In the Normandy sunlight, before surviving American veterans who eight decades ago helped turn the tide of the war against Hitler, President Emmanuel Macron of France spoke last week of the “bond of blood shed for freedom” that unites to his country with the United States.
It is a bond that dates back to the founding of the United States in 1776 and the decisive French support for American independence from the British. Tempestuous, often tense as France chafes at postwar American leadership in Europe, ties between Paris and Washington are nonetheless resilient.
President Biden’s five-day stay in France, an exceptionally long visit for an American president, especially in an election year, is a powerful testament to that friendship. But it illustrates its double-edged nature. French gratitude for American sacrifice competes, as always, uncomfortably with Gaullist unease at any hint of submission.
Those competing aspects will form the backdrop to a lavish state dinner at the Elysee Palace on Saturday, when Macron will reciprocate the state visit Biden arranged for him to the White House in December 2022, the first of his administration.
The toasts and bonhomie will not completely mask the tensions between Washington and Paris: over the war in Gaza, how best to support Ukraine and the unpredictable ways in which Macron is trying to assert France’s independence from the United States.
No recent French president has been as insistent as Macron in declaring the need for Europe’s “strategic autonomy” and insisting that it “should never be a vassal of the United States.” Yet he has stood shoulder to shoulder with Biden in viewing Ukraine’s fight for freedom against Russia as nothing less than a battle for European freedom, an extension of the fight for freedom that led Allied forces to scale the cliffs. from Pointe du Hoc in 1944.
“You can’t help but see the parallel,” Macron said last week in a television interview, portraying Ukraine as “a people facing a power that I wouldn’t compare to Nazi Germany, since the same ideology does not exist, but a power imperialist that has trampled international law.”
Still, when the cameras are off, American officials speak privately about their French counterparts in tones of blinding exasperation. French analysts express frustration at what they see as the Biden administration’s authoritarian approach to transatlantic leadership.
Charles A. Kupchan, a former European adviser to President Barack Obama and now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that “the political mess that the United States finds itself in right now” is forcing European leaders to calibrate “whether they can or “They should put all their marbles in the United States basket.”
This applies particularly to Ukraine, which former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has not supported in his war with Russia. “In some ways,” Kupchan said, “there may have been too much American leadership because if it happens that the United States pulls away from Ukraine and Europe needs to fill the void, that’s not going to be easy.”
In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Biden reflected on an initial conversation with Macron after he defeated Trump. “I said, ‘Well, America is back,’” Biden said. “Macron looked at me and said: ‘For how long? For how long?'”
Behind that question was another: How much American presence in Europe does Macron’s France really want?
The differences were on display most prominently in February, when Macron surprised both American and European allies by offering the possibility of sending NATO troops to Ukraine, something Biden has flatly ruled out for fear that the war would become a direct conflict with a country. Russia with nuclear energy.
“There are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine,” Biden declared in his State of the Union address just days after Macron’s test balloon. “And I am determined to keep it that way.”
The two leaders are a study in contrasts. Biden, 81, has spent more than half a century in Washington and is a creature of the American establishment who believes passionately in the US-led order created after World War II. When France opposed the American invasion of Iraq, she was outraged at seeing an unacceptable act of defiance by a country that owed its freedom to the United States.
Macron, 46, is a restless 21st-century president, eager to reassert French leadership on the European stage and willing to provoke his friends with defiant ideas and statements, suggesting in 2019 that NATO had suffered a “brain death.” .
Even in the run-up to Biden’s visit, there appeared to be some back-and-forth over the possibility of France sending military trainers to Ukraine. In his television interview, Macron said it was not “taboo” and that he believed sending such trainers to western Ukraine, rather than to combat zones in the east, was not an aggressive measure that would lead to escalation. with Russia. .
Officials close to Macron said no announcement of such a decision was imminent. Mr. Biden almost certainly would not have liked him.
Macron, however, offered to train a brigade of 4,500 Ukrainian soldiers. These troops are currently trained by Western instructors outside of Ukraine.
Gérard Araud, France’s former ambassador to Washington, said the two presidents differ not only on the theoretical Western troops on the ground, but also on where and how the war should be ended.
“An explanation between the two heads of state is more necessary than ever,” said Araud. “Not only is the conduct of the war at stake, but also the prospect of a negotiation after November 5 if Biden is re-elected. What are the West’s real war goals beyond the empty rhetoric about Ukraine’s 1991 borders?
The chemistry between the two leaders generally seems good. “Personally, they get along very well,” said Matthias Matthijs, an associate professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
But points of tension remain, he said, not only over Ukraine but also over the Inflation Reduction Act signed by Biden that provides broad subsidies for electric vehicles and other clean technologies. Europeans consider the measure to be unfair competition.
France has also been frustrated by the level of American support for Israel in the war in Gaza. The complaints center on the perception that the United States has failed to stop the Israeli advance toward Rafah and rein in Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. But they also include Washington’s strong rejection for now of recognition of a Palestinian state and its hesitations about how Gaza should be governed after the war.
“Arab states have never been so involved and so willing to normalize relations with Israel if a credible path to a Palestinian state is established,” said a senior French official who, in line with diplomatic practice, requested anonymity. “It’s frustrating.”
France has not recognized a Palestinian state, as four other European countries did last month, but it did vote at the United Nations in May to include Palestine as a full member of the organization. The United States voted against.
Still, under the Biden administration, differences may soften, even as Trump’s possible return to the White House in November induces extreme anxiety in France and other parts of Europe. The two leaders have in common the fact that each of them is trying to defend themselves against right-wing nationalist forces in their country, embodied by Trump and Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally party.
While president, Trump treated his allies with contempt. He recently made it clear that he hasn’t changed his mind on the matter, saying he would be fine if Russia attacked NATO members that don’t spend enough on defense.
Condemning such isolationism, Biden said of Ukraine in Normandy that “we will not leave.” The target of his rhetoric was clear: her opponent in the Nov. 5 election. As for Macron, speaking in English, he told the American veterans: “You are at home, if I may say so.”
It was a reminder that when it comes to the United States and France, periodic skirmishes do not undo a centuries-old bond.