GBlog

... Macron The Sun King, a specialist in mergers and acquisitions, has had no trouble identifying and jumping into a vacuum, embracing Trump as The American Friend while the rest of the European Union remains predictably paralyzed by the ramifications of “America First”.

The official Macronist spin is that Trump, after pulling out of the Paris agreement, should not remain self-isolated when it comes to Europe. That’s a mere diversionary tactic. The real game is that Macron is as frustrated as Trump when it comes to Germany’s “very bad” trade surpluses – and, from a French perspective, austerity obsession.

So how to add a few sleepless nights to Chancellor Angela Merkel? You ratchet France’s defense spending up to the Nato 2%-of-GDP standard; you invite Trump to Paris and throw in a lavish Bastille Day military parade (complete with a band playing Daft Punk, much to Trump’s puzzlement); and you position yourself as his prime interlocutor in the EU. When a crisis comes, any crisis, Trump will be dialing the Elysée, not Berlin or Brussels.

What Macron wants for Europe is a solid capital-markets framework and a banking union; this “restructuring” would arguably bring trillions of euros into the Eurobond market. He does not have much time to convince austerity-obsessed Merkel this is the way to go...

We’ll always have Paris