Delivered. In foreign policy, France has an opinion on everything. Before being able to change them, in a sense favorable to our interests and our values, we have to “say” things, we think in Paris. It is a tradition that we only share in Europe with the British. Emmanuel Macron is part of this French way of looking at the world and trying to act on it.
The president multiplied the “big speeches” and the talks-rivers. He has described, often accurately, the international scene as it is in the first quarter of a century. He commented on the most salient features: the rise in strength of China, the relative withdrawal of the United States from European and Middle Eastern affairs, the exhaustion of the seduction exercised by the democratic model, the emergence of new middle powers.
The components of power have also changed, which, even more today than yesterday, render obsolete the traditional methods of exercising sovereignty and defending national interests for a country the size of France. On the international scene, France counts, more than we often think, less than we think in Paris.
Try again and again
An elegant pen and weighty erudition, Michel Duclos recounts these moments of the Macron presidency when the man from the Elysee Palace confronted his speeches, willingly lyrical, to reality. In Lebanon as in Libya or the Sahel, in the Indo-Pacific as to revive the Iranian nuclear agreement, with Donald Trump as with Vladimir Poutin, President Macron has “tried” to change things. Without much apparent success.
Should he say nothing, do nothing, try nothing? No, no doubt. Because diplomacy means trying, again and again, even if it means maintaining the impression of arrogance that France often gives abroad – that of a former “great nation” poorly recovered from its downgrading?
It was by dint of “trying” that Emmanuel Macron moved Angela Merkel’s Germany – the most substantial result of his diplomatic action. It is not just the vote by the European Union (EU) of a post-Covid-19 recovery plan of 750 billion euros. Professor-trainer Macron hopes to have moved the lines on the imperative need for the EU to acquire a minimum of technological (industrial policy) and military independence (the eternal outline of a European defense policy) – the whole under the name “Strategic autonomy”. Without these elements, we do not “count”.
You have 12.38% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.