Correspondence Dan Alexe // How Macron "set the bar very high" for Trump, and Keir Starmer can't match him
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will arrive in Washington today for talks with Donald Trump, and some British officials fear that Emmanuel Macron “set the bar so high” in his visit to the White House on Monday that Starmer will struggle to match him. Combining flattery with detached politeness and affectionate irony, the French president presented Trump with his plan for European security and the defence of Ukraine. The success was so great and unexpected that, in a Europe in the throes of crisis, the French president is on his way to become the leader the continent needs.
Macron's White House visit was so successful that it aroused envy in many European capitals, many feeling that they would not be able to put on a similar show in Trump's privacy, patting his knee, holding his hand or interrupting him when he announced erroneous figures.
Macron, who has tried to heal the transatlantic rift caused by the war in Ukraine, was even praised by the US president as a "very special man", an affection and respect that Trump had only shown so far when mentioning people like Elon Musk or Putin.
The truth is that Emmanuel Macron was the first Western political leader to raise, more than a year ago, the possibility of sending international ground troops to Ukraine. Now, with a little backlash, it's funny to see how right France was, despite the laughter of other Europeans, especially from the eastern EU: reducing as much as possible dependence on the US, trade protection and supporting EU preference, nuclear energy, industrial policy, European defence and so on.
Then, the military industry and -- let's not forget -- the fact that France is now, after Brexit, the only nuclear power in the EU, and even, after Angela Merkel's withdrawal from politics, Macron, in his second term, remained the leader who most supports the idea of a united Europe with its military structures, no longer dependent on the US.
Many Europeans (again, especially in the East), accustomed to what is called "French bashing" and the decline of the French language, remind me of revelling in France's defeat by Germany in World War II and how the French were cowards and incompetent, instead of keeping in mind at the same time that France is the only nuclear power in the EU.
And to give just the case of Romania, for reasons of confused identity, Macron has become more unbearable for many Romanians than Trump, Bolsonaro or the Argentinean Milei, while Romania is a member of la Francophonie, and not the 51st US state.
„French bashing”
To remind you again: in Romania (a member country of «la Francophonie»), as in a good part of Eastern Europe where schools nowadays teach only English everywhere, many find it intelligent and comical to laugh at France repeatedly.
But Macron's France is one of the main supporters of Ukraine, and Kiev announced, for example, when the Russians left Snake Island, that they did so because they could not cope with Ukrainian fire with French Caesar cannons.
Macron gave Ukraine two dozen of such cannons. With a length of 10 m., each such Caesar cannon costs 5 million euros, and several dozen Ukrainian artillerymen continue to train with them in the south of France, on the largest shooting range in Europe.
In fact, even today you can't make a career in the EU and NATO structures (which Macron diagnosed as being in "clinical death") if you don't know French... but superficially Americanized Easterners snort when they hear about France, and even boast that they don't know a word in French except for "oui" and "c'est la vie".
Let's conclude: France is a nuclear power, with veto power at the UN, and French is a mandatory language in NATO (along with English), and to top it all off, Romania and the Republic of Moldova are members of the Francophonie, not the Commonwealth.
Then, laughing at the French and preferring to learn only American English, Romanians forget that French was the basis of the modern Romanian language, since 1848, and that Romanian is the only language so fertilized by French that it even took over adverbs like "déjà", making you wonder how we spoke before.
