Macron’s Trump containment operation
The French president keeps focus on a somber commemoration
and his defense of multilateralism.
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN 11/11/18, 9:24 PM CET Updated
11/12/18, 2:11 AM CET
French President Emmanuel Macron attends a ceremony at the
Arc de Triomphe in Paris on November 11, 2018 as part of commemorations marking
the 100th anniversary of the 1918 armistice that ended World War I | Ludovic
Marin/AFP via Getty Images
PARIS — Donald Trump is no longer allowed to steal the show
— at least not when it’s being held on Europe’s stage.
At a G7 summit in Quebec last June, and a NATO leaders’
summit in Brussels a month later, the American president grabbed the limelight
and disrupted proceedings, leaving his counterparts reeling and struggling to
contain any damage.
But European leaders have wised up. French President
Emmanuel Macron showed at commemorations in Paris for the World War I Armistice
centenary over the weekend that there is a new approach. No longer will Europe
simply appease and contain Trump, as they did for the first 18 months of his
unorthodox presidency. Instead, they are now prepared to push back and isolate
Trump if necessary, denying him the attention he craves.
After Trump landed in Paris Friday evening and immediately
fired off a provocative tweet accusing Macron of being “very insulting,” the
French president did make an effort at a meeting with Trump on Saturday morning
to smooth over the differences. The American president appeared to have
misinterpreted a call from Macron for an EU army. Ahead of his meeting with
Trump in the Elysée Palace, the French president said he agrees with his
counterpart’s call for European allies to spend more on their militaries.
But Macron also went on CNN — the U.S. cable network that
Trump loathes — and gave an interview in which he pushed back hard, saying that
while Europe should spend more, he did not want the money going to purchases of
American-weapons and other hardware.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Morocco’s Prince
Moulay Hassan and King Mohammed VI, U.S. First Lady Melania Trump, U.S.
President Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President
Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin,
Australian Governor-General Peter Cosgrove and his wife Lynne Cosgrove, Chad’s
President Idriss Deby and his wife Hinda Deby Itno and Tunisia’s President Beji
Caid Essebsi | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
“What I don’t want to see is European countries increasing
the budget in defense in order to buy Americans’ and other arms or materials
coming from your industry,” Macron said on Fareed Zakaria’s “Global Public
Square” program. “I think if we increase our budget, it’s to have to build our
autonomy and to become an actual sovereign power.”
European officials said they now have enough experience with
Trump to know what to expect and that a soft stance is pointless.
“Sometimes it’s better to be more assertive and have a clear
idea of the point you yourself want to make,” said one European official who
helped prepare for bilateral interaction with Trump. “He’s a power player — so
he respects more those who will push back a little than those who will just lay
down on the ground.”
Macron delivered a particularly dramatic pushback against
Trump’s “America First” ideology during a speech at the formal Armistice
centennial commemoration Sunday morning. “Patriotism is the exact opposite of
nationalism,” Macron told an assembly of scores of world leaders gathered under
the Arc de Triomphe which included Trump listening expressionless to a
translation.
For the first 18 months of Trump’s volatile presidency,
European leaders were shellshocked by the American’s bombast.
“Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” Macron said. “By
pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others’, we erase the very
thing that a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and makes it
great: its moral values.”
Trump, during the recent U.S. congressional campaign,
proudly proclaimed himself a “nationalist.”
But the ring-fencing was not just rhetorical.
Macron and the Elysée Palace appeared to move assertively to
prevent Trump from stealing any thunder from the historical import of the day.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was immediately by Macron’s side at the formal
ceremony — in a powerful show that the somber day belonged more than anything
to France and Germany (Theresa May had declined an invitation to represent
Britain at the ceremony, instead playing her role in extensive commemorations
in London on Saturday and Sunday.)
Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had seats close
by — but it was clear that they were supporting cast members — not the main
attraction of the day.
Interfax, the Russian news agency, also reported that the
seating plan of a leaders’ luncheon following the ceremony was designed to keep
Trump and Putin apart. Instead, the Russian news agency, reported, Trump was
placed in between United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. Yury Ushakov, a high-level
foreign policy adviser to Putin, told Interfax that Macron’s office “quite
persistently” asked that Putin and Trump not hold a bilateral meeting that
would inevitably draw attention away from the formal program.
Putin talks with Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel |
Pool photo Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Trump arrived in his own motorcade at the ceremony (for
security reasons, a White House spokesperson said) and appeared on the dais
later than most of the other leaders. They had arrived together by bus and
formed a somber umbrella-carrying crowd. Macron and his wife, Brigitte, at the
center along with Merkel, Juncker and an array of other familiar European
faces, processed toward the Paris monument beneath a flypast of French jets
trailing red, white and blue smoke.
But Trump’s solo arrival, with other leaders already in
their places, was quickly upstaged by Putin who was the last major leader to
appear — at least as television showed it. His motorcade, like Trump’s, had
arrived quite a bit earlier.
After lunch, Trump also skipped a Peace Forum attended by
Macron and Merkel and instead went off on his own to visit an American military
ceremony, where his speech, telecast live by the White House, competed for
attention directly with Macron’s own television appearances. Evidently more
comfortable at a U.S.-organized event, Trump pointedly declared it the
“highlight” of the trip.
Europe’s new assertiveness was not only on display in Paris.
In a speech in Poland on Saturday, European Council President Donald Tusk
bluntly took Trump to task.
“Today for the first time in history we have an American
administration which, to put it delicately, is not very enthusiastically tuned
in to a united, strong Europe. And I’m talking here about facts, not about
propaganda statements,” Tusk said. “And I say this as someone who has — let’s
say — the satisfaction of having fairly frequent direct exchanges with the
president of the United States.
“Maybe he’s quite open with me because we are namesakes,”
Tusk said. “I have no doubt that with regard to all of this I have different
views from my most influential namesake in the world.”
“I think he’s got a political problem at home, and I think
he’s picking a fight with President Trump to play good politics” — U.S. Senator
Lindsey Graham on Macron
For the first 18 months of Trump’s volatile presidency,
European leaders shell-shocked by the American’s bombast, especially his
provocative rhetoric that seemed to call into question the very pillars of the
transatlantic relationship, sought to soothe tensions by minimizing
disagreements, and giving Trump space to adjust to his role as leader of the
free world.
They shuddered as Trump applauded Brexit and expressed
disdain for the EU, but they mostly held their tongues. They pulled their
punches when he contemplated pulling out of the Paris climate change accords.
When he moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, they
quietly stated that they thought it an unhelpful mistake. When he slammed
European allies for not spending enough on their militaries, NATO
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg assured him that he is right.
But Trump’s thinly veiled threat to withdraw from NATO at
last summer’s leaders’ summit left leaders deeply unsettled. His unilateral
withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord shows he has no respect for past
agreements, even the Iran deal, which is enshrined in a U.N. Security Council
resolution.
Most recently, Trump’s announcement that he is pulling out
of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty sent a message to Europe
that he truly does not care about their security. The INF treaty, which
eliminated all missiles and launchers with a range of 500 to 1,000 kilometers,
first and foremost serves to protect Europe. It was Trump’s callous disregard
for the treaty’s importance that led Macron in an interview broadcast last week
to call for an EU army to help defend its people.
Even as Trump touched down in Paris, Europe was already
firing shots at him — though there is a good chance he was unaware of it. On
the occasion of Trump’s visit — his second to Paris as president — France’s
most prominent newspaper, Le Monde, began publishing a three-part series on the
diplomatic damage Trump has wrought. The first instalment opens with a
description of the leaders of the Baltic nations — Lithuania, Latvia and
Estonia — returning from a visit to the White House aghast because Trump had
made remarks about their responsibility for the war in Yugoslavia, apparently
mistaking the Baltics for the Balkans.
West Point cadets pose near the Arc de Triomphe | Benoit
Tessier/AFP via Getty Images
Trump contributed to his own isolation though. Perhaps
exhausted by the recent midterm elections, Trump cancelled a visit to a
military cemetery on Saturday, with the White House citing the rainy weather.
Criticism on both sides of the Atlantic was withering and unrelenting. Winston
Churchill’s grandson, the U.K. Tory MP Nicholas Soames, called Trump a
“pathetic inadequate.”
When he did visit a cemetery, Sunday afternoon, Trump’s
speech there was compared unfavorably to Macron’s statesmanlike oratory, in
which the French leader linked the sacrifices of Allied soldiers to the
importance of international institutions that grew out of the horrific
bloodshed of Europe’s two World Wars.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent political supporter of
Trump, noted that Macron’s line about nationalism was directed implicitly at
the American leader, and accused the French leader of trying to distract from
his own sagging poll numbers.
“I think he’s got a political problem at home, and I think
he’s picking a fight with President Trump to play good politics,” Graham told
host Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“Republican presidents always have a hard time in Europe,
and I’m not really worried about this at all,” he said.
Graham may not be worried, but the European leaders have
been concerned for a year and a half. And now, it seems, they are intent on
doing something about it.
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