This NYT article is about how France, birthplace of Freedom Fries (along with Equality burgers and Fraternity shakes), is trying to come to the grips with the fact it has Dubya in office until 2009.

Some excerpts:

PARIS, Feb. 7 - Ask the French foreign minister, Michel Barnier, about France and the United States, and he replies that the anger and distrust that tarnished the relationship for the last three years are history.

No matter that 18 months ago, when she was national security adviser, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was widely quoted as having said the way to deal with the three main opponents of the American-led Iraq war was: "Forgive Russia. Ignore Germany. Punish France."

The French have to coexist with President Bush for four more years, Ms. Rice is now America's top diplomat, and American-organized elections have taken place in Iraq. So for France, a new era of political realism is beginning, starting with Ms. Rice's visit to Paris on Tuesday and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's arrival in Nice the next day for a NATO defense ministers' meeting.

"The situation has changed," Mr. Barnier said in a recent interview over lunch at the Foreign Ministry, adding that Ms. Rice's instruction to punish France has been forgiven.

"The phrase was uttered in other circumstances," he said. "What's important now is neither to punish nor to give lessons. My line is to look ahead. I am someone who is very practical." ...

But even as Mr. Chirac and his ministers adjust to the reality of a second Bush term, they hold fast to a belief that Mr. Bush and his team still have a lot to learn from France about running the world.

In a meeting a week ago at Élysée Palace with five American senators, for instance, Mr. Chirac repeated his conviction that a "multipolar world" with multiple centers of power is not a desire or an aspiration but "a fact," three participants said.

That description of the world enrages Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice because it seems to envision a power that competes with American interests and influence, even though Mr. Chirac also says the best way to make the multipolar world as stable as possible is by strengthening the trans-Atlantic relationship.

"He still doesn't like the idea of the unipolar world with the United States as top dog," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat, said in an interview after the meeting.