Macron Tries a Mea Culpa on NATO and Ukraine
But Paris’s latest push for European leadership and cooperation will face resistance.
French President Emmanuel Macron in Bratislava, Slovakia, last week.
Photographer: MICHAL CIZEK/AFPEmmanuel Macron’s love of sweeping, De Gaulle-style rhetoric has gotten the French leader into hot water with his allies — whether it was declaring NATO “brain dead,” arguing the need to not “humiliate” Russia after the Ukraine invasion, or casting Europeans as American “vassals.”
Which is perhaps why Macron is now trying a more conciliatory tack. As Ukraine prepares a counteroffensive to regain occupied territories, the French leader has voiced support for the country’s bid to eventually join both a reformed European Union and NATO — something unthinkable a few years ago. Brain dead no longer, NATO had been jolted to life by Vladimir Putin’s shock therapy, he said; EU enlargement, a process that in 2019 he warned would weaken the bloc, was now a question of security and stability. Macron even added in his speech in Bratislava last week that France should have listened more to Eastern European countries on Russia, delivering a subtle dig at his predecessors’ dismissal of Atlanticist voices in the region.