PRESIDENT Emmanuel Macron is safely back in Paris after “Le Bromance” with US president Donald Trump.
They were all nice and friendly until Macron’s speech before Congress when he trashed two of Trump’s cherished faiths.
On protectionism, Macron said: “We can build the 21st century world order based on a new breed of multilateralism, based on a more effective, accountable, and results-oriented multilateralism.”
READ MORE: Businessmen tell Trump: Come to Scotland if you want to avoid protesters
In phrases that had the US politicians cheering, he ripped into Trump’s stance on global warming, saying: “I am sure one day, the US will come back and join the Paris agreement. There is no planet B.”
On Tuesday, Trump railed against the Iran nuclear deal and said the US might pull out. Macron said on Wednesday France would be staying in.
He repeated his criticism of Trump yesterday, saying: “My view is ... that he will get rid of this deal on his own, for domestic reasons.”
What’s the French for “ouch!”
SO NO SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP THERE THEN?
LE Bromance took nobody by surprise, not least because Trump was strutting on the world stage again, but anyone who has studied Macron would have known that the French president really believes in multilateralism and wasn’t going to let Trump dominate the state visit with his agenda.
It was almost a perfect example of the long and often tempestuous relationship between two countries which for much of the last 240 years has been two of the most powerful republics in the world.
SURELY IT’S THE UK WHICH HAS ALWAYS HAD THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP?
NO doubt Theresa May likes to delude herself about that, but history tells us that it was France who was the US’s first ally. Britain and France fought four wars against each other, largely on the North American continent, from 1689 to 1763, even before the US Declaration of Independence in 1776. France then supplied money and weapons for George Washington and his army and one of the great heroes of the American Revolutionary War was Marquis de Lafayette, a superb general.
French troops fought alongside Americans and it was a French naval fleet’s actions at the Battle of Chesapeake which enabled the American victory at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. That effectively ended the war, with the French hosting the talks that ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that guaranteed American independence from Britain.
The French Revolution complicated matters between the two nations and while the US government recognised the republican French government, there was no alliance between them until an extraordinary moment in American history when the United States bought France’s remaining territory in America.
WHO SOLD THEM LOUISIANA?
PRESIDENT Thomas Jefferson really only wanted New Orleans, but Napoleon Bonaparte was determined to invade Britain in 1803 and needed cash and no transatlantic distractions so he decided to sell the whole Louisiana Territory which France had only recently secured from Spain. For $15 million – about three cents an acre – the US nearly doubled in size with the territory stretching north from New Orleans into what is now southern Canada and west from the Mississipi to the Rockies.
HOW LONG HAVE THEY HAD A ROLLERCOASTER RELATIONSHIP?
THE Napoleonic Wars ended with Britain as the global superpower, but over the course of the 19th century, France retained some of its ambitions in the new world which ended with the Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 – many Mexicans and Americans celebrate the cinco de Mayo anniversary to this day.
That ended French interest in lands across the Atlantic which enabled a long period of peace and friendship between the two nations that culminated in the gift of the Statue of Liberty from France to the US in 1884.
Despite French misgivings about the increasing links between the UK and the US, and America’s rise to global power, they were grateful for the American intervention in World War I, and it goes without saying that France appreciated all the Allies’ heroics in World War II. General de Gaulle was less enthusiastic later on, and the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Vietnam War fought on former French territory proved there could still be huge divergences between the two.
Then along came the Iraq War.
CHEESE-EATING SURRENDER MONKEYS?
THE biggest crisis in recent Franco-American relations was over the US-UK’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the Gulf War in 1991, France stood resolutely alongside its allies, but by 2003 President Jacques Chirac had been convinced by his own intelligence agencies that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal – they were right, the CIA and MI6 were wrong.
There were protests against the war in France and the American public were whipped into near hysteria by the media. It was a Simpsons writer who coined the phrase “cheese eating surrender monkeys” as a piece of satire back in 1995. Unfortunately it was resurrected seriously and it took President Nicolas Sarkozy years to repair the damage.
Now Macron is calling Trump his “copain”, or buddy, so all is well between the US and France, at least until the next argument.
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here