Dick Hubert’s Worldview: France’s Macron speaks dark truths about Russia, Europe, and the West
May 8, 2024 at 10:37 p.m.
Media exclusives aren’t usually front page news.
But last week, at least in this country, TIME Magazine’s cover story interview with former President and current presumed 2024 Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump made headline news wherever I looked.
Trump’s announced determination to govern like a dictator and to ridicule the honesty of election results unless he was the 2024 victor were spelled out in a TIME interview that left absolutely no questions about his end game and that of his acolytes.
The London, England based Economist magazine had as their lead story an interview with French President Emmanuel Macron, wherein he laid out in grim detail the “mortal” threat that Russia posed to Europe and what he proposed to do about it.
I’m sure Macron’s interview was read carefully by our foreign policy establishment.
It certainly was in Moscow, if a front page May 6 story on the New York Times website is any indication. It was reported that Russia “would hold military exercises with troops based near Ukraine to practice for the possible use of battlefield nuclear weapons.”
The story added:
“Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said the Western “threats” in question included a recent interview with President Emmanuel Macron of France published by The Economist, in which the French leader repeated his refusal to rule out sending ground troops to Ukraine.”
As of this writing, The Economist’s Macron interview has been ignored by most of our mainstream media.
Neither President Biden nor aspiring future President Trump has commented on it nor spoken to the American public in the stark manner of Macron.
That is perilous.
Macron was questioned by The Economist’s Paris bureau chief Sophie Pedder and Deputy Editor Edward Carr.
Carr wrote of the experience:
“Our interview with Mr. Macron took place in the opulent salon doré, which looks out from the first floor onto the expansive gardens of the Elysée Palace. It was a beautiful spring day … Through a half-open French window onto the balcony, you could hear birdsong. The jollity made Mr. Macron’s apocalyptic warning about Europe’s future all the more shocking.
His worry is not just for the European Union, or even the defence of European territory. It is about the durability of a set of rules and values, underpinned by economic wealth and physical security, which bind all Europeans. European civilisation, he told us, is in mortal danger.
Mr. Macron spoke to us about the triple shock of interconnected threats facing Europe. The first is geopolitical: its struggle to stand up to Russia bent on war, even as America’s future commitment to Europe has gone wobbly. Second is an alarming industrial gap that has opened up as Europe has fallen behind America and China, especially in renewable energy and artificial intelligence. Mr. Macron’s third theme is the frailty of Europe’s politics, under assault from a resurgent nationalism, turbo-charged by disinformation and echo-chamber news.”
Carr is worried that Macron’s warnings will fall on deaf ears.
My simple hope here is that Westmore News readers of this column, leaders in this community and beyond, will at least be alerted and pass Macron’s concerns along to their friends and colleagues.
In Macron’s own words—
Russia’s threats and how to respond
The Economist published a transcript of what Macron had to say in French and English.
Here are some highlights taken from the English translation.
On the threat posed by Russia to Europe, and beyond:
“Since 2022, Russia has increasingly added an explicit, sometimes uninhibited, nuclear threat, as voiced by President Putin himself, and has done so systematically. It has added hybridity, provoking and fuelling conflicts that were sometimes latent in other zones. It has added aggressions and threats in space and at sea, and it has added cyber and information threats and attacks on an unprecedented scale, which we have decided, together with our European partners, to reveal for the first time. Today, Russia has become an over-equipped power that continues to invest massively in weapons of all kinds and that has adopted a posture of non-compliance with international law, of territorial aggression and of aggression in all known domains of conflict. Today it is also a power of regional destabilisation wherever it can be. And so yes, Russia, through its behaviour and its choices, has become a threat to Europeans’ security. Despite all the efforts made by France, but also by Germany and the United States.”
On whether France would send troops to Ukraine to join their war against Russian invaders:
“I have a clear strategic objective: Russia cannot win in Ukraine. If Russia wins in Ukraine, there will be no security in Europe. Who can pretend that Russia will stop there? What security will there be for the other neighbouring countries, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and the others? And behind that, what credibility for Europeans who would have spent billions, said that the survival of the continent was at stake and not have given themselves the means to stop Russia? So yes, we mustn’t rule anything out because our objective is that Russia must never be able to win in Ukraine.”
And further on, Macron grew increasingly blunt:
“If the Russians were to break through the front lines, if there were a Ukrainian request (for NATO and/or European troops on the ground in Ukraine)—which is not the case today—we would legitimately have to ask ourselves this question. So I think to rule it out a priori is not to learn the lessons of the past two years. At the NATO summit in the summer of 2022, we all ruled out the delivery of tanks, deep-strike missiles, aircraft. We are now all in the process of doing this, so it would be wrong to rule out the rest. But above all, it would be wrong in terms of credibility and deterrence vis-à-vis the Russians to rule it out. I note, by the way, that the aggressiveness of the Russian response to what I said showed that this was having the desired effect, which was to say: Don’t think that we will stop here if you don’t stop.”
Macron’s other concerns:
Equally momentous
For Macron, Europe has to be a power in and of itself:
“…NATO is a useful framework and over the last five years we have been able to build this European pillar of NATO. I think there is intergovernmental dialogue and a desire to build a joint defence industrial base, to do research, innovation, to develop an industry of big projects, and to build standards. But it would be a mistake to exclude countries that have never been in the EU, or recently were, such as Norway, the United Kingdom or the Balkans. We have joint missile programmes, including with the British. We have developed joint intervention and protection operations at sea with Norway. Europe needs to look at its geography. So the framework isn’t institutional, it’s geographical. This space is there, it’s the space that we’re building and which, in my opinion, by virtue of its novelty, must correspond to the times and not take on board the passions of the past.”
And then, for Macron, there’s avoiding being overwhelmed by the United States and China:
“Everyone underestimated the value of modernisation. And the same goes for the United States. The Inflation Reduction Act, which is a conceptual revolution in economic terms, was a key issue during my state visit to the United States in 2022. The Americans have stopped trying to get the Chinese to conform to the rules of international trade. They have taken their own action. And we Europeans haven’t wanted to see this. That’s a huge mistake. When you have the number one, the number two, who decide in all conscience to subsidise critical sectors that they consider essential for them, who are prepared to put public money into attracting capacity, you can’t carry on as if this isn’t happening. The WTO today is in deep crisis. It’s up to us to reinvent it for the 21st century.”
Why won’t our leaders speak
in such depth and frank terms?
There’s so much more that Macron discusses that is jarring to this American’s eyes. And his whole interview prompts the question: where are Biden and Trump?
Trump, who can barely put two coherent sentences together, was last weekend comparing the Biden administration to the Gestapo.
Biden, for his part, avoids interviews with mainstream media and most recently spent more than an hour with Howard Stern on Sirius XM radio talking about his youth and family and upbringing. Stern avoided policy questions completely. I heard every word of it and was left with the deeply uneasy feeling that Biden felt more comfortable speaking about his own past than the future challenges of the next Presidency.
Macron is only 46 and has three years left of his presidency. If only our country had a young, intelligent, vigorous leader with a firm grasp on what the free world needs to survive and would say so in public.
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper
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