French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said yesterday that “certain radical neoconservative ideas” are driving a wedge between Europe and the United States at a time when the trans-Atlantic alliance must be strengthened in the face of common threats.
In remarks at the end of a two-day fence-mending visit to Washington, Mrs. Alliot-Marie conceded that 2003 was a difficult time for Franco-American relations, but said Paris had been unfairly “stigmatized” as a “strategic adversary of the United States.”
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“To listen to some quarters, France is supposed to be trying to develop a counterweight to the United States, especially through European integration,” she told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Nothing strikes me as being further from reality.”
France’s active opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq badly strained bilateral ties last year. France also has led the push for an independent European Union defense force, which some in the United States worry is designed to compete with NATO and U.S. leadership.
Mrs. Alliot-Marie, a close political ally of French President Jacques Chirac, said the U.S. neoconservative writings appeared to call for the United States to match its economic supremacy with cultural and political dominance of the world as well.
She argued the United States and Europe must do more to understand one another, acknowledging the two sides may have different perspectives on issues such as the Middle East and the global war on terrorism.
“We may see things differently, but we must take into account our diversity,” she said.
The French minister met with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday. She left Washington yesterday for New York for talks with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
She restated France’s refusal to contribute troops to the U.S.-led peacekeeping mission in Iraq, but she added, “It is in no one’s interest that international efforts in Iraq fail.”
She said Paris was ready to contribute to the reconstruction of Iraq, but only after the U.S. interim administration is replaced by a permanent Iraqi government. She said France might consider training Iraqi soldiers and policemen as part of its contribution.
She said the West needed to take into account the growing sense of humiliation and injustice in the Arab and Muslim worlds, implicitly challenging neoconservative hopes of a quick democratic revolution in the Middle East.
“We know that democracy can’t be decreed and, for the graft to take, it has to take into account the historical and sociocultural realities of the countries where it is being implanted,” she said.
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