WASHINGTON, 5 June 2003 — Even among rivals, civility during summit meetings is not uncommon.

President Carter, for instance, steadied the ailing and aging Leonid Brezhnev when the Soviet leader lost his footing at a 1979 summit.

As US rivals go, French President Jacques Chirac is hardly in the same league as Brezhnev was, but Chirac surely ranks as one of the Bush administration’s least favorite foreign leaders.

Nonetheless, when Bush and Chirac got together at the Group of Eight summit in Evian on Sunday and Monday, both chose congeniality over prickliness.

They showed they are not prisoners of the past. Chirac highlighted some areas where the two can cooperate — Afghanistan, the fight against AIDS.

Bush sought Chirac’s counsel as he prepared for his talks with Arab leaders in Egypt on Tuesday. He urged Chirac to attend a meeting on terrorism at the United Nations this fall and offered to arrange a meeting if the French leader did.

The Evian meetings, however cordial, masked underlying differences that, according to analysts, are as wide as they are deep.

The French believe that Bush is inciting terrorism rather than suppressing it through his policies in Iraq.

And the American administration sees no point in cozying up to a country that seems to regard the United States as a rogue colossus that must be tamed at all cost.

Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, a private research group, acknowledges the “air of civility” at Evian between Bush and Chirac.

“Does this mean that Humpty Dumpty is back together? No,” he says. Kupchan says the United States and France will be able cooperate on some issues, but “on the big question of what to do about American power, the US and France will be miles apart.”

John Hulsman, of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, agrees. Citing the diplomatic dustup over Iraq, he says, “The relationship has been damaged beyond repair for the next generation”

Hulsman says fraternal US-French ties of the past were forged by the prominent American role in the liberation of France from Nazi occupiers. Nowadays, generations later, “the emotional tug no longer exists on either side,” he says.