When France scored their first goal in the World Cup final,
the country’s President Emmanuel Macron leapt to his feet in delight. By the
end, having joined the defeated French players on the pitch, he looked
dejected. It was a scene that mirrors Macron’s own political travails on the
world stage — extensive travel, an energetic performance but still, in his
tussles with Russia, with the US or with Germany, coming off second best.
اضافة اعلان
Macron is now in the first year of his second term as
president. With Germany’s Angela Merkel out of the picture and the shrunken
island of Britain relegated beyond the EU inner circle, he is the preeminent
politician of Europe — one who believes passionately in Europe and wants to do
things differently. Yet,in the midst of immense challenges, he could not seem
to get enough people to agree with him.
No challenge has been as great as Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine. In the run-up to his election in April, Macron leveraged the
presidential office to project the image of a statesman, in contrast to
his rivals. But after his election, Macron has sought to be the main Western
interlocutor with Vladimir Putin, a role that has occasionally put him at odds
with the rest of Europe.
This month brought the latest spat. In an
interview, Macron suggested Russia ought to be offered security guarantees
as part of any future negotiations to end the war. “One of the essential points
we must address … is the (Russian) fear that NATO comes right up to its doors,”
he said. His comments drew a formal response from several EU countries,
including the three Baltic states, as well as of course Ukraine.
At the heart of this disagreement are two different
political visions of Russia’s place in or alongside Europe. The Baltic states,
Ukraine and other countries that feel vulnerable to Russian encroachment like
Poland see Russia as a straightforward threat, and want — indeed expect —
Western powers to contain that threat.
These states are concerned that France is implicitly
accepting the Russian narrative that NATO expansion caused the war. The former
Lithuanian foreign
minister noted that Russia has all the security guarantees it needs,
as long as it doesn't “attack, annex, or occupy its neighbors.”
Macron’s vision is different, recognizing, as he has said,
that Russia will not stop being a neighbor to Europe after the invasion, and
thus a security architecture is needed that doesn’t endlessly see Moscow as an
enemy.
Not only does that vision put him at odds with much of
Europe, but it doesn’t appear to have yielded any tangible results. For all his
conversations with Putin, Macron’s diplomacy did not stop the invasion, and
doesn’t appear to have brought about any tempering of the war, at least
publicly. Putin may have listened politely, but his mind was evidently not
changed.
With Germany’s Angela Merkel out of the picture and the shrunken island of Britain relegated beyond the EU inner circle, he is the preeminent politician of Europe — one who believes passionately in Europe and wants to do things differently. Yet, in the midst of immense challenges, he could not seem to get enough people to agree with him.
The same is true on the other side of the Atlantic. Macron
was in
the US for talks at the end of November. It was something of a charm
offensive, but at the heart of it was, again, a major point of contention
between two powers, the price of American gas.
Macron is angry because the US sells its own stocks of
liquefied natural gas to Europe for almost four times its price in the US. The
US, Macron says, “is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling to us at a
high price.” That is not how allies are meant to behave, he says, especially
when they are meant to be showing a united front to Russia. On this, at
least, most
Europeans would agree.
Yet despite expansive talk from Joe Biden on close ties and
the war in Ukraine, there was little movement on Macron’s central contention:
standing shoulder to shoulder with Kyiv is exacting a far heavier toll on
Europeans than on Americans.
Even closer to home, Macron is having limited success. The
relationship between Paris and Berlin is essential to the wider EU, but Macron
and Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, cannot seem to see eye to eye.
In particular, they appear to be on completely different
pages when it comes to defense. Macron has long been a proponent of European
countries being less reliant on the US for defense.
If anything ought to have convinced Berlin of the wisdom of
such autonomy, it would have been a major war on European soil. But from Paris’
perspective, Scholz is prevaricating: on the one hand, suddenly announcing a
historic change in February and spending €100 billion to modernize
Germany’s forces. On the other hand, Germany suddenly announced in October
that it would create an air
and missile defense system together with 14 other NATO countries –
conspicuously leaving out France, the EU’s only nuclear-armed power. Even when
Macron’s arguments are accepted, his solutions are not.
As with the French performance on the pitch, Macron’s lack
of success is not down to a lack of talent. On the contrary, he has been
energetic in his diplomacy and, particularly in the US, tried to get his
message across both to politicians and the public. But there are philosophical
divergences in the French worldview, and the political obstacles — in Moscow,
in Washington, in Berlin — are simply too great for one man or one country.
Politics, like football, is a team sport.
Faisal Al Yafai is currently writing a book on
the Middle East and is a frequent commentator on international
TV news networks. He has worked for news outlets such as The Guardian and the
BBC, and reported on the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia
and Africa. Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai
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