The anti-U.S. syndrome.

WHEN I was a boy in the South of France, in the 1920s, all the elders and betters I met were enthusiastically pro-American. In class we were told, quite regularly, that the United States was the Number One country in the world. One war later, the French (in a broad sense) turned anti-American.

The great fact of political life in France, immediately after the war, and then in the late 1950s and through most of the 1960s, was Charles de Gaulle. President Roosevelt had persistently snubbed de Gaulle during the war, and de Gaulle didn't like being snubbed. Still, a million French men and women turned out to greet President Eisenhower in the streets of Paris in 1959. (The estimate is General de Gaulle's).

Was the turnout for the United States, or for Ike, the man who had liberated France? Hard to say, but I suspect mostly the latter.

In terms of hard reality, Eisenhower, as President, had also snubbed de Gaulle, by rejecting the latter's plan for an "Atlantic directorate" of the U.S., Britain, and France, in effect to boss the Alliance. The secrets of nuclear know-how being denied to the French, they decided to go it alone.

In Britain, the issue of anti-Americanism is, I think, a still more recent phenomenon. During the Second World War, the Churchill-Roosevelt partnership forged as "special relationship." Dean Acheson's famous remark about the British having lost an empire and failed to find a role did shock and still, in a muddled way, rankless. However, the Marshall Plan, that extraordinary example of enlightened generosity, was received in Britain with genuine gratitude, whereas it aroused widespread envy in France--or, to be more specific, among French intellectuals.

Then came the Suez affair in 1956, which was an Anglo-French adventure. Although Bulganin and Khrushchev cleverly exploited it, and diverted attention from their massacres in Hungary by brandishing their intercontinental rockets, the fact is that it was Eisenhower and Dulles who broke Anthony Eden's were by threatening to deny Britain financing for alternative sources of oil. It was this episode that sparked a wave of anti-Americanism in the right wing of the Conservative Party, which still endures.

I have left the most important factor to the end, though. Throughout the period of Stalin's most monstrous crimes, European (including British) intellectuals were astonishingly unwilling to accept any evidence that might tarnish their vision of the Soviet Union as the workers' paradise and the wave of the future.

The age of the fellow-travelers did not end overnight, even after the traumatic shock of Khrushchev's "secret speech" in February 1956 and his denunciation of a careful selection of the dead dictator's crimes. Today, however, it has become rare for intellectuals, even French ones, to continue to pretend that all is well in the USSR. Disillusionment has set in, as typified, perhaps, by the powerful writer Jean-Francois Revel, one of a number who saw the light and turned away not only from Communism but even from socialism.

Now the point is this. Frustrated by the loss of their Utopia, the intellectual Left settles for the next best thing: It attacks America, perceived still as the main citadel of capitalism.

The great period of anti-American euphoria was the Vietnam War. Chile, Argentina, and South Africa were unsatisfactory hate-substitutes. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, even "Eurocommunists" felt they had to join the chorus of disapproval. Poland and Solidarity presented the Left with an insoluble moral quandrary. During the Carter Presidency, willy-nilly, the European Left was quite often aligned on the American side.

Then came Reagan, a stronger foreign and defense policy, a "cowboy" image. El Salvador, especially, gave a spurious moral sanction to equivalence: It became respectable to equate the Americans' behavior there with the Soviets' in Afghanistan. Bad Show

GRENADA, however, was worse; or better, depending on the point of view. I confess I read the speeches in House of Commons debates at the end of October with a sense of shame. The new intake of Labour MPs didn't trouble to hide their relish at the opportunity for anti-American utterances. Denis Healey was in rumbustious form, and the government (in the persons of Margaret Thatcher and her new Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe), deeply embarrassed.

There were those who condemned the American action for old-fashioned leftist reasons; those who did so because of nostalgic envy ("We were much better at this kind of thing, old boy"); and those Conservatives who demonstrated, not for the first time, what "wetness" means.

For my part, I find all of this more than faintly nauseating. However, the anti-American syndrome is dangerous as well as stupid. The U.S. is the cornerstone of the Alliance, and as such the guarantor of the freedom of leftist politicians and writers to spout inanities.

The danger, moreover, is twofold. One senses a corresponding anti-European mood in America. Isolationism and "fortress America" cast their shadows. The gerontocracy in the Kremlin must love it all. After all, there is not much else to be happy about in Moscow, with the system under strain and the empire in danger of cracking up.