Macron puts France First at the expense of good relations with the US

We have been here before. When Emmanuel Macron told journalists last week on his way back to Paris from a visit to Beijing that Europe should pursue strategic autonomy and not allow itself to be America’s “vassal,” he was borrowing from the playbook of at least three former French Presidents: Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac. 

In 1966, De Gaulle famously withdrew France from Nato’s integrated command structure – though not from the alliance itself – in the belief that his country, with its proud military traditions, had to maintain its independence from the U.S when it came to questions of war and peace. NATO was obliged to move its headquarters from Paris to Brussels, where it remains to this day.

De Gaulle was no slouch when it came to analysing the ambitions of the Soviet Union, but he was also still smarting from his treatment during the Second World War by President Roosevelt, who regarded him as an irrelevance, too full of himself by far. 

François Mitterrand, President from 1981-95, was never an Atlanticist. He led support in Europe for the construction of the original Trans-Siberian Pipeline that delivered Russian gas to Europe’s borders by way of Ukraine. The link, opposed from the start by the US, was formally inaugurated in Paris in 1984. Ronald Reagan was outraged. “They can have their damned pipeline, “ he was reported to have said, “but not with American equipment and not with American technology.” 

Forty-three years went by before Nicolas Sarkozy finally restored France to Nato’s inner core. In the meantime, Chirac, having succeeded Mitterrand, infuriated America by refusing to take part in its ill-fated invasion of Iraq – so much so that in Congress, French fries were replaced on the menu by patriotic “freedom fries” and the French people themselves were lampooned as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. 

A keen student of history, Macron will have been keenly aware of the decisions reached by his predecessors and the response they provoked in Washington. He will have been conscious of the likely interpretation put on his words by the State Department and the Pentagon. What is clear is that, in keeping with just about all of his post-war predecessors, he was determined to put France First. 

What does that mean? How can irritating America possibly reap dividends? The answer – apart from its usefulness in deflecting attention away from domestic woes – lies in how the Élysée, supported by most of the country’s self-styled public intellectuals, views France’s place in the world, including its perceived role as Europe’s primary power. It is not stretching credibility to suppose that Macron has in mind the image of a benign version of Orwell’s 1984, in which the Great Powers (one of them Europe, for which read France) rub along rather than fight and keep their noses out of each other’s personal business. 

Under heavy fire at home over his controversial drive to introduce pension reform, Macron is tapping into a rich vein of gallic self-esteem. He believes that by making France look great again (at least in its own eyes), he can further bolster the relevance that De Gaulle felt was lost less as the result of Nazi occupation than by the Liberation. 

Beyond self-aggrandisement, there is also the possibility that Macron is right. America’s litany of achievement in the post-war era is undeniably impressive, starting with Marshall Aid, the Berlin Airlift and the formation of Nato, culminating in the defeat of Communism and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. But the Pax Americana was always deeply flawed, subject to both miscalculation and arrogance. Cack-handed interventions in Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are cases in point. 

US diplomacy got Russia spectacularly wrong after the fall of the Soviet Union. It left it to its own devices, providing neither model nor guidance. Subsequently, China embedded itself in the US economy so successfully that it was difficult to know where one ended and the other began. The CIA failed totally to anticipate the Ukraine crisis and, along the way, almost without anybody noticing, both Russia and China were allowed to supplant American influence in Africa. Why, given this record, would France – which is perfectly capable of making its own mistakes, and compounding them – feel obliged to do what it is told by Washington? 

But if Macron, in American eyes, is guilty of failing to do the right thing by its most important ally, it is worth pointing out that other French leaders are at least equally reluctant. 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the old Lefty who leads the Socialist coalition behind the current unrest in France, barely mentions either Russia or China in his regular political rants. He quietly admires Vladimir Putin, who for some reason he continues to think of as a progressive. On the subject of China, and for much the same reason, he has more than once justified the resentment expressed by Beijing on the subject of Taiwan. 

Marine Le Pen, as the perennial standard bearer of France’s Far Right, may, in recent months, have rebuked Putin for the nature of his invasion of Ukraine, but it is not long since she spoke favourably of the Russian despot, even choosing a photograph of the two of them together in the Kremlin to feature on the cover of her campaign literature. Just last October, one of her closest colleagues messaged the Chinese Communist Party Congress to offer the National Rally’s “friendly greetings” and the hope that China would continue along its “path towards peace, mutual respect and the independence of all nations within their borders and in their singularity”. 

Emmanuel Macron was ridiculed in the run-up to last year’s invasion of Ukraine for attempting to persuade Putin to stay his hand. Images of the two leaders seated at either end of an unfeasibly long table were derided by friends and foes alike. In the same way, when Macron sought last week to convince Xi Jinping to increase pressure on Putin to end the conflict and to rely on diplomacy to settle China’s dispute with Taiwan, he was routinely rubbished by critics in the US and UK, as well as by some on France’s Atlanticist fringe. 

The irony in all of this is that if push ever came to shove, most obviously in the event of further Russian expansionism, it would be France, along with the UK, that would be expected to provide the bulk of Europe’s military response. The French army, navy and air force are, if anything, more powerful and better-equipped than those of Britain and are maintained at a high state of readiness. The difference between the two is that while the UK almost invariably follows America’s lead on where to fight and who to bomb, France looks first to its own interests and takes its own decisions. If that is a weakness it is one with which Macron, and French public opinion, are evidently prepared to live.  

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