During his presidential election campaign last year, Donald Trump spoke of how a mysterious friend called Jim (Trump never revealed his full identity) had stopped his previous regular family travels to Paris because, “Paris is no longer Paris”. Jim, according to Trump, had stopped visiting the French capital because it was no longer safe, but Trump implied the backdrop was a city overrun by immigrants.
Earlier this year, after deciding to withdraw the US from the commitments of the United Nations COP 21 climate agreement reached in Paris in December 2015, Trump gave a speech insisting that he had been in part elected as president by the voters in Pittsburgh, and not Paris, in what was a sarcastic comparison, characteristic of his populist addresses, between an industrial American city and a supposedly sophisticated and socially elitist European capital.
But now, France and the City of Light has offered the president, facing heightening controversy at home over the long-running saga of alleged Russian interference in his election, the possibility of escaping the turmoil in Washington, and to play up his international role amid a display of pomp and glory – in contrast to the recent G20 summit of world leaders.
According to The Washington Post, the widely broadcast images of Trump co-presiding over the Bastille Day military parade, a rare event among western democracies, was something that he revelled in. For his inauguration as president on January 20th, he had asked in vain for a parade of tanks and marching marines. In an unlikely turnaround, French President Emmanuel Macron, who had defiantly challenged (and for the media, beaten) the big man’s now infamously virile handshake at their first meeting, before a NATO summit in Brussels in May, and who, after the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, had mocked Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan by calling to “Make our planet great again”, offered the US president an escape from troubles at home with the red-carpet show in Paris.
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Many commentators in the US press underline how Macron and Trump could not be more different. The first is 39-years-old, a graduate of elite French higher education schools, while the second is aged 71 and built his career in property development and TV reality shows. Macron is fascinated by the high-tech capitalism of California start-ups, while Trump champions fossil-fuelled industries and old-style protectionism. Macron is a firm supporter of the European Union and international treaties, while his US counterpart is focussed on nationalism and an “America first” approach. In contrast to Macron’s apparent openness to cultural diversity and minority issues, Trump is symbolized by his frontier wall to keep Mexicans at bay, an indifference towards the campaigns for equal rights of Afro-American citizens, women and gays, the figurehead of a myth anchored in the 1950s of a predominantly white America.
Yet for some, including Judah Grunstein, Paris-based editor-in-chief of the World Politics Review, the two men have several points in common. “On a substantive level, Macron and Trump actually have very few issues of discord to divide them,” writes Grunstein in an analysis piece on the website Politico. Both came to power, months apart, by upsetting the established political order, benefitting from both luck and the weaknesses of their opponents, and both, singularly self-confident, are reputed to have impetuous, strong character.
Emmanuel Macron has attracted the fascination of the US media and those who are bitter over last November’s US election result, representing the possibility of the victory of “reason”, an almost miraculous antidote to the disturbing rise of nationalism and populism that trump symbolizes. The nuances of Macron’s political programme, aimed at the centre-right but often to the Left of the US Democrat establishment, appear more important than his share of the vote in France’s presidential elections. He has succeeded in representing a sophistication to which Trump bears no comparison, while also capturing a popular enthusiasm to the expense of far-right Front National party leader Marine Le Pen, who lost to Macron in the two-horse final round of the French presidential elections.
Even among the Trump camp, and including his supporters who previously vilified France over its refusal to join the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, when bashing all things French became a sport, the French president arouses an astonishingly well-intentioned curiosity. Many of Trump’s supporters find a familiar echo in Macron, a sort of vague and exotic version of the notion of a providential figure, and admire the supposed national consensus he appears to have obtained while their own idol suffers from a regular rejection by around half of US public opinion and the country’s political institutions.
Despite his Pittsburgh-versus-Paris jibe, Trump refrained from employing further easy anti-French mockery which might have won him some short-term political advantage. The US president, so obsessed with his electoral score, displays a confraternal respect towards his French counterpart over his popularity, one which might serve him in the future.
The US media are keen for Macron to explain his attitude towards Trump. The new French president’s Bastille Day invitation to him, just as he is mired in incessant scandals and a certain political paralysis, is remindful of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s overtures to his then US counterpart George W. Bush when the latter had become isolated and ridiculed over the fiasco of the situation in Iraq post-invasion. In the eyes of American political commentators, Macron has seized the opportunity of filling the void caused by the broad international disapproval of Trump and the absence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, preoccupied by approaching elections in her country, so that France might at last replace Britain, amid the consequences of the Brexit decision, as the “special friend” of the US.
It is true that Trump had previously leant support to Marine Le Pen, has dismissed the theory of global warming, while also turning his back on Europe and upsetting NATO partners with his demands that they contribute more and count less on the US. But the NATO issue, according to many US observers, is not a true bone of contention with Paris, which, they explain, has always adopted a cool approach to the organization. France, which only relatively recently integrated NATO’s joint command, maintains a degree of autonomy in its military engagement.
France’s role in the offensive against terrorist organizations on the African continent offers a decisive backup for US military strategy in the region. The fight against jihadist movements, which remains the only point of agreement between the US political parties and also a more than ever divided public opinion, has led to a reinforced cooperation between US and French intelligence services.
While their separate positions regarding free trade are irreconcilable, Paris and Washington might be able to find a bridge across their disagreements over the issue of climate change. At a joint press conference with Macron in Paris last Thursday, Trump appeared to suggest he was reconsidering his stance on the COP 21 agreement. “Something could happen with respect to the Paris Accord,” he announced. “We’ll see what happens.”
“The US is committed to being a leader on environmental protection while we advance energy security and economic growth,” he said.
Above all, it is undoubtedly on the issue of Syria that the US and France are likely to find agreement. But while the anti-Trump camp in the US welcomed Macron’s firm stance with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the meeting of the two leaders in Versailles in May, his apparent readiness to collude with Putin over Syria and his comments that he could envisage that Bashar al-Assad remain in power, as part of a “realistic” approach to the Syrian question, were met with caution.
While Trump decided to act alone in ordering a strike by cruise missiles against the Syrian regime’s airbase at Shayrat last April, in response to what Washington said was an attack by poison gas against civilians in a rebel-held area, Macron has also pledged unilateral French action against Damas in the “red line” case of its future use of chemical weapons. Macron’s position is regarded as a warning that France, which was in favour of military intervention against the al-Assad regime after its use of sarin gas against rebels in the Ghouta agricultural belt around Damascus in August 2013 but which was forced to stand down after Barack Obama’s decision to call off a strike, would not be restrained by Washington a second time.
Whether Trump’s colourful two-day sojourn in Paris will help lift his isolation on the international stage, and turn a page on his image as a pariah at the G20 summit in Sicily in May, is yet to be seen. While he and his wife Melania revelled in the red carpet rolled out by Macron, the US media remained principally focussed on the controversy surrounding his son Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with Russian emissaries last year and the difficulties for the Republican healthcare bill, suggesting that the show in Paris will prove a short-term diversion.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse