Diplomatic relations between France and the USA are more strained than ever following a row at the United Nations.
The fallout began on Friday when the US was one of ten countries to vote against the renewal of Voker Turk as UN High Commissioner of Human Rights. They were in the minority. Turk, an Austrian, was reappointed by the General Assembly with 144 votes for and 13 abstentions.
In response to the vote, the French mission to the UN in Geneva posted a message on social media devoid of any diplomatic nuance. “The United States was once a beacon of human rights,” it began. “That is no longer the case. Today, they find themselves isolated alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali and Russia. And the world is no longer listening to them.” It added a hashtag: “America Alone.”
The taunt drew an angry response from Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN. On a post on X he accused France of coddling “some of the worst human rights abusers” and voting “for someone who has been lecturing free and sovereign democracies, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel, while getting closer to the world’s worst oppressors.”
Türk has been a fierce critic of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as Israel’s war in Gaza. During his first term he has also condemned the immigration policies of America, Britain and Italy. He treads more carefully when it comes to antisemitism. He has deplored the alarming rise in attacks against Jews in Europe but he appears reluctant to link it to the Middle East.
After Friday’s testy social media exchange, US diplomats walked out of the United Nations Security Council on Monday as France’s representative took the floor.
Dan Negrea, a senior US delegation official, said later that the walkout was a response to “disingenuous grandstanding” by France. He added: ‘“There is a member of this council that will feign moral outrage and pretend to lecture the rest of us about every topic, whether it’s about the very conflict we’re discussing yet again today, or even those unrelated to international peace and security, like human rights.”
He has a point. As far back as 1994, the Los Angeles Times was expressing disquiet about France’s willingness to overlook human rights abuses in Africa if it was in their interest.
“His attitude towards Africa has been characterized by arrogance and condescension”
In 2021 a French expert commission reported on France’s role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and concluded that the country, under the late President François Mitterrand, bore a “heavy and overwhelming responsibility” for the deaths of an estimated one million people. In response President Emmanuel Macron accepted that the Republic had for too long “valued silence over examination of the truth.”
The same could be said of France’s involvement in other African countries, where it has propped up tyrants and tolerated dictators. As recently as 2019, France was criticized in Chad because it had “prioritized regional security over human rights” in supporting the late dictator Idriss Déby.
Not long after Macron took office in 2017 he visited Burkina Faso and declared to an audience of students: “I am from a generation that doesn’t come to tell Africans what to do.”
But his attitude towards Africa has been characterized by arrogance and condescension. Relations between France and many African countries – Algeria, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso (who last month severed diplomatic ties with Paris) – have disintegrated since 2017.
In May this year Macron told an audience to shut up during a panel at the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya. In response one French left-wing politician, Danièle Obono, remarked of the president that “as soon as he sets foot on the African continent, he can’t help but behave like a colonizer.”
Colonizer behavior may be overstating the case. It’s more that Macron and his diplomats can’t help talking down to the rest of the world, whether they’re Africans or Americans.
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