ROME: On his first foreign trip as US Secretary of State John Kerry charmed Europeans with his flair for languages, his wry reminiscences about biking through East Berlin as a 12-year-old boy and his obvious affection for France and its cuisine.

What was less clear was how much influence Washington’s top diplomat will have on US foreign policy and whether President Barack Obama will allow him to change anything of substance.

“We just finished one of those wonderful French lunches that have been drawing Americans to Paris for centuries,” Kerry said, speaking French and drawing laughter at the start of a news conference in an ornate salon at the Quai d’Orsay.

Still in French, he added: “Now I will speak in English, because otherwise I won’t be able to go back home.” Patrician and polished, the former presidential candidate spoke with ease, and without gaffes, in English about foreign policy issues from the Falkland islands and Iran’s nuclear program to Syria’s civil war and Italy’s topsy-turvy election.

While the trip provided few clues on the extent to which Kerry will influence Obama, analysts remarked on his facility with the issues and his friendships with foreign officials from 28 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“He is a political heavyweight. It counts that he has been a presidential candidate. Surely in the end Obama decides the main direction for the US policy but that has always been the case,” Ruprecht Polenz, the head of the Bundestag’s foreign committee, told Reuters in Berlin.

“The US has always been an Atlantic and a Pacific power. So the fear that it might turn away from Europe was and is false,” he added, saying he has met Kerry several times at the annual Munich Security Conference. “But Kerry is somebody who has a particular open ear for the Europeans.”

Kerry’s ability to speak French was a liability during the 2004 US presidential campaign, feeding an image of the Democrat as a wealthy elitist that his Republican opponent George W. Bush exploited. As a diplomat, it is a clear advantage.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, as if not to be outdone, at times spoke in English during their news conference, a remarkable act for a French minister holding forth in Paris.

In London, Kerry diplomatically avoided upsetting British officials when he restated US policy on the Falkland Islands and said nothing of substance in public about Britain’s role in the European Union.