OLD AND IN THE WAY:

Paris and Berlin: the axis of weasel (Ferdinand Mount, January 26, 2003, The Sunday Times)

Yet Rumsfeld’s rebuke is positively mild beside some of the language being applied in the United States to the peace-loving Europeans. "Euroweenies", "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", "destined to slip down the Eurinal of history" and a "pain in the butt" are only some of the more printable insults.

Anti-Americanism in France has a long history. But now for the first time it is matched by knee-jerk anti-Europeanism coming from all sorts of Americans from the taxi driver to the defence secretary. The difference is that the bomb-happy rednecks don't worry about the limp-wristed frog-eaters nearly as much as the French worry about the onward march of American power and influence through the world--and especially through France. [...]

No doubt France and Germany will in due course recover that marvellous post-war elan which took them from their ground zero to the heights of the 1960s and 1970s. But it is silly to pretend they have begun to recover it yet.

You have only to look at the barmy scheme they have just concocted for not one but two elected presidents of the EU to see that an incestuous politics of gesture and posture is no sort of answer. Whether you agree with them or not, the painful reality is that the opposition of France and Germany poses only a minor inconvenience to whatever the Americans choose to do in Iraq.

Rumsfeld is a cantankerous old boy. His three little words were wounding and were meant to wound. They recall Dean Acheson's remark that Britain had lost an empire but had not yet found a role. That hurt, too. But in the long run it did us good.
For those of you unfamiliar, Mr. Mount was a Thatcherite and is now a fine novelist.

MORE:
-LECTURE: The Recovery of the Constitution (Ferdinand Mount, Charter88 Sovereignty lecture, 11 May 1992)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 25, 2003 11:59 PM