© twitter.comCIA project a real eye-opener for EU members.
It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. While irritated at times, the US has relied on the EU ever since as the
anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO.
There has never been a divide-and-rule strategy.
The eurosceptic camp has been
strangely blind to this, somehow supposing that powerful forces across the Atlantic are egging on British secession, and will hail them as liberators. The anti-Brussels movement in France - and to a lesser extent in Italy and Germany, and among the Nordic Left - works from the opposite premise, that the
EU is essentially an instrument of Anglo-Saxon power and 'capitalisme sauvage'. France's Marine Le Pen is trenchantly anti-American. She rails against dollar supremacy. Her Front National relies on funding from Russian banks linked to Vladimir Putin.
Like it or not, this is at least is strategically coherent.
The
Schuman Declaration that set the tone of Franco-German reconciliation - and would lead by stages to the European Community -
was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a meeting in Foggy Bottom. "It all began in Washington," said Robert Schuman's chief of staff. It was the Truman administration that browbeat the French to reach a modus vivendi with Germany in the early post-War years, even threatening to cut off US
Marshall aid at a furious meeting with recalcitrant French leaders they resisted in September 1950.
Truman's motive was obvious. The Yalta settlement with the Soviet Union was breaking down. He wanted
a united front to deter the Kremlin from further aggrandizement after Stalin gobbled up Czechoslovakia, doubly so after Communist North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the South.
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