France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, burst onto the Washington scene on Tuesday, in his first official visit to the White House and asking the United States to embrace him as a friend.
Mr. Sarkozy backslapped and hugged his way through the day. He also proclaimed his determination to be a reliable partner of the United States.
“I come to Washington to bear a very simple message, a message that I bear on behalf of all Frenchmen,” he said in a toast at a formal White House dinner in his honor. “I want to reconquer the heart of America.”
“Sarko l’Américain,” as he is called, is considered the most pro-American French president in decades. Mr. Sarkozy’s relationship with Mr. Bush is said to be warm, and his stance on Iran tough.
That’s not the attitude Bush would have ever heard from former French President Jacques Chirac who publicly lobbied against the United States at the U.N. and everywhere else. In electing Sarkozy the French people have clearly rejected Chirac’s socialist policies that have damaged the economy in France in recent years.
In his remarks in the State Dining Room, he spoke with passion about freedom and liberty and the need for U.S.-French cooperation in addressing terrorism, nuclear proliferation, poverty and religious fanaticism.
The U.S. and France back tough diplomacy to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons. They have jointly sponsored U.N. resolutions supporting Lebanese sovereignty. And while France opposed the war in Iraq, Sarkozy sent his foreign minister on a surprise three-day trek to Baghdad in August to enhance France’s role in Iraq’s future.
“I never quite understood why we had to fight with the United States,” Sarkozy said earlier in the day at a meeting of the French-American Business Council.
Sarkozy has wasted no time in his bid to modernize France, in part by trying to inject an American-style work ethic. As a sign of his pro-American tendencies, he even took a summer vacation in the United States.
Many Americans who have been apart of the widespread “Boycott France” campaign can finally in turn begin vacationing in France again.
