Macron, France, and the long shadow of Édouard Daladier

French President Emmanuel Macron once again is impetuously chasing national and personal glory in the capitals of autocracies. First, he repeatedly tried appeasing Vladimir Putin at Kyiv’s territorial expense, before and after the start of the Russian president’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Now, having failed to persuade Putin, Macron appears to be attempting to do the same by cozying up to Chinese President Xi Jinping to the detriment of Kyiv and its Western allies, including the national security of the United States.

As former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) caustically posted on his Twitter feed on Sunday, “Why is this always the French?” Why indeed? And, why now, in the face of Moscow and Beijing’s assault on the international order, as it has existed since the end of World War II, is Macron willing to play into Russia and China’s autocratic “multipolar world” designs at the expense of global democracy?

Macron’s pursuit of his vision of European “strategic autonomy” is nothing new. Neither are his repeated failures to pull it off. For all his ambition, he keeps misreading the room, particularly when it involves Ukraine. “New NATO,” Poland especially, wants nothing to do with his grandiose concept of a France-led European “strategic autonomy.” Warsaw painfully still remembers Paris’s failed pre-World War II security guarantees.

When war broke out on Sept. 1, 1939, after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, France — despite its guarantee to march on Germany — “merely advanced five miles into the German Saarland,” where it “stopped and stayed stopped.” Poland, after the war’s end, found itself on the inside looking out at the West. Warsaw’s reward for believing in France? Decades of brutal Soviet domination.

Yet, despite repeated rejection by NATO, Macron persists. On Sunday, while aboard Cotam Unité — France’s Airbus A330 version of Air Force One — returning to Paris from a three-day state visit to China, Macron’s never-ending machinations to establish France as a “third superpower” at Europe’s expense, took a far darker and divisive turn. The French president acerbically called for Europe to cease being “America’s followers,” lest the continent get “caught up in crises that are not ours.”

Recklessly, Macron also asserted that “Europe should not follow U.S. policy over Taiwan,”  despite Taipei being increasingly under the threat of a Chinese invasion. Macron’s comments came on the heels of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s visit to the U.S., where she met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and received the Hudson Institute’s Global Leadership Award. Beijing, in response, sanctioned the hosts of both events.

Macron’s self-defeating journey into the darkness of Xi’s world and oft-repeated attempts of autocratic appeasement for vainglory is evocative of James Tyrone, the lead character in Eugene O’Neill’s 1956 play, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Macron, like Tyrone, is a “vain actor,” seeking ever-elusive success and international standing at the expense of his NATO family. Like Tyrone ignoring his wife Mary’s drug addiction, Macron remains oblivious to that which he wishes not to see, including Putin and Xi’s addiction to autocracy on a global scale.

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