Paris: French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron put recent disputes behind them to unveil a nuclear power deal and renew their own sometimes shaky political alliance on Saturday.

The pair took a strong position on the Syrian regime's violence at their summit in Paris, and Cameron took the opportunity of a joint news conference to wish his "friend" Sarkozy well in France's upcoming presidential election.

Celebrating a multi-million pound (euro) nuclear power deal and ever closer defense ties, the Paris summit was a far cry from recent encounters between the pair at European summits in Brussels, where they have clashed bitterly.

"When you look across the foreign policy and defense policy issues we discussed today, I don't think that there has been closer French-British cooperation than at any time since the Second World War," Cameron said.

Mr Cameron and Mr Sarkozy first bonded over the Libyan intervention last year, where British and French jets spearheaded what later became a NATO-led air campaign that eventually led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi's regime.

They have since, worked towards closer defense and military industrial ties and have jointly pushed for tougher UN action against Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who is engaged in a bloody crackdown on a pro-democracy revolt.

Both men expressed support for an upcoming conference of an international coalition dubbed the Friends of Syria, which meets next week in Tunis, but called on the Syrian opposition to organize itself better as well.

"We cannot accept that a dictator massacres his own people, but the revolution will not be brought from outside, it will rise from inside Syria, as it has done elsewhere," Sarkozy told the pair's joint news conference.

Both men said the conditions are not ripe in Syria for another Western military intervention like the one that tipped the balance in Libya, but said that they would bring maximum diplomatic pressure to bear.

 

Tags: Britain-France Nuclear Deal, David Cameron, European summit, Muammar Gaddafi, Nicholas Sarkozy, Paris Summit