WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Macron’s trip couldn’t have been better for the French President and what he represents. As Europe’s last high priest of globalism, Macron used the invitation from President Trump to undermine his entire election campaign, administrative agenda, and most importantly: his supporter base.
The U.S. Congress gave Macron over a dozen standing ovations for doing so, celebrating his insistence that the United States should rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, and that the toxic Iran nuclear deal was and is a good idea. In other words Macron just spat in the President’s face and Trump appears to have licked his lips and accepted it. At least for now.
The backdrop to the first state visit for the Trump administration has been discussed at some length: Trump likes pomp, he loved the way France treated him, Macron knows how to flatter him, etc, ad nauseum. But few of Trump’s friends have seemed to recognise what Macron was doing this week, and for whom.
The European Union is faltering across the nation-states of the continent, with euroscepticism and nationalism continuing its ascendancy since the Brits led the charge with Brexit. Recent polls show the Sweden Democrats again on the ascendancy, the Alternative for Germany party impressively holding up against establishment attacks, and even the Front National — who were defeated by Macron — reorganising and re-energising.
Spain’s Vox Party is rising, albeit slowly. The “European Union” is becoming a dirty phrase in Poland. George Soros has just been chased out of Hungary on the back of a whopping election victory for the migration hawk Victor Orban.
While Europe thought “Mutti” Angela Merkel would remain their torchbearer in the post Brexit years, even she was unable to form a stable government at her last election. So it falls to the French to “save Europe” (or rather, the European Union).
Call me a jingoist but I scarcely think anyone in Brussels is beaming with delight at that thought. The fact that President Trump would seek the allegiance and alliance of a globalist “citizen of Europe” like Macron should be disturbing to even the most establishment of Republicans. But all of them were on their feet — in the White House as well as in Congress — cheering as the new French President and his geriatric teacher-wife paraded around with Donald and Melania before delivering a smashing rebuff to their polite invitation.
Macron used his address to Congress to slam “the illusion of nationalism” — quite an illogical feat for a man whose own republic was borne out of the ideal of a sovereign nation state, with assistance from America in its founding, and again in the wars of the early 21st century. Macron is the President who would throw such friendships and legacies away in pursuit of something larger, but with less meaning: global governance.
Issuing a warning over politicians who “play with fear and anger”, Macron stressed the importance of pursuing a climate change agenda, multilateralism, and stated: “…closing the door to the world will not stop the evolution of the world”.
The globalist parlour trick of presuming isolation on the basis of domestic prioritisation was the key theme. It wasn’t just insulting and disingenuous. It was nasty and evil.
The world’s “evolution” since the beginning of the 20th century has been one of power being leeched away from the people, and handed over to unelected elites or committees. It’s the European Union way, after all. It’s in the bloc’s DNA.
The only saving grace about the last few days is that Kanye West had the kindness to intervene with a cultural distraction.
WHY THIS IS ALL BRITAIN’S FAULT
American post-war imperialism has set its face against the British Empire, Commonwealth, and its interests. No one could expect anything else of a sovereign nation, especially of a young, ascendant global power. Especially with the world’s finest Empire in its path, to whom it was once subservient, and which had an unparalleled naval presence on the world stage.
America’s founders warned against the empire-building philosophy the United States has pursued since the early 20th Century, but the temptation for hegemony appears to have been too much to withstand. A Britain facing managed decline was leaving a vacuum. It was poetic for her greatest son to fill the void.
Now that relationship looks tarnished for at least this administration, as Prime Minister Theresa May allows her government to be dictated to by the social justice warrior left. The litany of public pronouncements against Trump by members of Her Majesty’s Government, as well as Members of Parliament and the state broadcaster, the BBC, has left a sourness towards the British in Washington, D.C., the likes of which probably haven’t been felt since 1812 (ok, maybe that’s a stretch).
Now the Americans are turning to one of the world’s least reliable allies: France.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the French. But when I say “French” I really mean FRENCH. I don’t mean “citizens of the world”. I mean Jeanne d’Arc and her modern equivalent Marion Marechal Le Pen.
Not De Gaulle, nor Mitterand, Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, nor now Macron.
The “special relationship” Britain enjoyed with the United States was one borne not just out of a common language and common values, but also a common strength that the Americans found lacking in other European nations, and in a need to control another cultural, military, and economic power that posed a threat to its own aspirations (and realisations) of hegemony in a post-war world.
Some will no doubt blame Brexit for Britain’s reduced role with the United States. It’s a lazy explanation that ignores our soaring crime rates, our tendency to police speech, our failure to tackle Islamic extremism, and the erosion of civil liberties. We have not just failed to stand with America, but we’ve failed to stand for almost anything America now stands for: the ideals we bequeathed them in the first instance.
Theresa May is one of the greatest arbiters of British decline. Ironic when you think of how quickly she’ll be forgotten. The silent assassin of a Britain which, in a post-Brexit world should be re-asserting itself as a power, not as a follower nor an observer. She is worse than Heath, Wilson, Major, or Blair. But her Britain is one of virtue signalling.
I have to confess I am however pleased to see Macron rather than a British Prime Minister attempt to be paraded around Washington, D.C. as a lapdog, which Tony Blair was so adept at. The only difference is Macron didn’t behave like a lapdog. He behaved like Hugh Grant as prime minister in Love Actually, when he tells the American President off:
I love that word “relationship”. Covers all manner of sins, doesn’t it? I fear that this has become a bad relationship. A relationship based on the President taking exactly what he wants and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to, erm… Britain. We may be a small country but we’re a great one, too. The country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter. David Beckham’s right foot. David Beckham’s left foot, come to that. And a friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the President should be prepared for that.
It does strike me as rather embarrassing for Britain that we weren’t even good enough to be the poodle this time around, and for that I blame Theresa May. But President Trump, for the sake of the MAGA-agenda and for his base, needs to guard closely against President Macron and the European Union’s intended malign influence on the United States.
Nothing but bad things can come of his so-called “bromance” with the French President. And it seems no one in the White House is willing to tell him so.
Raheem Kassam is the editor in chief of Breitbart London and author of Enoch Was Right: Rivers of Blood 50 Years On