Today's Date:

Our two countries are united by a friendship that goes back more than 200 years which makes France the oldest ally of the United States.

Based on solidarity that has never failed, from the battlefields of Yorktown to the beaches of Normandy and through all the crises of the past half century, the friendship between our two countries is especially strong because it is rooted in shared values. The American dream of the Founding Fathers melds readily with the ideals of the French Revolution. It is no accident that an American woman and a Frenchman, Eleanor Roosevelt and René Cassin, together wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more than 50 years ago.

This community of values is today our most precious asset enabling our two countries together to address the important common challenges facing them, foremost among them terrorism. After the horrific attacks that so wounded America, the very deep solidarity between France and the United States illustrates once again the lesson of our common history--that whenever the essential is at issue, whenever the values underlying our civilization are threatened, our two countries are naturally at the other's side in the same cause. As President Chirac said when he came to the United States a few days after the September 11 attacks, "France will be in the front line in the combat against international terrorist networks, shoulder to shoulder with America and its ally for ever."

The following pages give some idea, albeit a necessarily incomplete one, of the wealth of ties between France and the United States."

• Factors shaping foreign policy, and issues in US-French relations
• US-French commercial ties
• Economic Ties
• Strategic Council for Enhancing France's Investment Attractiveness
• France's Cultural Action
• Science and Technology
• Space Cooperation
• Latest Meetings
• Treaties and Agreements
• From Lafayette to D-Day: Two Centuries of French-American Friendship