Emmanuel macron

Ask three different people whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will approve an invasion of Ukraine, and you are likely to get three different answers. Yes, a Russian land, air, and sea blitz is inevitable and will come in fairly short order, likely without warning. Yes, a Russian invasion is possible, but could still be averted with some shrewd diplomacy. Or, no, surely Putin understands an invasion would be a disaster for his legacy and his country’s economy. In the midst of all of this comes wild speculation about what Putin is thinking at any given moment, how the weather may factor into his calculations, and what the Russian government’s end goal really is. What can be said for certain, however, is that diplomacy has picked up significantly over the past week.

Landing in Moscow on February 7, French President Emmanuel Macron had a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his step. There he was, taking it upon himself to be the first European head-of-state to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin since over 130,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border from three sides. Macron's mission was to explore whether a de-escalation with Russia was possible. “I believe that our continent is today in an eminently critical situation, which requires us all to be extremely responsible,” he told reporters before his five-hour session with Putin began. The other option, what could be the largest land war in Europe since World War II, would be far worse.

While American and Russian officials are yelling at one another in the UN Security Council chamber, another international actor has found itself at the little kids’ table: Europe. It's possible the phrase “little kids’ table” is too harsh. To be fair, French president Emmanuel Macron is at least in direct communication with Russian president Vladimir Putin and urging his European colleagues to formulate a joint European negotiating position on the Ukraine question. France is also a chief mediator of the Normandy Format, which seeks to resolve the eight-year conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region. But Macron is largely an outlier on his own continent.

Remember how Washington’s foreign policy establishment and their media echo chamber bashed the “isolationist” President Donald Trump for abusing, humiliating and making life miserable for our close European allies, in the process obliterating the “liberal international order”? Remember how some of the Europeans responded? Germany’s Angela Merkel declared “a new chapter” in US-European relations, saying that Europe “really must take our fate into our own hands.” France’s Emanuel Macron stated that Europeans need to stop “being naïve,” and assert their strategic independence from the US. What happened? Nothing. Here we are, three decades after the end of the Cold War, and it is déjà vu all over again between Washington and Moscow.

In December 2020, in the aftermath of the presidential election, Jake Sullivan, President-elect Joe Biden’s national security adviser, urged European officials to delay a European Union vote on a proposed economic agreement with China, called the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Sullivan, communicating with French and German officials, explained that the incoming Biden administration wanted to have 'early consultation' with the Europeans on China, and urged them to hold off until Biden took office to devise a common approach toward Beijing. Resisting the pressure from Biden, the European Commission announced that the agreement was concluded in principle, pending approval by the European Parliament.

One crisis can conceal another. While France has been distracted by COVID, a new menace is lurking. The specter haunting the republic is le Wokisme, the mutating ideology of race and identity that has found unexpectedly fertile ground here. French elites are unsettled. Those who assumed the French possessed herd immunity against such barbaric American ideas are having their complacency tested. Superficially a modern country, with iPhones, Amazon and electric cars, France is still often introspective and late to understand what’s happening in the wider — especially Anglophone — world, which is how wokeness has somewhat taken it by surprise. Woke had been happening in America for many years before the French noticed.

It’s that time again when newspapers tell us that America’s standing in the world has substantially declined under Donald Trump. It’s no coincidence that we’re always told this when a Republican resides in the White House. You must wonder why it is that 'the world' (i.e., elite European leaders and media) oscillates in its view of American leadership directly in tune with America’s presidential election outcomes. Since 1980, the message has boiled down to this: Republican presidents are narrow-minded and dimwitted warmongers (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) or isolationist (Trump), whereas Democratic presidents are nuanced and deep-thinking internationalists (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).

The familiar should be a consolation amid the terrible novelties of COVID-19, but the pandemic’s effects on the European Union threaten to turn familiar fiasco into dangerous novelty. As a weakened Angela Merkel faces Germany’s crisis of economic responsibility, and France floats the idea of issuing its own ‘corona bond’, the EU and its currency face what Emmanuel Macron would probably not want to call its Waterloo.Henry Kissinger’s remark — ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ — has never seemed more true. Britain is leaving.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Montpellier, France As the new year dawned, it was business as usual in France, with transportation paralyzed, hundreds of cars burning in the suburbs, violent demonstrations in the cities, a whiff of tear gas in the Métro, police beating protesters. Train drivers, air-traffic controllers, nurses, garbage collectors, ballet dancers, opera singers were all on strike — and so, even, were lawyers. If the country is not wholly immobilized, it’s because the French are pretty adaptable and, to be honest, some only pretend to strike. My garbage was picked up in the normal way. Making the French swallow bitter medicine is hard, even in a nation of hypochondriacs.

In Arthur Miller’s superb examination of the nature of fanaticism, The Crucible, the key moment comes not with the initiation of the Salem witch trials which form the subject of the play, but in the leading character finally and fully rejecting them. The point of crisis comes when John Proctor refuses to sign his name to the condemnation of supposed witches which would justify their horrific punishment. 'How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul, leave me my name.' It is the moment when a man finally finds the courage that is essential to any meaningful masculinity, the courage to defy the absolute consensus of opinion that harms the innocent and taints those who accept it with complicity in evil.

The French president Emmanuel Macron is as flighty as the movie character he most resembles, Harold Chasen, the eponymous sillyboy boy in Harold and Maude. As the world’s economies shudder under a variety of eco-angst initiatives, uncertainty over Brexit, the disruptions of Trump’s steely tariff initiatives, and the truculence of a surprised China, the blinking boy wonder jettisoned all the careful laid plans for the G7 meeting in Biarritz and announced without warning that the summit should focus on the 'emergency’, the 'international crisis’ of (as one news report put it) 'the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle.’ 'Our house is burning.

No one wants to hear a lecture on ‘liberty and democracy’ from a finance guy turned technocrat. Especially not at a service commemorating the dead of the D-Day landings. In the last 30 years, finance guys and technocrats have enriched themselves at the voters’ expense, abused the notion of economic liberty, and wrecked social contracts across the West. Thank you for your service, as the voters never say. The 75th anniversary of D-Day should be a time for remembering the true meaning of freedom and democracy — and for honoring the thousands of young men who died in foreign fields so that we might inherit those privileges. Instead, we got Emmanuel Macron’s side-eyed hectoring of Donald Trump at Thursday’s memorial service.

People do inexplicable things in January, like laying off drink for a month, taking out gym memberships they will never use, and making predictions about the year to come. As I shall not be ‘going dry’ this month or any other, and as I do not intend to alter a ‘fitness regime’ of afternoon naps in a sauna, the only remaining way to make a public fool of myself is to predict what will happen in 2019: 1. Look to the skies. I don’t know what a Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse is, but it’s coming to the US on the night of January 20. And the year will end with a transit of Mercury, and an annular eclipse over the Arabian Peninsula. I don’t know what that means, either, other than that the atmospherics aren't good. 2. The atmospherics are no better in the markets.

The roundabout on the departmental highway, at the exit for the Super U supermarket and gas station, the closest place to buy fresh milk, has been occupied by the Gilets Jaunes, demanding cheaper diesel. They wear the emblematic yellow safety jackets of their movement, although some are orange. Passing motorists sound their horns and display their own yellow gilets on the dashboard, to show solidarity. There is no barricade, traffic flows rather freely. It is all rather jolly. One man is cooking sausages on a barbecue. I slow down, as seems to be protocol, wind down my window to smile, shake a few hands, say a few bonjours. Hearing my accent, I got a chorus of ‘haffanicedays.’ I smile some more. A lady sends me on my way with a madeleine.