In the 1950s, the French and West Germans launched a new period of Franco–German cooperation that led to the formation of the European Union. Since then, France and Germany (West Germany between 1949 and 1990) have generally cooperated in the running of the European Union and often in foreign-policy matters in general. For example, they jointly opposed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, leading U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to lump them together as "Old Europe."