidence of the German rulers. German capitalism has increasingly lived up to its nickname of the "sick man of Europe," a far cry from the time of its original thrust -- formalized in 1957 with the foundation of the European Economic Community -- to impose its domination over its allies and rivals in the center and west of the continent.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home