OPINION: The Macron-Trump bromance is heading for a bust-up
On Sunday President Emmanuel Macron will become the first French leader ever to make an official visit to Greenland. He will be the first EU leader to set foot in the vast Danish autonomous territory since Donald Trump began to make bullying comments about the manifest right of the United States to grab all the real estate on its northern borders.
Trolls were originally part of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian folklore. Macron is 'trolling' Trump – on his way to a G7 summit in Canada where he will meet the US President that he calls a 'friend'.
Something has changed in Macron's obsequious public approach to Trump in the last few weeks.
Other members of the French government – the Prime Minister François Bayrou and the foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot – have overtly criticised the US President. In March Bayrou said that Donald Trump planned to 'destroy the international order' and 'make the world even more dangerous'.
In public, Macron has been careful not to attack Trump by name. He claims a 'friendship' with the US president from their first terms of office. He said in March that he speaks to Trump at least once every two days.
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In private, Macron, I am told, has no illusions about the US leader. He returned from his visit to the White House in February disturbed by what he heard off-camera. He told senior political and military figures in France that his conversations with Trump and senior US administration figures had been 'bizarre, brutal and sometimes racist'.
Macron believes nonetheless – or once believed - that nothing can be gained by frontal attacks on Trump. Something useful might still be achieved, he once hoped, for Ukraine and for transatlantic trade, by a mixture of flattery, cajolery and a patient separation of facts from Trumpian obsessions and inventions.
Four months later, something is shifting. Macron has still not attacked Trump directly. But the French president is moving towards the kind of open challenge to the Trumpian worldview that is likely to strain their strange bromance.
On his visit to south-east Asia last month, Macron called on Asian countries to ally with Europe to resist bullying attempts by 'big powers' to build 'spheres of coercion'. Officially, he was talking about China and Russia. In the context, he was also clearly referring to the United States.
Speaking at a conference on the future of the oceans in Nice on Tuesday, Macron said that 'ocean depths are not for sale, any more than Greenland is for sale'. Referring to his visit to the Danish territory this weekend, he said that his intention was to make it clear that 'predation' and 'threats' were not acceptable.
Where all this is heading is unclear. Trump may not yet have noticed the change in Macron's tone. It may suit both men to continue the fable of their unlikely friendship. But I expect that we are heading for a bust-up.
The French President has almost two years left in power but no majority in parliament and little real influence on domestic policy. The second coming of Trump offered him vindication at home and pivotal, diplomatic influence abroad. His appeals in the last eight years for Europe to build its own 'strategic autonomy', independent of the US, have proved to be visionary.
Macron remains an important figure in Europe and internationally. It was the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen who invited him to 'troll Trump' by joining them in talks on the territory's future this weekend.
But Trump's return to office has also confronted the French President with his own contradictions. After appealing for years for the EU to move towards military and diplomatic autonomy, Macron finds that France's own future defence investment is compromised by the state budget deficits that have piled up during his eight years in office.
At the Nato summit in The Hague later this month, Trump will push for European countries to increase defence spending to 5 percent of GDP (while doing everything he can to undermine their economies). Macron has spoken vaguely of increasing the French defence budget to 3.5 percent of GDP but there is no obvious way that can happen without cutting social spending or missing France's deficit-cutting targets.
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In alliance with Sir Keir Starmer, Macron hoped that he could persuade Trump that Vladimir Putin had no plans to end the war in Ukraine. It was time to intensify international sanctions on Russia, not weaken them.
Trump seems to have accepted that his disjointed and floundering peace initiative is going nowhere. But there is no sign that he is willing to join the EU in new sanctions or that he is prepared to continue military aid to Ukraine.
On transatlantic trade, Trump continues to speak nonsense about the size of the US-EU trade deficit and refer to the EU as a 70-year-old conspiracy to damage the United States. The Trump State Department published an unhinged new doctrine on Europe last month in which France, Britain and Germany are America's enemies and Marine Le Pen and 'Christian Hungary' are America's friends.
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In sum, the chances of a big quarrel between the US and Europe in the next month are high. Trump has given way on China; he will be looking for a diversionary squabble elsewhere.
The French president, marginalised in domestic politics, is understandably tempted to prove that he still exists by playing a pivotal role in European and international affairs. But at some point soon he will have to make a clear choice.
Will he continue to humour and flatter Trump or will he stand up to him?
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