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Sarkozy Sets a New Course for
Relations With U.S.
ELAINE
SCIOLINO
NY Times
Tuesday May 08, 2007
Two days before the first round of the presidential election last
month, Nicolas Sarkozy donned a red checked shirt, jeans and cowboy
boots, mounted a small white horse named Universe and rode around
the Camargue country in France’s deep south. A gaggle of reporters
and cameramen followed him in a cart pulled by a tractor. The black
bulls in the nearby pasture stayed away.
“A vague resemblance to the look of George W. Bush on his
Texan ranch,” is how the left-leaning newspaper Libération
described Mr. Sarkozy, who was elected president on Sunday, beating
the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal in a runoff.
The newspaper dismissed the event as a media stunt, saying, “Everything
for the image, right up until the last minute.”
Mr. Sarkozy is unabashedly pro-American, a man who openly proclaims
his love of Ernest Hemingway, Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone
and his admiration for America’s strong work ethic and its
belief in upward mobility.
The last film that made Mr. Sarkozy cry was Robert Altman’s
“A Prairie Home Companion.” He once said he wanted Gloria
Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as his victory song.
He calls himself “proud” to wear the label “Sarkozy
the American.”
In his acceptance speech on Sunday night, Mr. Sarkozy reached out
to the United States, signaling his desire to end the tension with
Washington during Mr. Chirac’s presidency.
Addressing his “American friends,” Mr. Sarkozy said,
“I want to tell them that France will always be by their side
when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact
that friends can think differently.”
He was so pleased with the message that he told an American friend
just before the speech, “I’m going to talk about America!”
There must have been relief in the White House on Sunday that President
Bush didn’t have to call Ms. Royal to congratulate her.
After all, she said during the campaign that she would never genuflect
before Mr. Bush the way she suggested her opponent had done. She
tried to tar Mr. Sarkozy as an imitator of what she called Mr. Bush’s
phony compassionate conservatism. She even told a Hezbollah lawmaker
in Lebanon last December that she agreed with him when he talked
about the “unlimited dementia” of the Bush administration.
Instead, with the imminent departure of Prime Minister Tony Blair
of Britain, Mr. Bush got to congratulate the man who may well become
his new best friend in Europe.
“They had a friendly, very friendly chat,” said David
Martinon, Mr. Sarkozy’s chief of staff, in a telephone interview.
“Mr. Sarkozy wants to improve the relationship with the United
States, to renew it. There’s a need for a change. There has
to be a way to restore confidence.”
Mr. Sarkozy is Mr. Bush’s kind of guy: brash, tough-talking
and proud of it. Mr. Sarkozy’s vow to rid the troubled suburbs
of France of delinquent youths — “scum,” he calls
them — is the French equivalent of Mr. Bush’s vow to
“Bring ’em on.”
Both men are teetotalers. Both are disciplined exercisers: Mr.
Sarkozy jogs and, like Mr. Bush, is a fearsome bike rider.
In Washington, Mr. Sarkozy’s victory has been warmly welcomed.
“We certainly look forward to cooperation with the French,”
Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said Monday, adding:
“We know that there are going to be areas of disagreement.
But on the other hand, there are certainly real opportunities to
work together on a broad range of issues.”
The two presidents will meet in Berlin next month for the G-8 summit
meeting of industrial nations, and Mr. Sarkozy would be expected
to visit the United States for the opening of the United Nations
General Assembly in September.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, told CNN on Sunday,
“It would be nice to have someone who’s head of France
who doesn’t have a knee-jerk reaction against the United States.”
On the same program, Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican,
said that “Sarkozy would be favorable to the United States,”
adding, “Clearly his views are more in line with ours.”
Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, meanwhile, praised
Mr. Sarkozy on the CBS News program “Face the Nation”
on Sunday as “the candidate of change.”
Certainly, Mr. Sarkozy has promised never to behave in the “arrogant”
way he said that the current French government did in making threats
against the United States in the prelude to the Iraq war. “You
must have loathed us then,” he said in a speech in Washington
last September.
Although he has a bellicose air, he has never suggested that if
he had been president at the time he would have sent French troops
to fight in the American-led invasion.
“I have been in every meeting Mr. Sarkozy has ever had on
the subject, and no, no, he would never have sent troops,”
said Mr. Martinon, who also serves as Mr. Sarkozy’s foreign
policy adviser.
Indeed, Mr. Sarkozy has long defended France’s decision to
stay out of the war, citing the bitter lessons of his country’s
tortured history in Algeria and Vietnam.
“We were kicked out of Algeria less than 50 years ago, so
don’t tell us that we don’t remember and that we don’t
understand,” Mr. Sarkozy told an audience at Columbia University
in 2004 in explaining France’s decision to stay out of the
Iraq war. “We lived what you are living through in America
before you. We were in Vietnam before you, and our young people
died in Vietnam.”
He added: “In France, history is something that counts. Please
don’t be angry with us because we remember what happened to
us. Is there even a single country of the world, at any time of
history, that was able to maintain itself in a sustained way in
a country that was not its own, uniquely by the force of arms? Never,
not a single one, even the Chinese.”
That analysis of the Iraq war sounds remarkably similar to the
one articulated repeatedly by Mr. Chirac both publicly and during
private meetings with Mr. Bush.
“In Algeria, we began with a sizable army and huge resources,
and the fighters for independence were only a handful of people,
but they won,” Mr. Chirac said in an interview in September
2003. “That’s how it is.”
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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