Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship With France [Anglais] [Relié]

National Review reporter Miller (The Unmaking of Americans) and Harvard lecturer Molesky focus quite single-mindedly on destroying what they say is the "myth" of the historical friendship between the United States and France. In doing so, they give short shrift to a few vital facts: for instance, while focusing on the French and Indian massacre of British colonists at Deerfield, Mass., in 1704, they overlook the importance of the French fleet in George Washington's great victory at Yorktown. Miller and Molesky also dismiss French policy as having a cynical underside of national self-interest, willfully overlooking the fact that all governments act out of self-interest. Thus, they call French trade barriers during the Cold War ingratitude for American aid in WWII. They accuse the French, who dare to look down on American culture, of their own "sordid cultural exports," such as the avant-garde, with its strain of nihilism. And, as the authors see it, the French, with the debacle at Dien Bien Phu, are responsible for America's quagmire in Vietnam. As one might guess, driving this revisionism is France's refusal to support the United States in its late invasion of Iraq The authors' ire, and their carefully selected and unnuanced slices of history, will convince only the already converted.
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Lafayette, the Statue of Liberty, D-Day-- such symbolic shorthand for a historical alliance between France and America crumbles in the caustic viewpoint expressed by this historical review of their relationship. Miller, of the conservative National Review,^B and Molesky, a Harvard history lecturer, argue that animosity rather than amity has been the two countries' normal state of affairs, extending from the French and Indian War to the post-World War II pattern of frequent French diplomatic opposition to American foreign policy. The authors reflect on the sources of French anti-Americanism, maintaining it is, in part, because of France's resentment of its own decline as a great power and its cultural contempt for America as crass and materialistic. What may seem like the long-gone past, such as Napoleon III's pro-South policy in the Civil War, is presented as a seamless continuum to the present, representing the French proclivity for hampering the American "hyperpower," as one foreign minister recently called the U.S. Gratifying to a nationalist sensibility, Miller and Molesky's editorialized jaunt through history is fluid and opinionated. Gilbert Taylor
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Americans were shocked when French president Jacques Chirac played a leading role in opposing America’s position during the Iraq crisis. In OUR OLDEST ENEMY, the authors demonstrate that France has never been our friend, has always been our rival, and has often been our enemy.

Miller and Molesky return to America’s earliest history, relating the little-known story of the Deerfield Massacre of 1704, when a group of French and Indians massacred settlers in northern Massachusetts. They show that the French came to America’s aid only at the end of the Revolution and then with the interest of harming the British; during the Civil War, they supported the Confederacy. In the twentieth century, French demands at the Versailles Peace Conference paved the way for the rise of fascism in Germany and eventually required America to rescue France during World War II. The postwar period was also rife with disastrous actions on the part of the French, including Charles de Gaulle’s decision to pull out of NATO and his obstruction of American efforts to turn back Soviet expansion. French imperialism left troubling legacies as well: America’s involvement in Vietnam followed decades of conflict between the French and the Vietnamese; the genocidal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot was a product of French higher education; even the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq can be traced to French influences.

Candid and absorbing, OUR OLDEST ENEMY provides an authoritative explanation for the explosive anger toward France that has swept across America and continues to shape debates about our foreign policy and role in the world.

John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author of The Unmaking of Americans. Mark Molesky is Assistant Professor of History at Seton Hall University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, where he was a Lecturer on History and Literature.