An Alliance in Ruins

摘要

Early last year, when the Iraq crisis looked to be wrenching apart old alliances, Secretary of State Colin Powell took a step back to talk about strained relations between the U.S. and France. The two countries, he said in a speech in late January, 2003, "have been in marriage counseling for 225 years. Guess what? The marriage is there. And it will be there." It's true that Washington and Paris have long been uneasy allies: Perceived slights on the part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt fed Free French leader Charles de Gaulle's prickly independence. That reached full expression when, as the President of France, de Gaulle summarily pulled his country out of NATO's integrated military command in 1966. Over the years, American and French officials have quarreled over trade, the Middle East, relations with the then-Soviet Union, and other issues. Yet there was never any doubt that the two countries were on the same side.