Macron’s ‘brain-dead’ Nato and Putin’s monumental blunder

The former is no Neville Chamberlain and the latter is not Hitler

Presidential elections in France are always interesting but when an election takes place in the middle of a war in Europe in which the candidates are beholden to opposing sides, its outcome is momentous, ameliorated only be the careful diplomatic path plotted by the incumbent, President Emmanuel Macron.

Marine Le Pen the pro-nation-state, pro-Russian candidate lost to Macron, who is pro-EU though still on talking terms with Russia. Despite losing by a huge margin Marine made a victory speech for having won three million more votes than last time. The results, however, speak for themselves – Macron received 59 per cent of the votes cast to Marine’s 41 per cent on a turn-out of 72 per cent – apparently the lowest since 1969 when Charles De Gaulle retired and Georges Pompidou won for the Gaullists.

Pompidou in the 70s and Francois Mitterrand in the 80s were France’s best presidents since De Gaulle retired in 1969.  In their own way both were very French: intelligent, intellectual and interesting – Pompidou was very cultured and Mitterrand as mysterious as he was enigmatic. Pompidou’s most memorable foreign policy achievement was reversing De Gaulle’s veto of Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community (EC) enabling Britain to join in 1973. Mitterrand achieved the opposite. He presided over the advent of the EU – the political union of the EC – that eventually led to Britain leaving the Union.

Both were presidents with the grandeur and gravitas commensurate to the office of President of France. After Mitterrand the quality of France’s presidents has been lacklustre and although the election of Macron was a breath of fresh air in 2017 his performance was disappointing.

The best that could be said of him after his re-election last week is that he is a safe pair of hands on foreign policy who was modest enough to concede that the votes he received were not votes for him but votes against Marine Le Pen: the choice the French people faced was likened to one between cholera and the plague, but they chose Macron that rhymes well with the milder omicron variant of Covid.

He was criticised in Britain for appeasing Russia over Ukraine and in France for spending too much time on the phone to Vladimir Putin but he is wise to keep Russia sweet and even wiser to distance France and the EU from the Anglo American demonisation of Russia which passes for policy these days. US President Joe Biden’s rants about regime change in Russia and accusations of genocide are not serious and neither is talk in Britain that Russia’s total defeat in Ukraine is in Britain’s long term strategic interest. Is it really in Britain’s interest to make Russia her sworn enemy?

A wise leadership in Ukraine would have steered clear of confrontation with Russia and wiser heads in the US and Britain would have advised the Ukrainians to proceed with caution about enshrining membership of Nato in their constitution. However there can be no doubt the invasion of Ukraine was unlawful as it was not done in self defence. At its most charitable the invasion has been a wholly disproportionate case of excessive self defence for which Nato does not exactly emerge smelling of roses.

Russia has issues with Ukraine and vice versa. Both are as corrupt as each other. Each has its fair share of oligarchs and the regime in Ukraine is not as angelic as we are led to believe in the West.

The point here is that it is good for Europe that in Macron we have a statesman who knows there is a huge difference between giving “peace a chance” and appeasement. Macron is no Neville Chamberlain and Putin is not Hitler.

Vladimir Putin rose without trace to become president by appointment on New Year’s Eve in December 1999 and then by election after March 2000 with a short interlude when Dimitri Medvedev was president between 2008-2012. Putin had power thrust upon him and stayed in office because he understands how the levers of power work in Russia owing to the mess left behind by Boris Yeltsin: as the English historian AJP Taylor would have said, it is fascinating to speculate what Russia would have been like had Mikhail Gorbachev not been dismissed in favour of Yeltsin in the 1990s.

In a new book on the strongmen of our time Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times paints Putin as an apparatchik-president with a whiff of corruption about him in a country finding its way to democracy Russian-style. After 70 years under a communist command economy and a closed society it was inevitable that Russia needed time and space to adjust to the disintegration of the Soviet Union – time and space that Nato denied her.

Rachman acknowledges that although Putin may be dictatorial and corrupt he is a genuine patriot and chippy about Russia’s loss of the prestige after the Soviet Union collapsed. He was livid when Barack Obama said in 2014 that Russia was a regional power showing weakness over Ukraine. Obama should have been more careful about branding Russia a regional power when she straddles many regions in two continents, is planet Earth’s largest land mass, the first and most advanced in space travel and the strongest nuclear power.

By contrast, Emmanuel Macron understands Russia much better than the Anglo Americans. His attitude towards Russia is a lot more subtle. He thinks of Putin as a European leader from St Petersburg with a sense of Russia’s culture, history, power and global reach.

What was interesting about the French presidential election was that Macron kept lines of communication to Putin open throughout the campaign and treated the Russian president with respect whilst maintaining his European and Nato credentials.

There was huge relief in Nato that President Macron won even though he famously called Nato brain-dead. At the time of his brain-dead remark in 2019, Nato was preoccupied with burden-sharing instead of addressing the geopolitical place of Nato in terms of its shared enemies after the Cold War ended, implying that Russia was not the enemy. She is now – which proves that the invasion of Ukraine was a monumental strategic error of judgment.

Alper Ali Riza is a queen’s counsel in the UK and a part time judge