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STRASBOURG

This pretty city of half-timber houses and sweeping canals is in lockdown, awaiting the arrival of the presidential guest and the presidential host.
The occasion is the 60th birthday party for Nato and there have already been . President Sarkozy will have his first tete-a-tete - bilateral, as they're called in the trade - with the new American president.

Smiles will be broad and arms will doubtless wrap around backs - but how will they really get on, and what does it say about the state of the relationships between these two great republics ?

The French president was ridiculed during his election as "Sarkozy the American", and it wasn't meant as a compliment. His is, on the whole, backed by public opinion, but there are severe critics on the left and within his own party.

It was, after all, President de Gaulle who marched because he saw it as little more than an American tool. I suspect that the strength of his insistence on new financial rules and regulations was partly because of a domestic perception that he is a fan of American-style capitalism.

The relationship between France and America is complex - at least on one side. When the United States snarls at France it seems to me to have its roots in De Gaulle's militant lack of gratitude for the USA's role in liberating France. That understandable reaction to this extraordinary statesman's personal and national arrogance has echoed down the years, with more or less arrogance, through the Cold War and the invasion of Iraq.

But French "anti-Americanism" is more complex. There is fear of culture-swamping, from food to films. There is a dislike of American foreign policy, which to me doesn't seem the same as being opposed to a state or its people. There is a huge difference in the attitude towards the state: an academic was telling me the other day that Tocqueville wrote that if a wheel came off a wagon and barrels spilled over the road, in France people would wait for the police, in America they would roll up their sleeves and clear up.

But, as anyone who has encountered American form-filling bureaucracy, or the delightfully relaxed French attitude to a multitude of rules, this risks being a parody.

There is admiration: French companies at the top of the tree are every bit as dynamic and capitalist as those in the States. But at the root is the envy that drove de Gaulle: it was France, certainly not the old colonial master Britain, that gave the United States its political model, its republican ideals, its taste for liberty and revolution. The idealistic desire to export that revolution and that freedom, and watching that turn into conquest and colonialism, is not a uniquely French experience.

Perhaps the feeling is akin to an elder brother who has grown up with the expectation of heading the family but finds his younger sibling is richer and more powerful. He consoles himself that his rival is vulgar and has distorted the family mission.

There's no doubt most French prefer Obama's brand of idealism to Bush's but they both look to lead and change the world. President Sarkozy will be forced to look up, literally, to his much taller guest. But will he say "It should have been me"?

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