French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Donald Trump meet at the White House in Washington, on Feb. 24.Brian Snyder/Reuters
Much of the Western world watched in horror this week as the U.S. sided with Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine, turning its back on its values.
Could there have been a starker symbol of Washington’s betrayal of the rules-based international order that it helped create than its sudden willingness to hand Vladimir Putin such a huge propaganda win and spare the Russian President the unanimous global censure he deserves?
As evidenced by the pressure he put on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a deal granting America access to Ukraine’s critical minerals, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to have embraced a mercantilist approach to foreign policy that abandons long-standing allies and principles in favour of purely monetary considerations.
The fear in Western capitals is that, in his impatience to end the war in Ukraine, Mr. Trump will jeopardize global security while allowing Mr. Putin to re-enter Washington’s good graces without placing constraints on his behaviour – and that his threat to reduce the costly U.S. military presence in Europe will only embolden Mr. Putin in the future.
The state of alarm in Europe is such that the continent’s most experienced Trump whisperer was dispatched by his peers to Washington on Monday to warn the U.S. President against rushing into a peace deal that might only lead to a bigger war later on.
French President Emmanuel Macron had already demonstrated a knack for pushing Mr. Trump’s buttons (in a good way) after his 2017 election by making him a guest of honour at France’s annual Bastille Day military parade and treating him like royalty. He repeated the exercise by inviting Mr. Trump to the December reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris, giving him the best seat in the house to view the spectacular show.
Though their relationship has had its rough patches, Mr. Trump has an obvious soft spot for Mr. Macron that stems in part from the U.S. President’s envy of all things French. He had, after all, decorated his apartment in New York’s Trump Tower to emulate the Palace of Versailles. And he copied the Bastille Day parade with his own Fourth of July celebrations that included tanks, fighter jets and troops decked out in MAGA paraphernalia.
This week’s rekindling of the Macron-Trump bromance in real time at the White House was hard to watch at times, as the two men fawned over one another. Even when the incurably tactile French leader grabbed Mr. Trump’s knee and crisply corrected the U.S. President’s misrepresentation of European aid to Ukraine as just “loans,” Mr. Trump let it slide. “I have no idea what he is saying, but that is the most elegant, beautiful language,” he gushed after Mr. Macron replied to a reporter’s question in French.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer could not woo Mr. Trump in the language of Molière, but he did tear a page from Mr. Macron’s playbook by arriving at the White House on Thursday bearing an invitation from King Charles III for an “unprecedented” second state visit to his country. That was after Mr. Starmer announced an increase in British defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 and 3 per cent by 2030, and promised to contribute British troops to a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine once a permanent ceasefire is reached.
The efforts of Mr. Macron and Mr. Starmer to ingratiate themselves to Mr. Trump will have been worth it if they lead him to agree to provide U.S. security guarantees to Ukraine. That would deter Mr. Putin from violating a future peace deal like he did with the 2014 and 2015 Minsk accords that sought to end the fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
“I think the initiative of the President is a very positive one, but my message was to say, ‘be careful,’ because we need something substantial for Ukraine, for the security of Europe and France,” Mr. Macron told Fox News after meeting Mr. Trump at the White House. “Be careful because in 2014 we had a ceasefire with Russia. And I can tell you by experience, because I was in charge with Germany to follow up the ceasefire in its respect, it was violated every time by Russia, and we didn’t react, all of us.”
Mr. Macron also called the deal granting the U.S. access to Ukraine’s critical minerals “one of the best ways to have the U.S. commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty.” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has insisted on a joint U.S.-Ukraine fund that would devote revenues from Ukraine’s critical minerals and other natural resources to the country’s reconstruction, and not (as Mr. Trump has suggested) go toward recouping U.S aid to Ukraine.
Even so, it will take plenty of Trump-whispering yet to secure Ukraine’s sovereignty.