The Secret Life of France (16 page)

This, as I would discover, is the conviction of a large number of French people, both young and old. Like many visceral antipathies, French anti-Americanism has its roots
in history. When I detected it, even in my own children, I became eager to understand its origins.

The week the British and Americans declared war on Iraq, I went to see Yves. I knew that he would provide a useful perspective on this new breach between France and the Anglo-Saxon world. We sat in his flat near the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by his wife’s luminous oil paintings and a posse of Scottish terriers. His response was more laconic than I had expected.

‘I’m afraid that all they are doing is taking the noose from around Iran’s neck,’ he said. ‘With the Sunni regime destroyed, the mullahs will simply have a huge playground in which to extend their Islamic Revolution.’

A man of the Cold War, Yves has little patience with the politics of interference inaugurated by Clinton (or rather, rehabilitated by him), drooled over by Blair and harnessed, most successfully, by G. W. Bush. For people like Yves, better the dictator you know.

‘The only thing that surprises me in all this’, he went on, ‘is the attitude of the English. Americans can be forgiven for their ignorance but the British have a sense of History. They
know
the region. Surely they can foresee the chaos that is to come.’

I relayed the theory that I had read in the editorial of a major British broadsheet, that Blair hoped to control Bush, act as a kind of moderator once in the theatre.

Yves said he thought this sounded like vainglory.

‘I do not think this invasion makes sense but I will say one thing,’ he said. ‘France has behaved very badly.’

Did he not think that Dominique de Villepin’s speech to the UN was rather magnificent?

‘Magnificent and ridiculous,’ he replied. ‘That is what we French do best: hover between the sublime and the absurd. But that is not what I am talking about. I am referring to Chirac’s behaviour. Giving the impression that he is working with his English allies to find a diplomatic solution, then at the last minute threatening to use his veto. How embarrassing for Blair. It is unacceptable. I will go further, I believe it was Chirac’s shabby manoeuvre that finally drove Blair into Bush’s arms.’

Few French men or women took Yves’s rigorous position on their country’s pre-war diplomacy. Most did not see beyond the simple fact that their leaders had been right not to involve them in a dubious and protracted conflict that has left the world a good deal less safe. I realise that the fact that the French may have been right about Iraq does not endear her to most Britons and Americans – in spite of the fact that the war has become increasingly unpopular in both countries.

When I asked Yves why he was so forgiving of the British and so tough on the Americans, he answered: ‘If you asked that question to anyone in the French intelligence community, their answer would be the same: history.’

When Yves became head of French counter-intelligence he discovered a deeply Anglophile environment in which anti-American sentiment was not only permitted but encouraged. The American secret service is seen as big and
cumbersome, with more money than sense.

‘The Americans are overly reliant on technical intelligence,’ he told me. ‘And the standard of their analysis is very poor. The CIA is an enormous machine which produces very meagre results.’

And yet Yves is more generous than many inside the ‘Ring of Secrecy’ for whom the CIA’s blunders have seriously endangered the West, the most disastrous of which is nowadays held to be Peshawar
†
and the ensuing rise of Islamic militancy.

With regard to the intelligence pointing to Iraq’s so-called weapons of mass destruction, Yves, who has remained friends with Sir Richard Dearlove,
‡
beleaguered head of MI6 at the time of the invasion, insists – memos and reports notwithstanding – that MI6 was not at fault.

‘It was simply not possible that British intelligence would ever make a mistake of that magnitude,’ he said.

Far beyond any particular grievance, however, French anti-Americanism appears to stem from a deep cultural incompatibility. Like de Gaulle, Yves and his kind consider
the Americans as uncultured and unsubtle, vices that for the French are unforgivable.

This disdain for the Americans and admiration for the British makes Yves particularly sensitive to what he sees as Britain’s servitude to US interests. He, like many French people, was excited by the prospect of Tony Blair governing Britain. A French-speaker with a home in France, he would surely turn towards Europe, perhaps even offer France a welcome alternative to her rather uncomfortable partnership with Germany.

If Blair’s fantasy, on taking office, was to build a foreign policy that would bestride both Europe and America, he soon recanted. His decision to ride shotgun with Bush into war with Iraq put an end to any possibility of a bipartite policy. Agreeing with Nelson Mandela’s remark that Blair was ‘the foreign minister of the United States’, it is Yves’s understanding that all of history since the First World War has led ineluctably to this rather unsatisfactory role for Britain. And like many Frenchmen of his generation, he watches from the sidelines, clutching his head in despair.

Yves’s analysis, shared by many French people, is that the US has a history of conning Europe, often with an accompanying naivety that only makes the sting more humiliating. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson arrived at the Paris Peace Conference brandishing the idealism of a young nation just starting to flex its muscles. He presented his ‘fourteen points’ for peace to the imperial powers of Britain and France, represented by two old men, Lloyd
George and Georges Clemenceau. Neither Clemenceau – whose nation had lost more than one and a half million souls – nor Lloyd George – who had lost almost a million – liked Wilson’s plan, which, as they saw it, left them insufficiently compensated for their losses and still exposed to further aggression. Neither of them appreciated being lectured on the evils of colonialism by a nation that was emerging as the world’s new and indeed only economic superpower. The principal difference in the positions of these two old men was that Lloyd George was cannier in disguising his distaste than his fiery French counterpart, who, despite having lived in America and been married to an American woman, stubbornly refused to speak anything to Woodrow Wilson but French.

What is certain is that Wilson irritated both men. Sigmund Freud, in his rather strange collaborative biography of the American president,
Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological
Study
, also confessed to have been irritated by his subject: ‘His career from 1876 at Princeton to the day he was received in Paris as the Saviour of Mankind offers a remarkable example of the power of the Super-Ego to drive to success a man of weak body and neurotic constitution.’

This home-schooled son of an overbearing Presbyterian preacher did not learn to read until he was twelve – an idea that would have shocked the French. He had then spent the rest of his life trying to prove himself to his father. His apparently contradictory policies (towards both war and peace) were, Freud argued, born of an inner
conflict between a heady and aggressive urge to contest the internalised father figure (by going to war) and the desire to placate it (by playing the Prince of Peace). Freud’s reading might equally apply to another cowed son, who would also decide to play global
gendarme
but for much higher stakes.

At the time of the Treaty of Versailles, Woodrow Wilson was extremely popular with the peoples of Europe, who were exhausted and traumatised by the war. Both Clemenceau and Lloyd George, however, saw the American president as an ingénue, whose idealism masked – perhaps even to himself – a dangerous will to power. Wilson’s decision to send his peace terms directly to the Germans without first consulting his French and British allies was to them a clear sign of his sense of entitlement.

From a French perspective Britain, in spite of her vanished empire and her weak economy, was, by virtue of her role in the Second World War, firmly in the victors’ camp and as such entitled to aspire to a certain status in the world.

‘Britain won that war,’ Yves says. ‘Or at least enabled us not to lose it. The Americans entered late because they had no choice. In the end, Britain was the nation that paid most dearly for US involvement. She sacrificed her independence.’

After Hiroshima, it was clear that nuclear capability held the key to status and independence in the world. Notwithstanding his legendary differences with his British hosts, de Gaulle strongly admired British culture
and disliked America. He was deeply mistrustful when he saw the United States trying, as he saw it, to lock down the nuclear industry. In 1953 the general would have heard President Dwight Eisenhower’s rallying ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech to the UN and reminded himself that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

‘It is with the book of history,’ said Eisenhower, ‘and not with isolated pages, that the United States will ever wish to be identified. My country wants to be constructive, not destructive. It wants agreement, not wars, among nations. It wants itself to live in freedom, and in the confidence that the people of every other nation enjoy equally the right of choosing their own way of life.’

Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme was, ostensibly, a plan to supply friendly nations (which at the time included Iran and China) with atomic materials and technology, to be used to civilian ends.

‘To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you – and therefore before the world – its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma, to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.’

Eisenhower’s offer carried with it the right of the United States to verify that the transferred materials were being used for peaceful purposes. Any nation joining the programme would therefore have to relinquish nuclear military independence, an idea that would have been unacceptable to de Gaulle. He interpreted Eisenhower’s
‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative as the vehicle through which an already dominant America would organise and control the world nuclear market.

If Eisenhower’s intention was peaceful, the result of his ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme was an opening up, to other participants, of the arms race (atoms for peace, through reprocessing and plutonium extraction, can quite easily become atoms for war). It also led to an increase in the tempo of the race and a hardening of the Soviet resolve. Eisenhower’s focus on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, hugely popular with US and international public opinion, in the end worked to camouflage his own administration’s rapid build-up of atomic weaponry.

For this reason, de Gaulle, who had returned to power in 1958, would watch with suspicion as President Kennedy and Harold Macmillan, nearly a decade later, went into negotiations on the matter of nuclear interdependency.

The Nassau Agreement signed in December 1962 between Kennedy and Macmillan was proof to de Gaulle that he had been right to distrust the Americans. As far as he was concerned, the agreement simply swindled the British out of their nuclear independence. De Gaulle’s reading of Nassau is highly questionable but it does offer an insight into the French perspective, which as events would show, still dictates much of her foreign policy.

Back in March 1960, Harold Macmillan had left a meeting at Camp David with Eisenhower, confident that Britain had secured an independent nuclear capability. In a secret quid pro quo deal, Macmillan offered Eisenhower
the use of Holy Loch, Scotland, as a base for America’s Polaris missile submarines, in exchange for which Britain would receive delivery, as soon as it was ready, of the weapon then being developed by the US Airforce. This was not a bomb, but a nuclear air-to-ground missile called Skybolt. Skybolt could be used in conjunction with British Vulcan bombers to penetrate Soviet airspace. After the Camp David meeting, a joint project office was set up between the RAF and the US Airforce to develop the weapon.

The following year, when Kennedy came to power, he met a barrage of resistance to the Skybolt programme. His secretary of defence, Robert McNamara, headed the campaign. McNamara criticised the whole idea of Skybolt, judging that ‘limited nuclear capabilities, operating independently, are dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence and lacking in credibility as a deterrent’.
§
In the same speech McNamara rejected the notion of small nations like Britain even possessing an independent nuclear deterrent: ‘In particular, relatively weak national nuclear forces with enemy cities as their targets are not likely to be sufficient to perform even the function of deterrence.’

Less than two weeks before Kennedy’s talks with Macmillan in Nassau, the former secretary of state Dean Acheson gave a speech to a group of students at West Point that was – and probably still is – a pretty accurate
summary of the American view: ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role, that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based primarily on a “special relationship” with the United States, a role based on being head of the Commonwealth [is] about played out.’

By the time he came to the negotiating table, Harold Macmillan must have been smarting with wounded pride. He already knew that Kennedy had decided to scrap Skybolt. Britain – who had cancelled ‘Blue Streak’, her own ballistic missile programme – had been left high and dry by the Americans.

Kennedy and Macmillan talked for three days. By the time they emerged, blinking, into the Caribbean sunshine, Kennedy had agreed to provide Britain with the far more advanced, second-generation Polaris missiles instead of Skybolt. In exchange, Britain would honour her commitment to provide the Americans with a strategic base at Holy Loch, Scotland.

De Gaulle, who had received Macmillan at Rambouillet two days before his trip to the Bahamas, had hoped to engage him in a nuclear partnership with France. In his eyes, the only impediment to this would be Britain’s continued nuclear alliance with America. After all, the goals of these two old men, at the head of two defunct empires, were the same – to claw back some prestige and independence in the world – and, as they both knew, only nuclear fire could do that.