Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump met for the first time at a NATO summit in Brussels last spring, just a couple of weeks after Macron’s election to the French Presidency. If there had been a fight card for the encounter, it would have pitted globalism vs. nationalism, progressivism vs. populism, optimism vs. declinism, youth vs. age. At a meeting in the morning, the two men tugged at each other’s forearms as though they were trying to pull a rope over a line in the sand. That afternoon, at a photo call with the rest of the group, Macron performed a cheeky little fake-out before finally extending his hand to Trump, who yanked it as though he were trying to start a chainsaw. Handshakeologists the world over were thus surprised when, a couple of months later, Macron invited Trump to France.
Macron, speaking of the historic alliance between the two countries, “which fully justifies the presence of President Trump today and tomorrow in Paris,” gave Trump a grand reception. There was a Bastille Day parade with vintage tanks and a flyover of the Arc de Triomphe; the Presidents and their wives dined at the Eiffel Tower on a solicitously bland menu of filet of beef and chocolate soufflé with chocolate ice cream. By the next day, Trump—who, in previous months had pulled out of the Paris climate accords, claimed that parts of Paris were so “radicalized and vicious” that the police refused to go there, and expressed his admiration for the far-right leader Marine Le Pen—was praising the French leader as “a great President, a tough President.” Macron—who had previously trolled Trump over his environmental policies, unfurling a “Make Our Planet Great Again” meme on Twitter—now said, “I very much respect the decision taken by President Trump” on the Paris accords, even if he disagreed with it, and affirmed that he and Trump shared a “common red line” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Thus was born the idea that there exists some kind of special closeness not between America and France but between Trump and Macron.
On Monday, Macron arrives in Washington for the first official state visit of the Trump Presidency. He will address a joint session of Congress; this time, the double date will take place at Mount Vernon. The bromance theory of Trump and Macron holds that their alliance is personal and unlikely. From Trump’s perspective, perhaps it is. Flattery, however crude or instrumental, plays an inflated role in the intellectual and moral vacuum of his Presidency, and a politics of ingratiation is by its nature erratic. Trump can easily find “a great guy” in whoever, for the moment, makes him feel important.
Macron’s seduction of Trump has been a determined exercise. Macron was going to be attentive to the American President, whoever he or she was. But the fact that it’s Trump, who has so alienated much of the rest of the world—“I try so hard to be his friend,” he tweeted, of Kim Jong Un, before word came of their potential meeting—makes a world leader who can forge some points of agreement with him look like less of a lapdog than an elephant tamer. With Angela Merkel sidelined by policy differences and Theresa May wrapped up in Brexit, Macron, who poses no threat in terms of seniority or gender, has positioned himself as Trump’s conduit to Europe and, consequently, as a player beyond. Macron has volunteered to mediate between Turkey and the Syrian Kurds, and he inserted himself as freelance fixer when the Lebanese Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, went missing in Saudi Arabia. He also seems to have calculated that the boost to France’s international profile is worth some compromises. Without capitulating on major points of disagreement between France and America—climate change, the Iran nuclear deal—he has delivered on some of Trump’s pet issues, such as nudging France’s military budget toward the two per cent of G.D.P. target for NATO member states. (The loi Collomb, the harsh immigration bill that Macron’s interior minister is now pushing through the French Parliament, undermines his inclusive campaign rhetoric, though its intent is less to appease Trump than to placate the domestic far-right.)
The dialogue with Trump isn’t an anomaly for Macron, who has a penchant for trying to win over skeptics in face-to-face confrontations. “Is the President ever so much in his element as when in often heated, sometimes coarse contact with the French?” the news site BFMTV recently asked, after Macron ventured out into a scrum of railway workers, who, in opposition to his desire to limit their retirement benefits, are conducting rolling strikes that will continue until June. Despite the disappointment of some American liberals, Macron’s decision to grant an interview to Chris Wallace, of Fox News, is entirely in character—the apotheosis, perhaps, of a foreign policy of, as he once put it, “we’ll talk with everybody.”
The previous French President, François Hollande, felt badly betrayed by President Barack Obama over Syria. “From a French perspective, U.S. unpredictability actually preceded Trump,” a recent policy brief by the German Marshall Fund of the United States observed. “In French diplomatic circles, the turning point was in fact Obama’s decision not to follow-through in Syria in 2013, despite the Assad regime’s ‘red line’ violation, just hours before French warplanes were due to join the bombing mission over Syria. In the words of former French Minister of Affairs Laurent Fabius, this was a ‘world-changing event,’ that would durably undermine the U.S. credibility and reliability, and bolster Russia to annex Crimea just a few months later.” The recent joint air strikes against Syria thus represent a payoff for Macron’s treatment of Trump. Both countries have changed Presidents; one has changed its behavior. Macron has publicly taken credit for the shift, saying, “Ten days ago, President Trump said the U.S. should withdraw from Syria. We convinced him it was necessary to stay.” He added, “We also persuaded him that we needed to limit the strikes to chemical weapons, after things got a little carried away over tweets.”
The question is not whether Trump and Macron are friends; it’s why, and to what end. Will Macron be able to leverage his social capital, so severely lacking in the Trump Administration, to nudge a country that overpowers his in both money and might toward some of his objectives? Macron is a tricky friend to have: after assuring Hollande, who had appointed him economics minister at the age of thirty-six, that he wouldn’t dream of running for President, he did exactly that, effectively pushing his old boss out of the race. (He broke the news by text message.) “La politique est un sport de combat,” a recent political memoir by Gaspard Gantzer, who was a top adviser to Hollande, offers a glimpse of the competitive advantage that Macron gleans from proximity. “He has one weakness: he’s vulnerable to pressure in one-on-one conversation,” Macron told Gantzer, as he came to know Hollande. “The last to speak often prevails.” One suspects that he’s made the same ruthlessly intimate appraisal of Trump.
