ìPlaying the Role of U.S. Foil: Franceís Envoy to NATO Frames Divided Worldviews,î by Philip Shishkin, Wall Street Journal, 2 Aug, p. A9.

T.M. Lutas recently alerted me to a post of his where he discusses his concerns that France is the ìimplicit villainî we need to worry about most within the Core, meaning the state within our ranks which tends to play both sides of the equation: wanting to shrink the Gap while simultaneously wanting to preserve it for its own particularistic gain. As he puts it:

As I've noted in the past, one of the major player factions on the global stage is a group of people who thrive on monopoly/monopsony profits, providing the spider thin controlled connectivity that most Gap states have to the Core in order to supply the elite's whims for expensive cars, jet setting travel, and PS2s.

The US has played along with this game in the past but the major unforgivable sin of this Bush administration in old Europe has been threatening all these sweet, cozy deals by wanting to open connectivity wide and bring in all the world's major players into these countries, bringing prosperity and freedom to the Gap while costing the established players their ultra-fat profits.

This is the heart of France and Germany's beef with us, the reason why they are so implacable in their enmity. Major contracts are threatened, established relationships would largely be rendered worthless, and a high amount of unpredictability would ensue with US firms winning an awful lot of those new opportunities. The problem is that Bush wants to bring too much competition, too much free market, too much rule of law into the Gap.

Read the above Journal article on how Franceís ambassador to NATO seems totally committed to thwarting every idea we have for getting NATOís help in regional security situations outside of Europe, and Lutasí complaint strikes you as fairly compelling.

Read his entire post at http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/tmblog/archives/004677.html