Sarkozy, and France, Look to U.S. Visit

By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: March 28, 2010
WASHINGTON — President Nicolas Sarkozy of France travels to the United States on Monday for a two-day trip designed to underscore his close cooperation with President Barack Obama on Afghanistan, Iran and other issues, and apparently to make a statement about their personal relationship.

The trip, culminating in a news conference Tuesday and then a private dinner at the White House, comes at a crucial time for both.

Mr. Obama has just scored two major victories — the passage of historic health-care legislation and agreement with Russia on a new strategic arms control treaty — and is heading into a period of heavy international engagement.

Mr. Sarkozy, for his part, has seen his popularity fade and his party suffer stinging defeats in regional elections. At the same time he is preparing for a crucial stint on the world stage as France takes leadership of both the Group of Eight and the Group of Twenty.

As the newspaper Le Parisien put it, “This meeting could not come at a better time” for Mr. Sarkozy.

The closeness of the Sarkozy-Obama relationship — and for that matter, of Mr. Obama with other European leaders — has been questioned, based on issues like Mr. Obama’s decision in February to skip an annual U.S.-European summit meeting.

But in an interview here last week with the International Herald Tribune and three French correspondents, the national security adviser, James L. Jones Jr., repeatedly rejected the notion of any strains.

He called Mr. Sarkozy a “very helpful and steadfast ally” on Iran and “a strong adviser and supporter on the Middle East.” If Mr. Sarkozy sometimes urges the American president to push harder in both areas, said the general, Mr. Obama appreciated the “honest exchange of views.”

General Jones, a former supreme allied commander in Europe, said that Mr. Obama had particularly appreciated Mr. Sarkozy’s decision to bring France back into NATO’s military wing and Paris’s “strong support” on Afghanistan.

The United States has been pressing its NATO allies to provide more military trainers for Afghanistan. French officials have been quoted as saying they will send no more, but General Jones appeared to leave open the possibility that Mr. Sarkozy would make such a gesture during the visit.

While the general acknowledged that as NATO commander he had known frustration over allied contributions in Afghanistan, he said that he had never seen better cooperation within NATO. “We’ve achieved a major breakthrough in how we think of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said, “and there is a new sense of energy that we can be successful.”

He played down two areas of friction. The announcement that France had agreed to sell four Mistral-class warships to Russia might once have raised American hackles. But General Jones seemed unperturbed. “It was not the subject of any serious bone of contention,” he said, adding that the United States, too, wanted better relations with Moscow.

Europeans were deeply unhappy when the Pentagon, while taking bids for a huge contract to supply aerial refueling tankers, changed the plane’s specifications in a way they interpreted as giving an advantage to the chief American bidder, Boeing, to the detriment of the European aerospace group EADS.

General Jones asserted that as a former director of Boeing he could not comment. But he said that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had “assured the president that the Department of Defense wants the competition to be fair and equal for all parties.”

The presidents also are expected to discuss some differences: France wants the United States to institute tougher financial regulations and to undertake more resolute action on climate change.

Mr. Sarkozy is to open his trip with a speech Monday at Columbia University in New York. He then is to meet with the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.

In Washington on Tuesday, he plans to meet with several senators before the presidents hold a late-afternoon news conference.

They are then to adjourn, with Michelle Obama and Carla Sarkozy, for a private dinner that French officials are calling “testimony to a particularly close friendship.”

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