Janet Flanner shrewdly observed in November 1953, ‘for the French as a whole the EDC problem is Germany—not Russia, as it is for the Americans.’ France’s hesitations frustrated the Americans—at a NATO Council meeting in December 1953 John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, threatened an ‘agonising reappraisal’ of American policy if the EDC were to fail. But even though the Pleven Plan was the brainchild of a French prime minister, public debate had revealed the extent of French reluctance to countenance German rearmament under any conditions. Moreover, the proposals for German
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