Emmanuel Macron’s provocative advocacy of NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine
Yesterday’s news analysis programs in Europe and in Russia devoted a lot of attention to French President Emmanuel Macron’s statements during a meeting at the Elysée Palace of a Conference in Support of Ukraine which was attended by a great many European heads of government or their immediate deputies and at a press conference which followed. Macron yet again has positioned himself and France at the vanguard of a new direction for European foreign and military policy, namely to send ground troops to Ukraine to participate in the war directly and thereby ensure Ukrainian victory and, what is more important, Russian defeat. Following Macron’s announcement, his prime minister spoke of the need to defeat Russia if Europe is to uphold the principle that democratic countries may not be swallowed up by totalitarian countries.
Macron’s proposal was immediately rejected by all major European leaders, including the hitherto most aggressive defenders of Ukraine among them, the United Kingdom, Poland and Germany. High-flying French ideological, geopolitical messaging ran into a brick wall of down-to-earth and justified imperatives of self-preservation among Macron’s peers, all of whom seem finally to take seriously Russian threats of immediate reprisals to those who move outside the fig leaf of proxy war and become de jure co-belligerents.
As I say, this tantalizing exposure of deep fissures in the positions of the West that contradict the myth of total solidarity among them was a red flag to global media. Indeed, during the day I had two invitations to go on air and offer a comment. See below the link to my participation in a news program of India’s premier English language global broadcaster, WION:
NATO Chief: Alliance has no plans to send troops to Ukraine | Latest English News | WION
On Russian television last night, Vladimir Solovyov opened his talk show with a lengthy attack on Macron. Among the more printable remarks he made was that Macron is not a shadow of a rightful successor to General De Gaulle (to whom he likened himself in his speech to the U.S. Congress at the start of his first term in the presidency) but is rather a modern day Pétain (Nazi collaborationist) or Putain (whore).
Solovyov asked Macron rhetorically which French city does he wish to see burned to the ground first when the Russians respond to French entry into the war with their promised barrage of hypersonic missiles. And he rounded out his commentary by noting that the French already have troops on the ground in Ukraine, namely members of their Foreign Legion in the guise of mercenaries, and that considerable numbers of them were among the dead when the Russians stormed Avdeevka a week ago.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024