I simply don't know how I missed it or why. I was on the phone this morning getting my weekly wisdom from Fouad Ajami and he happened to mention Nicolas Sarkozy's speech at the French-American Foundation last September. As you may recall, I like Sarkozy. He is both complicated and a truth teller. He is honest when most others (in France and elsewhere) cling to fables and utter nonsense. In any case, in reading this address, I was stuck by how his utter solidarity with America and the causes for which it fights is so unlike the mood and opinion of fashionable Europe. Sarkozy is now running for the presidency of France on what is, more or less, the old Gaullist party slate. Now, De Gaulle always harbored a resentment of the U.S. (and to the U.K.), mostly--I believe--because he grasped that he did not deserve to sit at the table as an equal with Winston Churchill and F.D.R. After all, France collapsed to the Nazis in 20 seconds or 20 minutes or 20 hours or maybe it was 20 days. And it was the blood of Americans and Brits who seeded the restoration of the tree of liberty on French soil. The French did not make a deep mark in their resistance to Nazism, and for decades after the war there was the constant peril that the country would go red, Stalinist red, the most Stalinist red in Europe. But now that Sarkozy has put out his views about the essentialism of the French-American relationship, they have also become a weather-vane in the elections. (He has done that in his feelings towards Israel, as well.) Cross your fingers for him. On his winning against that utterly silly woman and the nothing third candidate rests the future of the bond between France and the United States. These stakes are not small. David Rieff has published in today's Times magazine a longish and very informative article fleshing out the portrait of Sarkozy. I have small quibbles with it. But it certainly is honest, a rare trait in political journalism these days.