Touting “a very strong personal relation” with Donald Trump, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on Sunday began an ambitious charm offensive intended to strengthen US commitments in Syria and Iran while heading off threats of a transatlantic trade war.

Prior to his departure for an official state visit to Washington, Macron likened himself to Trump in an interview with Fox News Sunday, a venue with a wide following among Trump supporters and likely to be watched by the president himself.

“Both of us are probably the maverick of the systems on both sides,” Macron said. “I think President Trump’s election was unexpected in your country and probably my election was unexpected in my country. And we are not part of the classical political system.”

But if his emphasis was on political affinities, Macron faces a substantial challenge to guide his occasionally errant counterpart away from positions popular with his base and, in the case of Syria, at odds with his own recently stated intentions.

“I want to get out, I want to bring the troops back home, I want to start rebuilding our nation,” Trump said of Syria at the White House earlier this month, before declaring the US “mission accomplished” with missile strikes outside Damascus and Homs.

Macron will arrive in the US with the opposite message. “We will have to build a new Syria after war,” he said. “And that’s why I think the US role is very important to play.”

Macron described a similarly ambitious plan to keep the US in the Iran nuclear deal, which the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee last week predicted Trump would withdraw from in May.

“Is this agreement perfect?” said Macron. “No. But for nuclear – what do you have? As a better option? I don’t see it.”

Macron has been framed as the best hope for co-opting Trump to European policy priorities, with a recent Der Spiegel cover depicting him standing next to a fiery Trump, holding a fire extinguisher as German chancellor Angela Merkel stands by.

Macron will have an unusually strong opportunity to make his case in his multi-day state visit. He and Trump are to dine privately on Monday at Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, before an official White House welcome on Tuesday and an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.

As a gift, Macron will offer Trump an oak sapling taken from Belleau Wood, north-east of Paris, where in June 1918 US Marines repelled a German offensive with such ferocity that they earned from their beaten enemies the nickname “teufelhunden”, or “Devil Dogs”.

Macron does seem to have surpassed other world leaders in establishing a rapport with Trump, whose envy he won when he hosted the US president for a military parade on Bastille Day – “We’re going to have to try to top it,” Trump said.

Macron told Fox an interminable handshake between the two was not the contest of wills it appeared to be, but a moment of comity.

“It was a very natural moment, I have to say,” he said. “And a very friendly moment. Don’t worry.”

One of the sharpest splits between Macron and Trump, however, may be over another world leader, Russian president Vladimir Putin, who Macron, unlike Trump, has a history of confronting.

“He’s strong and smart,” Macron said of Putin. “But don’t be naïve. He’s obsessed by interferences in our democracies.”

If the French president can convince his American counterpart on that point, no claim of a diplomatic coup might be denied him.