Why Emmanuel Macron dissed Donald Trump and now is dining with him

What to make of the curious relationship between French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Donald Trump? Their first meeting opened with “the handshake heard ’round the world,” when a clearly well-briefed Macron turned Trump’s penchant for aggressive greetings against him. Videos of their vice-grip battle of wills went viral, leading many to wonder whether the move was premeditated. In an interview with a French weekly, Macron quickly confirmed that, yes, the handshake was a way to communicate a message: that he would not be intimidated by Trump.

Trump reportedly did not take kindly to this public calling out. Days after Macron, along with the other assembled leaders, spent the better part of the G7 summit in Sicily trying to persuade Trump not to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, Trump did just that. In making his announcement about the policy, Trump pointedly stated, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Not one to be cowed, Macron immediately released a video address that amounted to a public trolling of Trump. In it, he invited American innovators to come to France to dream up the future of clean energy, and closed by appropriating Trump’s campaign slogan: “Let’s make the planet great again,” he declared, smiling almost tauntingly into the camera.

The young, refined but brash French president, it seemed, was itching for a fight with his older, coarser but no less brash American counterpart. With pundits and observers desperately seeking to fill the now-vacant position of “leader of the free world,” Macron appeared to be throwing his hat in the ring.

But anyone who was expecting a celebrity death match was quickly disappointed. To observers’ surprise, just weeks later, in a phone call to discuss developments in Syria, Macron cordially invited Trump to attend the Bastille Day parade this week, followed by a gastronomic meal in the Eiffel Tower, and the notoriously travel-averse Trump accepted. Then, last weekend, another viral video, this one from the summit of G20 leaders in Hamburg, Germany, seemed to show Macron eagerly pushing his way through the assembled heads of state and government to stand beside Trump in the official photograph.

The young, refined but brash French president, it seemed, was itching for a fight with his older, coarser but no less brash American counterpart.

Was the earlier hostility overblown or simply forgotten? Or had we missed something? Absent insiders’ accounts, it’s hard to know for sure the answer to the first question. The second is a bit easier. The short version is, yes. Macron needed to establish his bona fides as an independent leader unafraid to stand up to Trump. But despite what Trump’s European detractors might think, it is in Macron’s and France’s interests to maintain a strong partnership with the United States — and Trump, in fact, is someone he could be well-suited to work with.

To begin with, the two men’s visible differences obscure some remarkable shared traits. Yes, Macron is almost half Trump’s age, a polished elite and former banker who graduated from France’s top finishing school. But like Trump, he ran for president as an outsider, was given virtually no chance of winning by most experts, benefited from strokes of luck indistinguishable from destiny and exudes a fierce confidence in himself that, while less gaudily expressed, is just as palpable. For all these reasons, Trump considered Macron “impressive,” according to a senior White House official, telling him, “You were my guy,” when they met in Brussels.

Why, then, did Macron go out of his way not just to defy Trump, but to publicly confirm that was indeed his intention? For the same reason he publicly confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin during Putin’s visit to Paris over Russian media’s meddling in France’s presidential election: He felt the need to show the two bullies looming on either side of Europe’s shoulders that he was not afraid to stand up to them, in person and to their face.

In this, Macron follows in the French tradition of a prickly national pride that prizes autonomy of action above all else. In addition to embrace this Gaullist heritage, Macron has expressed a deep attachment to the symbolism of the French state, which could easily be confused for a secular religion. In this symbolism, France’s president incarnates the nation. Upon assuming office, he or she transcends the limits of an individual person to personify France itself.

From his remarks in the past, Macron seems to be convinced that if his immediate predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, failed in their terms in office, it was in large part because they failed to fulfill this first and overarching function: Sarkozy because of his manic efforts to be a hyperprésident and Hollande because of his stultified attempt to be a président normal. By contrast, Macron has declared his intention of being a président jupitérien, ruling over the executive — and France — as Jupiter ruled over the ancient Roman pantheon: distant, omnipotent, godlike.

In openly defying Trump in May, Macron was sending a message to his domestic audience, but also to Europe and beyond: If a new kind of leader was occupying the White House in Washington, the same was true for the Elysée Palace in Paris—one unafraid not only to stand up for France, but also to champion its merits.

What, then, explains the seeming about-face to suddenly court Trump despite their initial differences? On a substantive level, Macron and Trump actually have very few issues of discord to divide them. France has become a major security provider in the Sahel and West Africa, a region that also sees extensive below-the-radar involvement of American security forces and contractors. France does not quite meet NATO’s 2 percent of GDP target for defense spending, but it is not far off and has become a dependable alliance partner for the United States. Besides, France’s formal reintegration into the NATO command is a recent turn, dating back only to 2009, and France maintains not only operational autonomy — one of the few nations besides the United States that can project military force at an extended distance beyond its borders — but also its own nuclear deterrent. So Trump’s well-publicized hostility to NATO is less of an existential concern for France than it is for, say, Poland.

In Syria, Macron has signaled a clear-sighted realism with regard to the military and political objectives there, accepting both the likelihood that President Bashar Assad will remain in power and the need to work with Russia to achieve any sustainable outcome. He has also declared his willingness to act unilaterally in response to any use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, marking a clear difference from Hollande, who stood down an imminent French strike in 2013 rather than follow through without the United States. The similarities to Trump’s approach to the Syrian conflict so far are obvious.

Perhaps the only real bone of contention between Macron and Trump, besides the Paris climate agreement, could be trade. Macron is a committed liberal internationalist who was the most vocal supporter among all the candidates during the French presidential campaign of both the European Union and the benefits of free trade. France enjoys a trade surplus with the United States, but it ran to only $15.5 billion in 2016, or less than a fourth that of Germany.

In other words, looking around, Macron probably realized that he is unlikely to be in Trump’s line of fire when it comes to the U.S. president’s trigger points, and is not particularly vulnerable to repercussions even if he were. The mood in France and Europe is one of optimism these days. The worst — Brexit, the populist menace in the Netherlands and France — is in the past. Trump is a manageable problem.

That doesn’t quite explain Macron’s decision not just to tolerate Trump, but to seemingly court him. While the video of the G20 photo op was misinterpreted — in fact, the leaders’ placement follows a scripted protocol, and Macron was simply making his way to his predetermined spot as visibly pointed out to him by an usher visible in the video — that still leaves the Bastille Day invitation.

That doesn’t quite explain Macron’s decision not just to tolerate Trump, but to seemingly court him.

Here, Macron appears to be applying a modified version of the approach Sarkozy used after his election in 2007 to cultivate ties with President George W. Bush. At the time, months after the 2006 U.S. midterm elections, Bush had begun to launch the course corrections that came to be known as his “third term.” But he was still a deeply divisive figure in Europe and extremely unpopular west of Poland. Meanwhile, Washington has historically viewed France with some suspicion, preferring Britain and Germany as its European partners of choice, in large part due to France’s autonomous political line during the Cold War. There were echoes of that reputation for being an unreliable ally in the bitter dispute over the invasion of Iraq. Sarkozy savvily understood there was potentially great advantage in being an isolated U.S. president’s best European friend, while refurbishing Paris’ image in Washington.

Among his first foreign trips, he traveled to the United States and publicly embraced the toxic U.S. president, a major gesture in repairing French-U.S. ties. Sarkozy then unilaterally agreed to significantly increase France’s troop contribution to NATO’s Afghanistan mission and successfully pressed to reintegrate France back into the full spectrum of NATO’s military command, a long-standing taboo among French military and national security circles. Even if his ostensible request at the time — the green-lighting of further European Union defense integration — never panned out, the result was to position France as America’s primary European security partner, an effort considerably aided by Britain’s post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan military exhaustion.

But while Sarkozy enjoyed the status that came of being in the middle of the action, he suffered initially from the reputation he gained as being Bush’s lapdog: “Sarko l’Américain,” as he was pejoratively nicknamed in France.

With his early gestures of defiance, Macron does not risk suffering the same fate. That now gives him a freer hand to seek to leverage his outreach to Trump, whether on behalf of France — to coordinate policy in Syria, for instance — or on behalf of his European partners seemingly befuddled by the unprecedented nature of Trump’s presidency.

In fact, of the two men, Trump might have more reason to look on the Paris visit with trepidation. There is a large American expat community in France, many of whom will almost certainly take advantage of the opportunity to publicly disavow their president on foreign soil. That’s the kind of embarrassment the thin-skinned Trump might find hard to take. Worse still, the last time a Bastille Day invitation to a world leader raised this much controversy, it was when Sarkozy invited none other than Syria’s Assad in 2008. The comparisons will hardly be comforting.