LIKE Nato nuts in Britain who imbue our “special relationship” with the US with an exaggerated significance, something of the same sentiment drives the French political elite to make more of the revolutionary origins of their two states than the facts support.

Hence the hullaballoo around Emmanuel Macron’s visit to the US.

Where British imperial interests have been subordinated to the US hegemon — in post-war Latin America, pre-shah Iran, and end of the Suez adventure — the British Establishment, courageous only when outgunning colonial subjects, has prostrated itself before successive US presidents — even Trump.

And where that Labour empire loyalist Ernest Bevin insisted that post-war Britain have an “independent nuclear deterrent,” his successors, Tory and Labour, are content to command a minor flotilla of nuclear submarines armed with US-supplied and US-maintained nuclear missiles, over which the US has ultimate control.

Bevin’s insistence that Britain possess the atom bomb — “We’ve got to have this thing… whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it” — was an early instance of Labour’s willingness to sacrifice domestic advance to imperial foreign policy.

It was the expenditure on the Korean war that did for Labour’s commitment to a free NHS dental service. We are paying the price for this and the cold war, three generations later, in the form of a bare-bones NHS and an impoverished welfare state.

France under Charles de Gaulle, in addition to owning a more “dirigiste” state than Britain’s ramshackle laissez-faire economy, threw out the US military. Nato was relocated to Brussels and Britain was blocked from joining the European Common Market.

When, eventually, Britain was admitted to the fledgling federalist entity, it was over substantial French objection but at US insistence.

Viewed from the other side of the Atlantic, Britain’s semi-detached engagement with the EU was a double-plus benefit for US capital. The deep interpenetration of British and US capital (and our ruling elites) made Britain a direct conduit for US interests, while our country’s political role within the EU allowed successive governments to act as a guarantor of US priorities on the continent.

The strain of popular-sovereigntist sentiment that was expressed in the referendum vote for Brexit disrupted that, and presented the Atlanticist elites with new problems.

For all the bluster President Macron returns from his transatlantic travels with little to show.

Here, and in the EU, there is a sustained attempt to present Macron as an informal leader of the European bloc. For a man elected on a minority vote of the French, and even that on an unprecedentedly low turnout, he has unsustainable delusions of grandeur. But in his own way, he does express something of the developing contradiction between the European and the North American imperial blocs.

President Joe Biden’s economic policy is designed to tackle his domestic problems — but it has external effects which demonstrate just how low in US considerations are the domestic concerns of European states.

A slow-burning antagonism is developing over the effects of Biden’s wide-ranging package of economic measures.

Summer saw Biden sign into law his Inflation Reduction Act. This legislation contains a massive $370 million tranche of notionally “green” subsidies aimed at stimulating the domestic wind turbine construction sector and the production of solar panels; substituting US-made microprocessors for Chinese imports and subsidising consumer purchases of electric vehicles.

Provided Americans buy a US-manufactured electric vehicle and one equipped with a US-manufactured battery they get a tax credit of nearly $8,000.

This accounts for the shit-eating grin on the face of Elon Musk and the dismay of French manufacturers. Before his departure Macron told them, “I think that this is not in line with the rules of the World Trade Organisation and that it is not in line with friendship.”

In Washington he warned: “The choices of the past few months, in particular the Inflation Reduction Act, are choices that will fragment the West.”

One of his ideas is for the EU to come up with a “buy European” trade mechanism. Germany, on which the burden of financing many EU initiatives unequally falls, and already burdened with a booming energy bill, is not surprisingly reluctant to get into a trade war while its own manufacturing carries these extra costs.

In contrast, the US is now energy independent, with a great potential for energy exports. The growth rate in US shale oil and gas investment has slackened somewhat, driven by a focus on maximising returns on capital expenditure and shareholder returns, and US coal and oil interests have moved quickly into the burgeoning gas-fracking sector.

In doing so they have created a powerful lobby that drives both an aggressive export industry (and the foreign policy moves that support this) as well as acting as a real drag on US compliance with climate change commitments.

The EU is suffering a double whammy. Already in technical recession, its exports to the US, hobbled by higher domestic energy prices as a result of the US-Nato sanctions policy against Russia, face a US market made more hostile by US protectionist measures and local energy costs way below Europe’s.

This is, in effect, a one-sided trade war that has presented European leaders with a lose-lose situation. They either accept US hegemony and a slow attrition of European manufacturing and export capacity, or they go for a “Europe first” protectionist battle with unpredictable casualties.

Macron’s trip produced few benefits beyond a largely verbal commitment to tweaking things. The US press treated the event as a US-French “bromance” focused on solidarity with the Kiev regime, with France extravagantly designated as “America’s go-to partner.”

The meeting carefully avoided mention of the sharp affront dealt to the French a year ago with the Aukus deal that abandoned an Australian-French submarine deal in favour of an Anglophone escalation of the new cold war.

At that moment US-French relations were torpedoed. Macron immediately recalled his ambassador from Washington. What is instructive about this latest visit is the failure to make much headway on the French priority list. This is masked by a flurry of value-free rhetoric from the US side and an uncomfortable acceptance of its subaltern status by the French elite.

“France has in many respects jumped to the head of the queue and become America’s go-to partner when it comes to advancing transatlantic co-operation,” said an on-cue Charles Kupchan, a Council on Foreign Relations bigwig and former European affairs specialist at the US National Security Council.

The big context is the US pressure to dragoon European states into a fuller commitment to confront China. Biden’s point man on foreign policy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, last month claimed to see a “growing convergence between the US and its Nato partners.”

The background to his pitch was a US diplomatic offensive to tie in European states to its export control measures that are designed to chill trade with China.

Meanwhile, Paris has seen massive anti-Nato and anti-EU demonstrations that mirror those in Madrid and Prague, while German cities, especially in the east of the country, see weekly rallies against the sanctions policy and Nato.

Italy’s new government wants to boost exports to China and strengthen mutual trade between the two countries. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Beijing last month.

The mood music in Spain runs counter to the US signals. The customary felicitations were exchanged at Bali, while officially Spain says it wants to strengthen high-level interactions with China, promote exchanges and co-operation in trade, investment, culture and climate response and provide more aid to Chinese businesses.

Dutch chip manufacturers are in a bind over the US pressure to cut off high-tech contacts with China which account for 5 per cent of its exports. The EU maintains that the US Inflation Reduction Act discriminates against European production and breaches world trade rules.

Talks with Washington appear to be a ploy to kick the issue into the long grass, with US sources arguing that their legislation limits the ground they can give in mitigation of its effects

Much of the liberal left in our country fell in behind Biden and Boris Johnson’s war and sanctions lash-up, and like our delusional “rejoin the EU” crowd, remain blind to the real-life contradictions between European capital and the main forces in the US.

The narrow TUC vote in favour of ramping up arms expenditure shows just how deeply embedded in British society is the imperial mindset that Bevin exemplified. It is Britain’s submission to its big brother across the Atlantic that makes the residual “rejoin” sentiment so risible and their futurology so flawed.

We shouldn’t be surprised when people who saw no problem in a surrender of sovereignty to the EU now have no objection to our status as a US spear carrier in the new cold war.

But their paper-thin commitment to even a basic sense of European values — let alone the distinct capitalist interests of European states — signifies the deep irrelevance of contemporary liberalism and of a social democracy wedded to cold-war ideology.

Of course, the heads of European states may yet be compelled to completely bow to US pressure — but if they do so, they will pay the price in further deindustrialisation and weakened manufacturing and exports. And if they don’t, a trade war will ensue.

Nick Wright cam be found on Twitter @NicholasBWright and www.21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.