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Chirac bristles at suggestions that he's motivated by instinctive anti-Americanism. "When I hear people say that I'm anti-American, I'm sad — not angry, but really sad," Chirac told TIME. "Often insults say more about the person saying them than the target." He actually knows the States quite well, having spent time in the early 1950s working as a forklift operator for Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, as a soda jerk at a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Boston's Harvard Square and attending summer school at the Harvard Business School. "I've hitchhiked across the whole United States," Chirac says. "I even worked as a journalist and wrote a story on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. I know the U.S. perhaps better than most French people, and I really like the United States. I feel good there. I love junk food and always come home with a few extra pounds. I've always worked toward and supported transatlantic solidarity, and that unity is a major element in global equilibrium. That was true yesterday and it will be true tomorrow."
Part of Chirac's fondness for the U.S. has to do with his youthful experience of Americans during World War II. "Like most of his generation, the most vivid memories he has are those of the liberation of France, the arrival of American troops, and the later reconstruction of France and Europe under the Marshall Plan," says Denis Tillinac, a personal friend of the President's and author of a memoir about him. "He has a great fondness and respect for the energy, innovation and courage of America to believe in itself and take risks."
Still, Chirac sees the risk of falling too far inside America's gravitational pull. "Any community with only one dominant power is always a dangerous one," he says. "That's why I favor a multipolar world, in which Europe obviously has its place." Not everyone accepts that explanation. "The sinister part is a wish to be the leader of the anti-American world," says an aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "[Chirac] is trying to see the world in bipolar rather than unilateral terms, which is absolutely at odds with Blair's vision of Europe and America working together." Ennio Di Nolfo, an international relations expert at the University of Florence, concurs. "Chirac's position is manipulative and Machiavellian," he says. "France is taking the opportunity of a clash with the U.S. over the war to seek preeminence in Europe."
That view has become scripture in Washington. "It is French policy to diminish our influence in Europe and in the world, and to shape the European Union as a counterweight to the United States," says Richard Perle, chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board and a superhawk close to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The current crisis will fuel the resolve of many U.S. leaders to bypass the U.N. on important matters, including attacking Iraq with a "coalition of the willing" instead of the Security Council's blessing. It would be ironic if France, by flexing its muscles in the U.N., helped weaken the venue in which some of its last real power resides.
It doesn't take a partisan eye to see a desire to check American power motivating France's recent maneuvering at NATO. Last week, the corridors of the alliance's headquarters in Brussels resembled the waiting room of a hospital emergency ward, as packs of officials and journalists heard that the 19 member states failed to resolve one of the most serious disputes of its 54-year history. France, Germany and Belgium balked at their treaty commitments to deliver antiaircraft missiles and surveillance aircraft to defend Turkey against a possible assault by Iraq. The trio argued that their agreement would amount to sanctioning a war by the back door. Now that U.N. arms inspectors Blix and ElBaradei have made their reports, a compromise could be reached as early as this week. But the credibility of the alliance is in tatters.
Blocking NATO is a well-known propensity for France, which exited its military commission in 1965. But many feel Chirac has also played a key role in scuppering hopes of forging a common foreign and security policy for the E.U., a goal he has lobbied hard for in the past. As Chirac gleefully leads the Continent where public opinion wants it to go, he has paradoxically alienated the leaders of many other European allies — especially Tony Blair, who was left staring wanly from the sidelines last week. Chirac's vain presumption that France and Germany could speak for all of Europe against the war — and the answering volley of support for America from 18 other European nations — leaves the E.U. looking silly and feckless. "The Europeans have been telling us for a decade that they're on the verge of getting their foreign policy act together," says Robert Kagan, neoconservative author of Of Paradise and Power, a new book on U.S.-European relations. "The Iraq case shines a bright light on the disunity of Europe." "Constructing Europe is not an easy thing," Chirac admits. "There are a lot of obstacles on the way, and we have to get over them one by one and move forward." But France's claim to leadership in that effort no longer enjoys the support it once had.
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