AARE, Sweden - The United States on Wednesday fired a salvo at a "few countries" in Europe that it said were trying to build the European Union as a counterweight to Washington and NATO.
"There are some in Europe who are proposing that the EU build itself in opposition to the US and NATO or that the EU become a counterweight to NATO," US undersecretary of state for political affairs Nicholas Burns told reporters on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Sweden.
"That would be a colossal strategic error, (but) happily, very few countries support that," Burns said.
Burns refused to name specific countries but during talks with the president of the NATO parliamentary assembly, French MP Pierre Lellouche, he clearly indicated that he was referring to France, reviving an old quarrel with Paris which Washington accuses of wanting to strengthen the EU at NATO's expense.
"We don't believe the EU should duplicate what NATO does so well," said Burns, the former US ambassador to NATO.
"The US and the EU should agree on that division of labor," he stressed.
In response to Lellouche's call for more balanced transatlantic relations, Burns insisted that if the EU was "seeking a competitive relationship, you're going to find it and you're not going to be happy."
France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, which all opposed the war in Iraq in 2003, angered Washington by organising a European defense summit shortly after the US-led war.
Despite an improvement in transatlantic ties since then, the issue has remained a bone of contention between the two sides.
05/25/2005 15:42 GMT