RE EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY

"RE going back, for a moment, to 1776, etc, the Europeans, and the Czars, scorned French foreign policy, after 1789, for the same valid reasons that they scorned American foreign policy both before and after 1776."

One source for this, the one I used for the remark above, is Kennan's two volume work on European diplomacy in the 19th Century. 

He makes scattered references to France, mainly, in that work, but the remark would presumably have applied to the US, were it a topic of the work.