As France’s President Emmanuel Macron casts himself as Europe’s new leader in a joust against Donald Trump he might do well to have a look at two great Frenchmen who advised against haste and hubris.
The first is that paragon of diplomacy Talleyrand who managed to survive four regimes, including one created by a bloody revolution and another that set Europe on fire before drowning it in blood.
One day Talleyrand was called in by an angry Napoleon who ordered him to illico presto to draft a declaration of war on Austria in reaction to “insults from Vienna”. The diplomat did so but, as he later recalled; kept the war declaration under his pillow until the following day when the Emperor ordered him to forget about it as France wasn’t ready for war.
Prudence was the best part of courage.
The next great Frenchman Macron should have a look at is Marechal Ferdinand Foch, commander-in-chief of Allied Forces in World War I. Receiving cables from frontline generals begging him to visit urgently, the Marechal got into his car commanding the driver: “Make haste slowly, I am in a hurry!”
Foch is also known for other gem quotations including this one from one of his cables to Paris from the frontline: “My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.” Later, he commented on the Versailles accords: “This is not a peace treaty; it is an armistice for twenty years.”
In the past two weeks, however, Macron has been all over the place with the alacrity of a butterfly. He has assumed that the 80-year alliance between European and American democracies is over, that NATO is dead, that Russia is determined to conquer Europe and that war - if not World War III - is inevitable.
But what caused that haste, which as we know, can’t but produce waste or worse?
The answer is the political version of “The Apprentice” reality TV show that President Trump staged with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Officer, plus a few of the hundreds of tweets, or whatever they call them now, that the US president darts at the world each week.
What might the ghosts of Talleyrand and Foch advise?
Talleyrand might have invited Macron to wait and see if the Oval Office show doesn’t have a sequel that might twist the plot in another direction now that Zelensky has opened a new dialogue with the new US administration.
Talleyrand would have also invited Macron to take no notice of John Bolton’s cracked disc about Trump planning to destroy NATO, a disc played for almost six years. Instead, the foxy diplomat would have asked the French president to wait and see whether or not Trump attends the planned NATO summit to be held in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 24-25. All we know is that NATO Secretary-General and former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is working with Washington Sherpas to prepare the summit.
Talleyrand might have drawn Macron’s attention to another rendezvous penciled in the Elysee Palace’s agenda: the G7 summit to be held in Alberta, Canada on June 15-17 - this time with European Union’s chiefs given seats at the high table.
To please Trump, the Canadians have already replaced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau - a bete-noire of the American leader - with Mark Carney who owes his success in the Liberal Party leadership contest partly to a surge of Canadian nationalism prompted by Trump’s talk of rising tariffs and annexation. A banker and economist Carney is best placed to reduce the political heat and promote a serious review of trade and economic ties between the two neighbors.
Foch would have advised Macron not to assume that the US will sit back and watch as Vladimir Putin’s army of North Koreans, Uzbeks, Chechens and Kazakhs, backed by Iranian drones, march into the Champs Elysee.
While the threat from Putin must not be minimized, it would be foolhardy to exaggerate it out of nervousness. For four decades Russia occupied two-thirds of the European continent from the Oder-Neisse line to the Urals. The USSR’s population was twice that of Russia today. With Warsaw Pact allies, the USSR had the world’s biggest war machine with thousands of tanks and warplanes and millions of men in infantry divisions, not to mention thousands of nuclear warheads.
Yet, military historians agree that the Soviet juggernaut was never in a position to conquer Europe even if the US had not been on the side of the Europeans. After all, in World War II, Britain managed to fight the German military giant alone for more than two years albeit with the lend-lease arrangement.
In June 1994, Soviet troops had to leave East Germany in trains hired from the French SNCF and DeutscheBahn, which means that had they wished to march on Paris they would have had to hitch a ride.
The wily Marechal might have noted that building the kind of war machine that Macron and Ursula von der Leyen talk about could take between five and 10 years.
Foch could have quipped that you can’t push back a foe just by big-talk. If you really wish to pin Putin’s back to the floor, then end his control of Ukrainian skies. That means giving Ukrainians some of the warplanes that EU members own.
The 10-year Soviet war in Afghanistan ended when President Ronald Reagan provided the Mujahedin with Stinger missiles to destroy Soviet helicopter gunships that controlled the skies of the war-torn land.
Macron talks of building a European defense system which requires a massive leap forward in industrial development, scientific and technological research and economic and political re-configuration all of which require massive popular support, something that EU leaders take for granted at their peril.
The two French wise men of the past might have made another suggestion: Why not try to stop a war that one protagonist can’t win and the other can’t lose? That requires thinking before acting, rather than vice versa, a fact that injects the element of time in any calculation.
In two years’ time with US mid-term elections, will Trump be in the unassailable position he is in today? Does Putin have the stamina of a long-distance runner in a war that has given him advances at a snail’s pace? Should Europe regard Russia as an eternal mortal foe or consider turning it into a tolerable neighbor - if not a friend - in a few years’ time?
In other words, as the ghosts of Talleyrand and Foch might have said: Don’t do today what tomorrow you may regret having done.
