Spirited, disruptive, impotent? Five years of Macron on the international stage

Right up to the end of his term in office, France’s youngest leader since Napoleon has stuck to the role he fashioned for himself after his momentous victory in 2017: that of a mediator-in-chief, placing French diplomacy – and himself – firmly in the spotlight.

While Macron’s last mission – staving off Europe’s biggest military invasion since World War II – ended in failure, it was not for lack of trying. 

The French leader sought by every means to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even as US officials warned that war was imminent. Macron rushed to Moscow in early February, pleading for peace during marathon talks with his Russian counterpart at a now-famously gargantuan table. He returned with Putin’s agreement to sit down for talks with his US counterpart, perhaps believing he had secured peace for our time.  

Those hopes were dashed less than two weeks later, first with Russia’s recognition of the Donbas’ separatist republics, then with its invasion of Ukraine.

The crushing setback came on the heels of another French debacle on the international stage: the announcement, on February 17, of France’s precipitous pullout from Mali, where French troops had been bogged down in a seemingly intractable nine-year fight with jihadist militants roaming the Sahel region.

While the twin setbacks cannot, alone, sum up Macron’s diplomatic efforts, they symbolise France’s impotence on the international stage – despite the best efforts of an energetic president who sought to establish and cultivate close rapports with the powers that be, friends and foes alike.

An unlikely bromance

No foreign leader has Macron tried harder to sway than Russia’s Putin, whom he treated to a grand reception at the Palace of Versailles in May 2017, just two weeks after taking office. He hosted Putin again two years later, this time at the Fort de Brégançon, French presidents’ summer retreat. 

“A Russia that turns its back on Europe is not in our interest,” Macron stated at the time. But his guest proved less forthcoming, rarely missing a chance for a dig at his host. When quizzed on the heavy-handed arrest of protesters in the Russian capital, Putin quipped: “We don’t want a situation like the Gilets jaunes (France’s ‘Yellow Vest’ protesters) in Moscow.”

Macron adopted much the same strategy with another demanding guest, former US president Donald Trump. Just weeks after Putin’s Versailles treatment, the French president pulled all the stops to impress America’s First Couple, hosting them for dinner at the Eiffel Tower and making Trump the guest of honour at the annual Bastille Day military parade. 

At first, Macron’s charm offensive appeared to work as Trump showered his French host with praise and the media spoke of a new “bromance”. There were exaggerated handshakes and double-cheek kisses when the pair met again at the White House the next year. But for all the effusion, Macron proved powerless to stop Trump from pulling out of the Paris climate accord and the Iranian nuclear deal.

With America withdrawing into Trumpian isolationism and Britain consumed by the Brexit saga, Macron sensed an opportunity to step into a leadership role and offset France’s relative decline on the international stage. The first half of his mandate was marked by a succession of bold and impassioned speeches, in which he sought to cast himself as a champion of multilateralism and the progressive camp, famously challenging the world, in a play on Trump’s best-known slogan, to “Make Our Planet Great Again”.

NATO ‘brain-dead’

On top of the festering crisis in eastern Ukraine and the standoff over Iran’s nuclear programme, France’s mediator-in-chief took on a string of diplomatic challenges, attempting – and most often failing – to break deadlocks in Lebanon and Libya. In the process, he did not shy away from controversy – recently becoming the first Western leader to visit Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman since the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

To critics of his visit to Jeddah last December, he said: “Who can think for one second that we can help Lebanon and preserve peace and stability in the Middle East without speaking to Saudi Arabia?”

It was a trademark move by a president keen to translate his “disruptive” brand of politics into exploits on the global stage. Macron’s assertiveness frequently landed him into diplomatic spats – particularly with populist and authoritarian leaders he was prone to lecturing. Frequent sparring partners included Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, arguably his principal bête noire, who questioned the French president’s “mental health” during a bitter row about France’s secular rules in 2020.

Macron was equally capable of annoying his own allies, not least when he described the NATO military alliance as “brain-dead” during a 2019 interview with The Economist, drawing a chorus of protests from Washington and European capitals.

Surprisingly, relations with America briefly hit a historic low under Trump’s successor Joe Biden, amid a furious dispute over submarine contracts. Paris had hoped for a fresh start with the Democrat’s election in 2020, but those hopes were dashed the next year when the US and Britain secretly negotiated a pact with Australia that cost France a submarine contract worth billions of dollars. The snub came on the heels of a precipitous US withdrawal from Afghanistan that left America’s European allies – let alone Afghans themselves – feeling they had been left high and dry.

France responded to the submarine snub by recalling its ambassador from the US – an unprecedented gesture by America’s “oldest ally”. It would take a 30-minute phone call between Macron and Biden, followed by a meeting in Rome, for the two to patch up, though French analysts said America’s “stab in the back” would leave deep scars.

Macron enjoyed greater success in Africa, where he pursued the fight against jihadism launched by his predecessor, Français Hollande. Despite the recent setbacks in Mali, where a military junta hostile to France precipitated the departure of French troops, Macron succeeded in persuading other European countries to help shoulder the burden and contribute troops to an international force.

The French president was perhaps most successful in his other African initiatives, including his efforts to reach out to countries beyond France’s traditional sphere of influence. In July 2018, he won plaudits for engaging with civil society leaders during a trip to Nigeria, which saw him visit an iconic Lagos nightclub founded by Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti. 

European aspirations frustrated

Macron also made significant progress in acknowledging dark chapters in France’s troubled history in Africa. In May 2021, after more than two decades of bitter relations between France and Rwanda, he gave a landmark speech in Kigali recognising French “responsibility” in the 1994 genocide of Tutsis. His speech followed the release of a comprehensive report on the failures of France’s peacekeeping mission at the time, which Macron commissioned.

Touching on another highly sensitive subject, Macron announced the establishment of a “memories and truth” commission to review France’s colonial history in Algeria and find ways to address long-standing grievances. He ordered the declassification of parts of France’s national archives on the Algerian war of independence and sought “forgiveness” from Algerians who fought for France and were abandoned after the war, promising reparations. 

As Macron entered the last stretch of his mandate, France’s rotating presidency of the European Union offered a chance to focus anew on his principal foreign-policy objective: advancing European integration and the development of a “strategic autonomy” for the EU. 

In one of his first moves as president, Macron had renamed France’s foreign ministry the “Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs”. A passionate europhile, he has made no secret of his hopes that the EU will one day have a single budget, shared fiscal rules and, above all, a common defence. While he failed at first to get Germany’s Angela Merkel to back his agenda, the Covid-19 ultimately came to his help, persuading France’s EU partners to sign up for a massive recovery plan and issue mutualised debt.

On the eve of France’s EU presidency, Macron appeared to shift his focus on security, calling for greater convergence in foreign and defence policy. “We need to shift from a Europe that cooperates within its own borders to a Europe that is powerful in the world, fully sovereign, free to make its own choices and master of its own destiny,” he told a press conference in December. 

Three months on, with a devastating war unfolding on the EU’s doorstep, Germany’s historic decision to boost its military spending suggests a potential game-changer. Whether the tragedy in Ukraine will favour Macron’s push for a common European defence capacity, or bolster the US-led NATO alliance instead, remains to be seen.