Stardate 20030614.1717

(On Screen): With all the talk by the French about how all the bad blood between the US and French is just a rumor, and how we're all just the very best of friends and the closest of allies, there still seems to be an undercurrent of harsh feelings that bubbles out occasionally and suggests that all is not quite as it seems. Or perhaps that all is not as the French would like to pretend that it is.

For one thing, the "everything's just peachy" story is coming only from Paris. No one in Washington is saying that. Chirac says:

France and the United States are engaged in relationship of dialogue and trust, French President Jacques Chirac told business leaders from the French-American Business Council on Friday.

Before dozens of major U.S. and French corporate heads, Chirac said Paris and Washington had a period of "discord about how to disarm Iraq," the president's spokeswoman Catherine Colonna quoted Chirac as saying.

The two countries spoke frankly to one another but will "continue to be faithful allies," Colonna quoted Chirac as saying. Relations between the two countries are strong and have been forged by history and "took root in the same values: respect for liberty, human dignity, justice and peace," Chirac said.

Economic and commercial relations between France and the United States have "great vitality," Chirac told the group, which was set up to promote trade between France and the United States.

And why has this suddenly become so urgent? Well, it's because the French are beginning to get worried about business relations with the US. French sales to the US seem to be collapsing. In March they had a €97 million trade surplus with the US, but in April that became a €202 million trade deficit. A change that massive means either a dramatic rise in American sales to France, which seems unlikely, or a dramatic decline in French sales to the US, and it's got to be a lot more than just wine and cheese. There isn't any official boycott or trade sanctions, but there seems to be something big going on.

And given that the current unrest in France is likely to seriously impact their tourist industry, and that the overall economic outlook for Europe is pretty grim right now, it means that France is facing a pretty serious economic challenge, and it's reached the point where the French government has decided it has to work to solve the problem, even as it denies that the problem exists.

Having the Americans stop hating France and once again open their wallets would help a lot. Certainly the French Finance Minister thinks so:

French Finance Minister Francis Mer has called for the restoration of mutual appreciation between France and the United States, affected by their sharp policy differences over the recent war in Iraq.

"The time has come to work together and restore the image of France in the United States and the United States in France," said Mer, standing alongside his US counterpart Donald Evans at the start of a meeting of the Franco-US business council here Thursday.

"It is you, the French and US businessmen who are the guarantors of the continuity and dynamism of Franco-American relations," he told his audience.

Step 1: Hire Woody Allen as a spokesman. (Good choice. There's no one in America more trusted by the Jacksonians and neo-cons who are most likely to decide that France doesn't need their business.)

If the French want to try to patch things up, they could start working on reducing the public paranoia about the US, especially among French cabinet officers like Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie:

France's defense minister criticized her American counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview published Saturday as someone who considers the United States the world's only military, economic and financial power.

Michele Alliot-Marie also accused American industry of waging "economic war" by trying to "take over the capital" of European defense-related industries. Europeans must regroup to resist, she said, according to the interview in the daily newspaper Le Monde. ...

"American industry is in a logic of economic war," she said in Le Monde. "This attitude is not connected to the Iraqi episode. European industry must regroup to be in a position to resist them."

She's got cause to be peeved right now. The Paris Air Show is something of a lead balloon this year because the US is not actively participating. Hardly any wonder she's mad.

And yet, she is also trying to deny that this is related to anything France has done recently. "Not connected to the Iraqi episode," she says. This is more rhetoric about "counterbalancing" we've heard so much of: Europe has to work collectively to match the US so that the US doesn't dominate the world. But that's exactly the attitude which caused them to oppose us so stridently d