Artículo de Joseph Fitchett en "The International Herald Tribune" del 22-2-03

PARIS. The clash between the United States and France in the UN Security Council may turn out to be a watershed marking the end of a period in which the two countries have been prickly but durable allies, according to diplomats and political analysts in both countries.

When the dust settles, both countries may think of each other in very different and significantly more hostile terms, they say.

The moment is heady for President Jacques Chirac and his closest adviser, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. Their go-slow approach on Iraq - often phrased by their supporters as French resistance to American imperialism - has won almost rapturous public support. Chirac has been lofted to a pinnacle of popularity, with virtually no public dissent, even from France's normally disputatious intellectuals.

But a few French voices, publicly muted in most cases, are asking questions about the long-term costs of France's campaign against U.S. policy on Iraq because hard-liners in the Bush administration are publicly urging a rethink, along negative lines, in U.S. attitudes toward France.

Congress, too, is angry. It is calling for U.S. retaliation against French political and industrial interests, and urging active moves to combat the European Union's ambitions in foreign policy and to cut back trans-Atlantic cooperation in the defense-manufacturing sector, where major French companies have started to make profitable inroads.

An early victim of the worsening relationship is bound to be France's role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has grown significantly over the last decade.

Now, the Bush administration wants to handle important NATO business in the Defense Planning Committee to end-run the French delegation, according to an official at alliance headquarters in Brussels. The committee, which can replace the NATO council for military decisions, is the only top-level alliance body of which France is not a member. Moreover, the Pentagon may show reluctance to lend Europe any significant U.S. military assets such as satellite intelligence, which would be a setback for the fledgling EU peacekeeping force. In addition, Pentagon officials are vowing to curtail French access to U.S. nuclear-weapons simulation facilities, which have been valuable to France's defense planners since Paris halted its nuclear testing program in the Pacific a decade ago.

The countries are facing the worst chasm since the Vietnam War four decades ago, when Charles de Gaulle closed NATO in France.

The French are "obviously not a foe, but they are starting to be seen as a nation liable to side with an enemy of the United States in a major quarrel," according to a former Clinton administration official who deplores the trend. .For France watchers, a puzzling aspect of this collision is how the French, right or wrong on the substance of the issue, have accepted a showdown in which Paris seems to have eliminated any wiggle room of its own.

"Presumably, the French will avoid casting a UN veto against United States, but if they do, the Bush administration is committed to stiffing the Security Council," a U.S. official said, citing the Kosovo precedent in which NATO attacked Yugoslavia without explicit United Nations blessing. A more radical idea evoked by some Bush aides - weakening France's stature by getting its permanent Security Council seat handed over to the European Union - is dismissed by most U.S. officials as too remote a possibility for the current administration.

Most knowledgeable sources say that the U.S.-French rift started three months ago, under apparently cloudless political skies, when the two countries succeeded in drafting Resolution 1441, adopted by the Security Council on Iraqi disarmament. ."We got consensus, but getting there involved compromises and these meant that the resolution did not have a specific triggering device," according to a diplomat involved in the negotiations. In other words, there was a deliberate ambiguity in the text about what exactly would signal Iraqi noncompliance and commit the signatories to war.

Even so, a French policymaker added, "everybody, and I mean officials in both our countries, knew that we were committing to military action if Iraq defied the council.""There was no misunderstanding about that," he said.

But there were hidden political rifts. The resolution, greeted as a success for skilled diplomacy by the French and by Secretary of State Colin Powell, left a bitter taste - and anti-French grievances - in the Pentagon and other hawkish sections of the Bush administration.

This factor was apparently underestimated by French officials, who were under orders to shun contacts with the Pentagon that might be interpreted as war preparations. .Most analysts expected France to step back from a showdown with Washington. Historically, France has a reputation for Machiavellian diplomacy that usually enables Paris to put up a fight and then end up on the winning side at the last minute.

This time, diplomats say, Chirac seems to have lost the knack for keeping open an escape hatch. Nowadays, French public opinion overwhelmingly views U.S. plans to attack Iraq as an act of political hubris, casting Bush as almost as dangerous as Saddam Hussein.

"It's the perfect storm," a U.S. diplomat said this week, alluding to a chain reaction of political blows that has wreaked such havoc in U.S.-French ties.

In his view, French obstructionist tactics have played into the hands of hard-liners in Washington, who readily accuse France of reverting to appeasement and indulging in anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism by blaming U.S. support of Israel for troubles in the Middle East.

While the French media hint at a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Chirac, some voices in the French policy-making elite, without any enthusiasm for what they see as heavy-handed U.S. policy, quietly voice alarm about the long-term cost of France's defiance.

"Where is the French diplomatic finesse, the steely ability never to lose sight of your own national interests?" asks a retired French official who once dealt extensively with Chirac. Answering his own question, the source said: "The Chirac-Villepin team has driven so fast that they ended up on a one-way road with no exit ramps."