The European Union has lost control of its foreign policy to Washington and now “there are no independent states left in Europe,” Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s anti-establishment Front National, said in an interview with the Russian news channel RT: “The European Union’s diplomacy is a catastrophe.”

Le Pen said the EU’s foreign policy has been badly misguided by the United States – Syria and Libya being just some of the most recent examples: “We’ve made a great deal of foreign policy mistakes under Washington’s influence, but the worst of them is Syria.”

“We [Front National] have been the only party to stand against the option of intervening in Syria. When the crisis first started, we said France is supplying arms to jihadists, who would spread terror if they win. That’s what already happened in Libya.”

“That’s the way the US acts in the international arena. But what is even more horrible, is that one can’t hear the voices of European countries.”

Le Pen’s anti-immigration, eurosceptic party topped the polls in last month’s elections to the European Parliament, returning 24 members, on-third of France’s representation, and beating the governing Socialist party of President François Hollande into third place.

With the centre-right UMP of former President Nicolas Sarkozy mired in accusations of corruption, Le Pen’s party, as the Spectator writes today, is the only successful political formation currently in good order,” so her attack on American influence in the EU is significant.

>On Ukraine, Le Pen told RT that the EU had no right to blackmail the country into breaking its historical and cultural ties with Russia: “When offering a partnership agreement to Ukraine – which would mean breaking off of its allied relations with Russia – the EU has clearly set blackmail in motion. And that can’t help but fuel dissent inside the country.”

“The EU speaks out on foreign affairs either to create problems, or to make them worse.”

However, while the US influence over foreign policy in the EU is, as Le Pen says, considerable, it is not new.

The European Movement, which was launched in the post-war years to coordinate the groups promoting European integration and “break down national sovereignty,” was largely finance in the 1950s by secret funding from CIA money in order to create an anti-Communist European bloc compliant with American foreign policy during the Cold War.

As detailed by Christopher Booker and Richard North in their history of the EU, “The Great Deception,” top American intelligence officials set up the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE) in 1948 which was used as “a conduit to provide covert CIA funds, augmented by contributions from private foundations such as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Institute, to promote the State Department’s obsession with a united Europe.”

The covert funding went to a range of individuals and organisations working for European integration. Between 1949 and 1960, the European Movement was kept afloat almost entirely on $4m of CIA money, equal to half to two-thirds of the movement’s income.