The author offers a revisionist-style look at the French-American relationship as seen through a series of case studies dating from the great misunderstanding between the Roosevelt administration and the Free French movement in World War II to the formation of the Euro-Corps in the early 1990s.

American power grew tremendously in the wake of World War II and the Cold War that followed, forming, around a strategic consensus based on the indivisibility of defense against the Soviet Union, an American imperium in Europe. The interests of this imperium differed significantly from those of...