While irritated at times, the US has relied on the EU ever since as the anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO.

There has never been a divide-and-rule strategy.

The eurosceptic camp has been strangely blind to this, somehow supposing that powerful forces across the Atlantic are egging on British secession, and will hail them as liberators.

The anti-Brussels movement in France - and to a lesser extent in Italy and Germany, and among the Nordic Left - works from the opposite premise, that the EU is essentially an instrument of Anglo-Saxon power and 'capitalisme sauvage'.

France's Marine Le Pen is trenchantly anti-American. She rails against dollar supremacy. Her Front National relies on funding from Russian banks linked to Vladimir Putin.

Like it or not, this is at least is strategically coherent.

The Schuman Declaration that set the tone of Franco-German reconciliation - and would lead by stages to the European Community - was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a meeting in Foggy Bottom. "It all began in Washington," said Robert Schuman's chief of staff.