Barack Obama’s sixth State of the Union address was an homage to France. The president might not have intended it as such — he mentioned the nation only glancingly when denouncing terror attacks in Pakistan and Paris. Yet France was at the heart of the president’s address.

France has everything that Obama finds wanting in his own country. His entire presidency is a prolonged effort to tear the United States away from free market economics and decentralized political power (what the French deride as the “Anglo Saxon model”) toward the kind of socialist, government-dominated society France has achieved.