The John McCain meet-and-greet tour hit London last Thursday, by way of Iraq, Jordan and Israel. America's answer to Phileas Fogg was telling Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown and leader of the Conservative party David Cameron that, if he becomes president, he looks forward to doing business with a strong Europe.
This message is likely to go down well with Brown, if not with Cameron. It must have been heard with interest at the Elysee Palace, the Arizona senator's last stop-off, where the French President Nicolas Sarkozy is no doubt polishing up his Ray-Ban aviator shades and royal protocol before his state visit to Britain beginning today.
Both meetings are critical for Brown. McCain may well be heading for the White House, especially if the Democrat challenge is torn apart by a cocktail of race, rivalry and religion.
Though his track record is hawkish, he claims to want "an enduring peace", with Europe and America at the heart of a "League of Democracies".
This aim dovetails with Brown's agenda. Still being finalised with the French, it is likely to feature the prime minister's ambitious to-do list: build global prosperity; create an environmentally stable world; foster stability and reconstruction; fight poverty.
Anglo-French relationships have certainly picked up since the Duc de Chatelet, an 18th-century ambassador to London, said: "It seems to me impossible to be French without wishing ill to England.'' Sarkozy admires British and American job creation. A trans-Atlanticist, like Brown, he may help to bail out Nato by putting troops into Afghanistan.
Brown, once lukewarm on the EU, must think himself in Euroheaven. In Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, he has two fellow leaders who have no interest in "la [long-lost] gloire'' of Europe.
All three are pragmatists who are interested in the EU for what it can do on trade, globalisation, peacekeeping and rebuilding creaking institutions, such as the UN Security Council.
Nor is it necessarily bad news for Brown that the French and German leaders can't stand one another.
Opposing Iraq was easily the best thing to be said for the former heads of France and Germany. Of the two old dinosaurs, Schroder went off to join a project led by the Russian energy giant Gazprom, whose belligerence and close ties with Putin's Kremlin had long alarmed the West. Chirac's gratuitous rudeness soured France's relations with the world.
House guest
The Queen may balk at having, as a house guest, a president decked out like a Ratners' window display. She might be unaccustomed to a pop chart-topping first lady once branded a croqueuse d'hommes (a man-eater).
But entertaining the Sarkozys sounds much more convivial than serving Windsor soup to Chirac, whose distaste for the English was based on the view that "one cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad''.
A more powerful Europe will not necessarily gladden British hearts. But, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, there is ample evidence of the disaster that an unchecked US president and his British sidekick can wreak.
If failing states are to be helped and tyrants tamed, then Europe will have to play a more heavyweight role. The next step is to get some coherent plans.
The Brown/Sarkozy double act began last August, when they helped force through a UN resolution mandating 26,000 peace-keeping troops for Darfur.
Shoulder to shoulder, they demanded "quick and decisive action'' and promised further pressure. Some forces are in place, but the fighting in west Darfur is as bad or worse than it was then.
There is no obvious leverage on Khartoum, no influx of helicopters and hardware, no end to death, no tough sanctions and no peace to keep.
Iraq has been destroyed by too much intervention; Darfur by too little. Today Sarko, possibly in Gunners' strip, will be treading the Emirates turf with Gordon Brown.
Perhaps they could give us the gameplan for what their partnership will do next, in Sudan and elsewhere. These may be early days. But, as any Arsenal fan could tell them, it's the results that count.
