If one had to pick a year in which the Franco-American relationship reached a nadir, it would no doubt be 1967. Following the withdrawal from NATO, de Gaulle capitalized on his newly achieved “independence” by seeking rapprochement with the Warsaw Pact countries. In 1967, France would also proclaim a nuclear strategy that made no distinction between the West and the East, issue high-profile statements on a range of issues across the globe that set France clearly at odds with the “Anglo-Saxons,” and launch an attack on the American dollar as the linchpin of the international monetary system.

In all of these issues, French foreign policy was more openly than ever aimed at redressing a global balance of power that de Gaulle felt was tilted too heavily in favor of the United States. De Gaulle argued that, while there was an apparent military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, “the US was so much more powerful from the economic and financial point of view as well as in organization of its state that there was no comparison.” In his view, the United States’ hegemonic hubris had become more of a threat to peace than the ideological designs of the Soviet Union. “It was ‘inevitable,’” he declared to Bohlen in the summer of 1967, “that so much power as that possessed by the U.S. sooner or later […] would begin to influence the policy and conduct of any country.” By the fall of 1967, the CIA had come to believe that de Gaulle was “more concerned with […] the dominant role played by the United States in Europe than with fears of Soviet hegemony” and might withdraw France from the Atlantic alliance altogether by 1969; de Gaulle, given his age, was judged to be “anxious” to present his successors with a fait accompli.

It is therefore not surprising that de Gaulle's foreign policy by 1967 was seen as virulently and incorrigibly anti-American. His popularity among Americans dropped to new lows. In October 1967, Dean Acheson voiced his frustration at de Gaulle's grandstanding by lashing out against the French as “the most […] selfish people in the […] world” and “the greatest nuisance” in Europe.