now the maggots want to bomb france

Sarah Hal, political correspondent
Monday April 28, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair will today issue a warning to Jacques Chirac over Europe's relationship with the US - describing the French president's vision of two rival powers as "dangerous and destabilising".
In a Financial Times interview the prime minister makes it clear that after France's threatened veto of a second UN resolution in the run-up to the war on Iraq the gulf between Paris and Washington is far from being bridged.

His warning mirrors comments by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, last week that France would pay a heavy price for opposing the war.

In today's interview, Mr Blair disassociates himself from the more hawkish elements in Washington who feel that France should be "punished" for its stance.

But, spelling out the damage that would be inflicted by Mr Chirac's vision of a "multipolar" world, he says: "I am not interested in talk about punishing countries, but I think there is an issue to resolve between America and Europe and within Europe about Europe's attitude towards the transatlantic alliance.

"I don't want Europe setting itself up in opposition to America ... I think it will be dangerous and destabilising."

France might have a vision of a multipolar world with different centres of power, he said, but "I believe that they will very quickly develop into rival centres of power".

The result, he said, would be: "You end up reawakening some of the problems that we had in the cold war, with countries playing different centres of power off each other."

His comments came as a Mori poll for the Financial Times revealed that 55% of Britons regard France as Britain's least reliable ally, while 73% view the US as the country's most reliable.

The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, also warned yesterday that a "mini-summit" in Brussels today between Mr Chirac, the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, and the prime ministers of Belgium and Luxembourg, "risks sending a message of division about the creation of a defence policy separate from Nato".

Mr Chirac and Mr Schröder reportedly want to clear the way for a common European defence system that would start with a core of volunteer states.