As French President Emmanuel Macron moves smoothly through his visit to the U.S., observers are still buzzing about the speech he delivered to the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week—a performance that led my longtime friend Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, to call Mr. Macron the leader of the free world.
The speech was a full-throated defense of liberal democracy, which for some sparked memories of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address. But there is a key difference. President Bush...