At the beginning of January, a government official led the way through the corridors of the US Department of State in Washington. He invited Le Monde to wait in an antechamber beneath a painting depicting a woman draped in white, driving Native Americans from their lands. The artwork, a reproduction of a classic piece of 19^th-century American art, was intended as an allegory of the United States’ “manifest destiny” to expand its empire.

“Hello, welcome.” Jacob Helberg, 36, offered a rather cold handshake and spoke to Le Monde in English. Yet French is his mother tongue. The US under secretary of state for economic affairs was born to a French mother in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a leafy, affluent suburb west of Paris. He described it as “a little valley on the Seine.” He grew up there and only moved to the US, his father’s homeland, when he came of age.

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