Naive, immodest and pretentious, the president’s foreign policy record hardly inspires confidence.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet Feb 9, 2022

In what mirror universe can you call “a success” a Macron diplomatic trip to Moscow ending up with Vladimir Putin, at the post-discussions press conference, threatening Europe with nuclear war should Nato help Ukraine regain her Russian-annexed Crimean province? In pre-presidential election Paris – but nowhere else.

I might be unduly pessimistic. The French president asserted yesterday that, as a result of his meetings in Moscow and Kyiv, he now saw a path towards easing tensions between Russia and Ukraine. He hinted there may even be the basis of some sort of deal. But given Emmanuel Macron’s notorious hubris – Élysée aides, before and after the summit with Putin, briefed the media that “Vladimir Putin has already lost” – it is hard to avoid the suspicion that any deal will ultimately lead to Moscow achieving its wish to “Finlandise” Ukraine. That is if it is even implemented in the first place.

Macron still maintains the fiction that he’s not running for re-election, coyly refusing to admit he is a candidate even though his party is already sending out mass mailings for financial campaign contributions to registered sympathisers. His plan is to remain statesmanlike, “presidential”, while the rest of the candidates slug it out down among the fray.

His grand ambition, as told in a long interview to France’s most prestigious literary review, the NRF, one year after his election, was to make his mark in history. In one of the strange aphorisms he likes throwing about – “paradoxically, what makes me optimistic is that history in Europe is becoming tragic again” – he implied that he saw there opportunities for (personal) grandeur.

From the start, Macron cultivated Putin, inviting him to a summit in Versailles weeks after his 2017 election, visiting him in St Petersburg the following year, then receiving him in the presidential summer residence, Fort de Brégançon, on the Riviera. Sum total of the achievements from this frantic pace of diplomatic discussions, even before the marathon talks at Putin’s super-socially-distanced negotiating table at the Kremlin: nil.

His track record elsewhere hardly inspires confidence, either. When France picked a fight with President Erdoğan of Turkey in 2020, supposedly to call his bluff on threatening to flood the EU with migrants, Turkey’s navy retaliated by shooting at the French frigate Courbet, on a policing mission off the coast of Libya. The idea was to make the point that Turkey, not France, was really the sea power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Humiliatingly, 22 Nato countries refused to sign a motion of solidarity with France over the incident, signalling that there had been provocation on both sides.

And best not recall Macron’s visits to Lebanon in 2020 and 2021, after a massive explosion destroyed parts of Beirut as well as the country’s fragile political consensus. He first showed up soon after the disaster, promising aid and lecturing the Lebanese political class, decrying its inability to cope. One year later, he was back, suggesting he would draw up proposals for a new political pact since the Lebanese themselves were unable to come to terms. (General de Gaulle’s famous 1941 quote, “Towards the complex Orient I came with simple ideas”, referring to the task of turning Vichy-held Lebanon and Syria to the side of the Résistance, applied even better here.)

Predictably, nothing came of Macron’s grandstanding. While the notoriously fractious and self-interested Lebanese politicians got a fair share of the blame, Lebanese commentators were quick to call the French president “amateurish”, “pretentious”, “naïve”, “grandiloquent”, “ill-prepared” and “immodest”.

And then came the frantic preparations for France’s six-month presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers, which started on January 1. Obama-like, Macron vowed he would make the oceans recede, or at least achieve the Grail of a European Strategic Initiative (copyright one Macron, E.), in which the 27 would reclaim diplomatic and military pre-eminence at a time when the US, under Joe Biden, seemed to be unable to and unwilling to take the lead. (It is worth noting, at this stage, that the council’s rotating presidency has until now been a fairly ceremonial affair, low-key and meant to affirm equality of each country in the Union).

No one can blame Macron for trying to stop a possible land war in Ukraine. His trip to Moscow was not exactly a humiliation – it probably didn’t make things much worse, and might conceivably produce some good. Maybe.

But the Russian attitude to negotiations, from the early days of the Soviet Union, has always been that everything that’s theirs remains theirs, and everything that’s yours is negotiable. Talking with them without concrete arguments to back you up (economic sanctions, freezing any business deal for, say, a gas pipeline; if necessary, carefully weighted military aid) is surely a pipe dream. Boris Johnson, much as it pains me to say it, has the right approach to the Ukraine crisis”, one of the editors of Le Monde, no fan, told me. “All Macron performed here is a Potemkin initiative, without substance, in the aid of his own re-election.”