France, U.S. Try to Smooth Rough Spots After Latest Rut in Long, Rocky Road

For Charles de Gaulle, Americans were “big, good-looking and stupid.” With the haughty general’s political heirs back in command of French diplomacy, transatlantic nerves have been rubbed so raw that even table manners can spark a nasty controversy.

From Africa to the Mideast, from blueprints for NATO reform to last week’s straw votes on a new U.N. secretary-general, for months now, the French and Americans have taken digs at each other, or been at odds in full public view.

The latest sour note in America’s longest-standing alliance (and, since World War II, its prickliest in Europe) came one week ago at a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels, when every NATO foreign minister--except France’s--honored outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

In fact, steamed U.S. officials later related, France’s Herve de Charette got up and walked out during a tribute offered to Christopher by NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana.

U.S. officials noted that an account of the snub by one American newspaper incorrectly described it as happening during the ministers’ lunch, rather than afterward, giving the French the opening to issue a flat denial of the “false and malicious” report.

“Malicious,” the French Foreign Ministry further contended in a statement faxed to U.S. news offices, “because the aim of those who peddled this information is clearly to damage French-American relations.”

In what was just as clearly a fence-mending mission, De Charette flew into Washington over the weekend with plans to meet with Christopher and with decidedly warm words about Franco-American relations on his lips.

De Charette on Monday denied any intention to snub the top American diplomat, insisted he had been hurt and puzzled by the news reports and took pains to pronounce Christopher “a great secretary of state.”

“We want to convince you,” De Charette told a dozen American reporters, “to convince the American people that we have great respect for your nation and have friendship for your people.”

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He dismissed a reporter’s hypothesis that State Department officials are irritated with France because it tries to assume a larger role in the world than it merits by wealth and power. “I can’t imagine that idea,” he said.

He argued that the Americans understand that France, “a nation with a long history,” has global interests and responsibilities. “France is a proud nation. . . . Our main aim is to achieve the unity of Europe,” he said. “But we have interests all around the world.”

For many in the diplomatic world, however, the details of the 58-year-old Frenchman’s behavior had become a cause celebre because of the irritants of late in the complex, oft-strained Franco-American relationship that dates from treaties of friendship and alliance negotiated by Benjamin Franklin in 1778 as the Continental Army shivered in rags at Valley Forge.

Ironically, the unpleasantness occurs as France has a president with unique firsthand experience of the United States. As an exchange student in Massachusetts in 1953, Jacques Chirac waited tables at Howard Johnson’s and garnered a certificate for his prowess at making banana splits.

The former HoJo employee and Harvard summer school student, who went on to become a two-term prime minister and leader of the Gaullist Rally for the Republic party, was elected president of France in May 1995.

“The real problem is that Chirac is a Gaullist and wants to show himself as one, and the way to do this is to impose himself and France on others,” Denis Lacorne, a French analyst of Franco-American relations and U.S. politics and history, said in an interview.

“The Americans think that someone who knows English and their country is more likely to be favorable to them, whereas the opposite is sometimes true,” he said.

As in the La Fontaine fable about the frog that wanted to become as big as an ox, Lacorne said, France under Chirac has manifestly been seeking of late a “greater place in the world than perhaps we now merit.”

Last week, for instance, France opposed the United States and all 13 other members of the U.N. Security Council on the election of Kofi Annan of Ghana as the next secretary-general. But the French, offended by what they considered cavalier American treatment of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the incumbent (and French-speaking) secretary-general from Egypt, were finally forced to cave in to overwhelming pressure and endorsed Annan.

To the ill-disguised irritation of Washington, Chirac has also plumped for a bigger European role in the Middle East, and one of De Charette’s Cabinet colleagues sneered at U.S. diplomatic efforts in Africa, implying they were nothing more than a bid by President Clinton to win African American votes.

After the U.S. launched cruise missiles against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s military positions in early September, France in protest limited its participation in enforcement of an expanded “no-fly” zone over Iraq.

After Christopher visited Paris to try to recruit French backing in enlarging the southern “no-fly” zone, the French, in the Americans’ view, put out a statement that misrepresented the U.S. position and flouted diplomatic rules of conduct.

“These things are episodic; they come and go,” a senior U.S. official said in Washington. “We are trying to handle it maturely. We are defending ourselves. There is too much that we have to do together to allow these small pinpricks to affect the relationship.”

For the French, the crunch issue, and one not yet resolved, is reform of the Atlantic alliance. De Gaulle, who dreamed of a strong, influential France “between the blocs,” withdrew all French forces from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966.

But one year ago this month, France announced that it would be resuming an active military role.

The price for their rejoining NATO as a fully functioning member, the French have been hinting heavily, is that the alliance’s Southern Command in Naples, Italy, now headed by an American admiral, should pass to a European, presumably a French officer.

U.S. officials say this is out of the question because the U.S. 6th Fleet is the largest unit in the command.

“We want to give the Europeans greater exposure in the NAT0 command structure, but we are not willing to give them the Southern Command,” State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said.

For the French, the unyielding American position is emblematic of the U.S. dominance in world affairs that has only been accentuated by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc--and that they resent.

“The alliance remains very strongly dominated by the United States,” one highly placed French official complained. “It’s like a big factory. There are real positions of power, and others that are somewhat bogus.”

In a television interview Thursday, Chirac spoke in Gaullist tones of “American hegemony,” and he has been talking up the European Union as a counterweight to the sole remaining superpower.

But the controversy stirred up by the Brussels incident seems to have convinced the French that the sniping has gone too far and that it is time to focus on what unites, rather than separates, the old allies.

“France and the United States are two countries that are the oldest friends in the world,” De Charette assured reporters after arriving in Washington.

“From time to time, we have differences of evaluation, as two friends do, but we are still old friends, and we intend to remain so. You can count on France for that.”

Times staff writers Norman Kempster and Stanley Meisler in Washington contributed to this report.