One of Donald Trump’s contributions to international diplomacy has been to make it more of a contact sport. Planning how to deal with his aggressive handshakes has become as much a part of preparing for a Trump summit as memorising the talking points.
Emmanuel Macron – who was Trump’s guest in Washington this week in the first state visit of the administration – decided to be proactive, gripping the US president’s palm with white-knuckle ferocity and leaving his left arm free for pats and hugs.
The French president can point to some benefits of his approach. Trump reserves most of his admiration for autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Mohammed bin Salman. Macron is the only democratically elected head of state Trump seems to genuinely admire, having convinced the touchy US president that he genuinely likes him – and that he, too, is a man of power.
That impression was conveyed last July in Paris where Trump was Macron’s guest at the grand Bastille Day ceremonies. Despite deep unease in the Pentagon, Trump is now insisting on holding his own military parade this Veterans Day.
The personal connection has allowed Macron to claim France to be the real bridge between Europe and the US. Both men used the words “special relationship” to describe their friendship – a stake in the heart of the central aspiration of British diplomacy.
But plunging into Trump’s embrace is a gamble in which the risk of humiliation is never far away. Inside the West Wing, Trump brushed what he claimed to be dandruff off Macron’s shoulder, in a supposedly solicitous and affectionate gesture that managed to be domineering and demeaning instead.
The traveling French press was aghast. If Tony Blair had been George Bush’s poodle, perhaps Macron was becoming Trump’s bichon frisé, muttered a veteran diplomatic correspondent who had flown in from Paris.
In the US press meanwhile, there was much talk of “bromance” and the traditional admiration for French style. The French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, was dismissive of such trivia. “Very Washingtonian to spend hours commenting insignificant and superficial details,” Araud complained in a tweet. “I can assure you that the bilateral talks at the [White House] were substantial and consequential.”
By the time Macron flew off on Wednesday evening, the substantive outcome of the trip was still hanging in the balance. The three issues at the top of the French president’s agenda all involved trying to coax Trump into changing his mind on gut decisions: withdrawal from Syria, steel tariffs on foreign producers including the EU, and most importantly, Trump’s vow to abrogate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
French officials claimed that Macron was winning the argument on Syria, having warned Trump that a hasty withdrawal could allow Isis to regroup and leave a swath of the Middle East under Iranian hegemony.
On steel tariffs, the friendly ambience of the visit left some hope that – once Angela Merkel has bolstered Macron’s message with her own visit to Washington on Friday – Trump might rethink his position.
On Iran, however, Macron was downbeat. He and Trump had discussed the fate of the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA) for a full hour. The French president had come up with the idea of a “new deal” that would address some of Trump’s complaints, such as the fact that some of the limitations the JCPOA put on Iran’s nuclear activities expire by 2025, and that it did not address ballistic missile development and Iran’s role in conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
In fact, the “new deal” did not really exist, but was rather a Macronian rebranding of previous European assurances that they would be tougher on Iran’s missiles and regional role, and would work to make nuclear restrictions on Iran more permanent – if only he would continue to abide by the JCPOA. A US withdrawal, they fear, would lead to the agreement’s collapse and ultimately a new war in the Middle East.
Macron’s gambit was based on the hope that the “new deal” would provide a face-saving means for Trump to stick to the old deal. By the end of the talks, the French president was not confident of success, telling reporters the US president “will get rid of this deal on his own, for domestic reasons”. Macron even claimed that, despite all appearances to the contrary, he had not even tried all that hard.
“My commitment, my action is not to try to convince President Trump to walk away from his campaign’s commitments or to change his mind. I’m not a masochist,” he said.
Many European diplomats, including some in the French foreign ministry, believed that Macron went too far to pander to Trump’s whims, and that the suggestion that sunset clauses in the JCPOA could be renegotiated called into question French commitment to the deal.
“He left himself exposed by acknowledging that there is something fundamentally flawed in the deal,” said Célia Belin, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The optics suggested Macron took a step towards Trump that validated him and his approach.”
While the diplomatic benefits are yet to be seen, there is no mistaking the political benefits of the trip for Macron.
He left behind train strikes in France, knowing that his high-profile international diplomacy is one of his strongest points with the French electorate. Polls have shown that two-thirds of French voters approve his action on the world stage.
Washington provided a grandiose canvas on which to paint his image as a young global leader. Macron’s speech to Congress on Wednesday – in fluent though heavily accented English – eloquently put the case for the international liberal order that Trump appears determined to take an axe to. The address received standing ovations from Republicans and Democrats alike – a rare phenomenon in recent years.
Back in France, Le Figaro praised him for “reinforcing his standing on the international scene”. If French commentators warned that Macron was at risk of flattering Trump for little immediate gain, the consensus was that it was a risk worth taking.