Two decades ago, Americans renamed French-style fries for a time –known in English as French fries, to differentiate them from chips– as Freedom fries. They were enraged at France for its refusal to go along with the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a war justified over an outrageous forgery – the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein's regime – that had catastrophic consequences. The invasion destroyed the country and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. And the balance of Washington's geostrategic gamble was calamitous: it pushed Iraq under the influence of Iran and gave birth to the terrorism of the Islamic State.
Then-French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin warned against military intervention in a famous speech at the UN Security Council on February 14. Soon after, President Jacques Chirac confirmed France's decision to use its veto power to deny any legal protection to the invasion. The French gesture did not prevent the war, but it earned him the hostility of the North American Administration. Vice President Dick Cheney called the French attitude an "unforgivable crime."
The Iraq war also broke European unanimity. With France and Germany against it, the United Kingdom and – more surprisingly – Spain decided to join the US war adventure (José María Aznar, by the way, is the only Western leader who still does not admit that he was wrong). Although it was only by testimonial title, the British and Spanish leaders were joined by those of Denmark, Italy, Portugal, as well as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, in signing a joint article in the Times on January 30 in defense of the theses american. Exasperated, Chirac harshly criticized the signatories, especially the Eastern countries recently incorporated into the EU: "These countries," he said, "have been very poorly educated and a little unaware of the dangers of aligning too quickly with American positions." . They have lost a good opportunity to shut up.”
This is where the dichotomy between the two Europes was born. The head of the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, illustrated it by confronting the Europe embodied by Germany and France, an "old Europe" supposedly out of date, with a new emerging Europe "whose center of gravity tilts to the East." On the eve of the attack on Iraq, the former countries of the communist bloc appeared as the US's most faithful allies. Twenty years later, against the backdrop of the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine and the tensions with China over Taiwan , they are again.
On a visit to Washington last week, the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, recovered this division to show his chest: “The old Europe believed in an agreement with Russia and the old Europe failed. But there is a new Europe – a Europe that remembers what Russian communism was. And Poland is the leader of this new Europe”. The truth is that this new Europe no longer has anything new. It is just a remake of the one from 2003. (Another day we will have to talk about how the ultranationalist and conservative regime in Warsaw, targeted by the EU for its anti-democratic drift, is using the war in Ukraine to vindicate itself)
The question, today as twenty years ago, is whether Europe should have its own voice in the world concert or limit itself to acting as a herdsman for the United States. And the theater where this struggle is going to be resolved – it is already doing so – is the of relations with China, where the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has traveled in recent weeks surrounded by enormous suspicion; the head of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánzhez, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
In an interview published on the 9th, upon returning from his trip to Beijing, Macron once again vindicated Europe's "strategic autonomy" and called for the US to "not follow through" on the Taiwan issue, as well as to avoid the “logic of the blocs” in relation to China (something that naturally irritated Washington greatly). The Polish prime minister did not miss the opportunity to amend the plan: "Instead of building a strategic autonomy with respect to the United States, I propose a strategic association with the United States."
France has always been very jealous of its sovereignty in matters of international and defense policy (something it would like to extend to the EU) and it has always distanced itself from its North American ally. It has been a constant trend since General De Gaulle decided in 1966 to abandon NATO's integrated military structure (to which France returned in 2009, leaving its nuclear deterrent force aside) and to close US bases on its territory. The rejection of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 amply confirmed this.
Bad that despite the new Europe, it does not seem that this trend is going to change. The US confrontational strategy towards China is not convincing in Paris. Not in other capitals. The late president Jacques Chirac already pointed it out in 2011 in his memoirs: “Many in the West are concerned about their alleged expansionist objectives. But there is less to fear, in my opinion, from deeply peaceful old civilizations with a universalist vocation, like China, than from great powers devoid of the same referents and worried about imposing their point of view by force.
