France was humiliated after its defeat in the French and Indian Wars, and England was their enemy. It was in France’s self-interest to help the Americans; it was a way of getting back at the British.

Some very interesting things about the French versus the Americans….In Our Oldest Enemy, John J. Miller (co-author of the Book) describes the tenuous relationship between the US and France. And it’s much older than I ever imagined.

The most immediate influence was the recent unpleasantness with France over Iraq, but a deeper motivation was a desire to look at the pervasive myth of Franco-American friendship. If you listen to the commentary about relations between the United States and France, a lot of it assumes that France is America’s oldest friend–and that our two countries share a 200-year history of sweetness and light that began with Lafayette and somehow ended when our unrefined, cowboy president came into office and made a mess of things. This is nonsense. Franco-American history is a 300-year story of friction and hostility. From the French and Indian Wars to the Quasi War of the 1790s to the U.S. Civil War to Versailles to the Vichy regime to de Gaulle in the Cold War–when you study the historical record, it becomes clear that the jousting over Iraq is really nothing new. People always wonder about the period of the American Revolution, but it was an anomaly, and even then it’s poorly understood–the French entered the war for entirely self-interested reasons and behaved treacherously toward the Americans during the peace talks. There’s a lot more to it than Yorktown.

The French suffer from a very bad case of wounded national pride. Three hundred years ago, they ruled a globe-spanning empire. But ever since their defeat in the final French and Indian War–known in Europe as the Seven Years War–they’ve traveled on a downward trajectory. Napoleon provided a brief and bloody interruption to this relentless decline. At the same time, the French have watched the United States grow in power. Our gains mirror their losses. This has resulted in a tremendous sense of jealousy that embodies itself, nowadays, in a distinctly anti-American geopolitical outlook.

Many in France believe a one-superpower world is a dangerous world, even when the superpower is benign. So they talk of balancing American “hyperpower”–and for them “balancing” is a euphemism for “opposing.” This is what Francois Mitterand spoke about shortly before his death: “We are at war with America,” he said. “A permanent war … a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans–they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world.” This hardcore anti-American outlook makes it possible for French leaders to say some pretty outrageous things. Just a couple of weeks ago, French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced, “The Iraqi insurgents are our best allies.” What kind of friend or ally talks like that?

The notion that France has ever been a steadfast ally is a pernicious myth that serves French interests, not American ones. If France were America’s oldest ally, it wouldn’t have backstabbed the colonists at the end of the American Revolution, become the first military foe of the United States (following the ratification of the Constitution), sought to split our nation in two during the Civil War, accommodated the Soviet Union during the Cold War, quit NATO in the 1960s, or harassed the Bush administration over Iraq.

Here is Jamie Glazov’s interview with him, it’s very interesting.

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