Here are Macron’s successes and failures in foreign policy
The Politico.eu site, usually lavish with praise for President Macron, reviewed the French president's successes and failures in foreign policy. The article by Tino Oldani for Italy Today
Turning against Angela Merkel is never good. This is true even if your name is Emmanuel Macron and you are convinced that you can challenge her not only on the rewriting of the EU treaties, but also in foreign policy. Reading is believing the broad counter-analysis that the Politico.eu website dedicated to the interview given a few days ago by Macron to the magazine of a French study center, Le Grand Continent, and published by several newspapers in Europe, including Corriere della sera. A fluvial interview (12 thousand words, Politico specifies), in which Macron argued that Europe can do without the United States, relaunching its project of European "sovereignty" and "strategic autonomy". Ambitious goals, but not at all shared by Angela Merkel's Germany, as confirmed within 24 hours by the dry response of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (known as AKK), German Defense Minister: "Europe will have to rely on the United States for safety also for the near future ».
WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN GERMANY AND FRANCE
We gave an account of this controversial exchange between AKK and Macron on ItaliaOggi two days ago. The Politico.eu site, usually lavish with praise for the French president, has gone further, and has seized the ball to review the successes and failures of the French president in foreign policy. With a resounding final rejection. The distancing, which in certain passages knows so much about taking a piss, begins in the title: «Emmanuel Macron, think-tanker in chief». The reason? Of course, the site admits, the French president is a brilliant politician, gifted with great eloquence, a character that European journalists really like for the originality of the proposals. But, on balance, his provocative theses "make him look more like a think-tanker in chief than the commander-in-chief of the EU's only nuclear power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council."
THE POLITICAL ANALYSIS ON MACRON
In support of the dismissal, Politico's counter-analysis reports the judgment of Tara Varma, head of the Parisian office of the EU Council for external relations, who does not hide her skepticism about Europe's strategic autonomy from the US: "The commitments undertaken from France they are too ambitious and, although they touch on major issues such as Iran, climate, trade and Covid, they have not managed to convince the United States to share them and work on them ". Macron did not succeed with Donald Trump, and insisting on strategic autonomy with respect to the US, he risks having the same result with Joe Biden, "despite the fact that the new US president has already committed to working with traditional American allies and returning to the forums international ".
RECOVERY AND STOP
As for the rest of the world, Politico argues, the French president's hyperactivism can boast only one positive result: having convinced Merkel to give life to the Recovery Fun d as the first episode of common debt. For the rest, it's all a succession of failures. Examples? Macron flaunts his success in convincing China to stay in the Paris climate agreement. But it is pure fiction for the Chinese researcher Antoine Bondaz, who works in Paris in the Foundation for strategic research: «China's commitments are long-term, and now they don't have a significant impact on its economy. If Beijing has remained in the agreement, it is only because it has been able to feed the narrative that the US is unilateral, while China is multilateral ”.
NAGORNO CHAPTER
Other failures listed on the site: «Despite Macron's efforts to get involved, France was cut off from the ceasefire agreement reached earlier this month in Nagorno-Karabakh, where Vladimir Putin and Recep Erdogan ». Ditto in Lebanon, a country in which France had in the past a recognized influence, while now "the French attempt to sponsor and mediate a solution to the country's political crisis has failed."
DOSSIER TURKEY
Then there is the clash with Erdogan's Turkey, accused by Macron of hegemonic expansionism in the eastern Mediterranean. But even here, Politico recalls, "the main allies of NATO and the EU have done without the French hard line, adopting a more cautious approach in expressing support for Greece and Cyprus in their disputes with Turkey".
FLOP IN LIBYA FOR MACRON?
Macron's personal activism has also been a loser in Libya, where France has shown that it has oil aims in contrast with the interests of Italy: "By breaking the European ranks, it gave support to General Khalifa Haftar, with a maneuver that did not it has borne fruit. The Turkish military intervention made Haftar's rival prevail, that is Fayez al Sarraj, head of the government recognized by the UN ».
RELATIONS BETWEEN MACRON AND PUTIN
The relationship with Putin is also judged clumsy on a European level: "Macron's decision to continue the dialogue with Russia has not only injected mistrust into its relations with the Eastern European and Baltic states, but has yet to produce results," as the French Defense Minister himself admitted ».
ATOMIC BOMB
"The French put their money where their language and their interests are: in the African countries of the Sahel, in the Mediterranean, in the Gulf and even in Central Europe," Tobias Schneider of the Global public policy institute in Berlin told Politico . "Their agenda is ambitious, but on balance France turns out to be a medium power, which struggles to shape concrete results compared to the great ambitions declared at the outset". And for a country that prides itself on having the atomic bomb, the definition of "medium power" sounds like a calculated and definitive mockery.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ecco-successi-e-fallimenti-di-macron-in-politica-estera/ on Sun, 29 Nov 2020 08:10:28 +0000.