Americans should have been surprised that the French broadly approved President Emmanuel Macron’s invitation to President Donald Trump as guest of honor for the July 14 Bastille Day celebration.
Unlike what was seen at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, there were no widespread protests against Trump.
Don’t the French disdain Trump, and aren’t they incredulous that the supposedly great American democracy could have elected him?
As a sheer political calculation, wasn’t Macron taking a large, unnecessary risk in the invitation? Of damaging his support in public opinion and even among his majority in parliament?
Wasn’t Macron also splitting from the European consensus at the G-20 that made Trump persona non grata?
There was of course a ready-made reason for the invitation: the 100-year anniversary of America’s entry into World War I on the side of France and Britain against Germany. Furthermore, American military personnel were invited to march in the annual martial display down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees that remains a staple of French patriotic feeling.
Macron made a heartfelt speech emphasizing the Franco-American alliance and the strong affinities between the two nations. Trump’s presence was “a sign of a friendship across the ages.”
He thanked “the United States for a choice it made 100 years ago.”
President Charles de Gaulle, by contrast, always expressed gratitude for America’s crucial aid but added pointedly that it took three years for American forces to arrive in WWI, in 1917, and five years in World War II, June 1944, D-Day.
What was Macron up to?
Quickly-written editorials said that Macron wanted a “reset” of his initially stormy personal relationship with Trump.
Considerably more was involved than that, however. Macron has already shown that he thinks strategically and geopolitically. He has a classic European sense of the long term: that countries and peoples operate with long memories built of turning points in their experience.
Macron, as a French leader, has a Gaullist sense of the importance of history in global politics and of national political cultures in relations between states. He is the anti-Trump. International relations is not simply about winning and losing, about getting the best deals today. Macron has an idea of France in her historic “special role” as a permanent counter-example to American can-do impatience.
In short, this was more than Macron trying to make up with Trump. He was representing not only himself and his government -- the French president was also representing France and its historic relationship with Europe’s crucial ally in global affairs.
By inviting Trump to the Bastille Day ceremonies and making a great show of courtesy and respect, Macron was legitimizing Trump, who is, whatever his unsavory character, the president of the United States of America.
Macron was, as the Chinese say, giving Trump “face.”
Once again France is Europe’s diplomatic leader, with Macron setting an intelligent, realistic example for Europeans in general. Trump is the American president and, as Americans say, deal with it. Europeans must respect what the American electoral system has wrought.
In a small way -- the comparison is overblown but instructive -- Macron’s legitimation of Trump recalled two greater historical moments. First, de Gaulle’s legitimation of a rehabilitated West Germany (the 1963 Elysee Treaty of Friendship signed with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer). Second, President Francois Mitterrand’s legitimation of German unification in 1990, which occurred despite his initial worries and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s strong opposition.
In all three cases, France is playing its part. Macron’s invitation to Trump, de Gaulle would have said, is France behaving like France.
At the same time, Macron is setting up another Gaullist or Mitterrand-style strategic policy: keeping the United States at a distance. Friendship and alliance with the United States need not mean subservience to U.S. foreign policy. An independent French and European foreign policy is good for Europe and, if only Washington will act with geopolitical rational sense, good for the United States as well.
