Sumantra Maitra devotes a Federalist column to interesting pronouncements from French Presdent Emmanual Macron.
Everyone in Berlin, London, and Washington’s policy circles know it to be true, but no one has said what French President Emmanual Macron has out loud, except for President Trump. Much as it pains me, sitting here in England, to say that a Frenchman is correct, he is.
It might be a subtle French bid for Euro leadership and hegemony, but Macron’s recent concern in an interview about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was as subtle as using a flamethrower to light a Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir candle.
Macron was positively Trumpian about a few things. When asked what is Europe’s endgame, Macron said Europe is not just a market, but a community: “Europe has lost track of its history. Europe has forgotten that it is a community, by increasingly thinking of itself as a market, with expansion as its end purpose…A market is not a community. A community is stronger: it has notions of solidarity, of convergence, which we’ve lost, and of political thought.”
He then pointed out that it is logical that America would refocus on China, an ever-growing revisionist hegemon in the Pacific and a threat far bigger than anything in the Western Hemisphere, and incomparably large compared to some tribals killing each other in the Middle East.
Macron also argued that the “End of History” is bunk. It’s over, much though some might try to return to the heady days of the early 1990s.
