Macron's Versailles diplomacy wins mixed results over decade in power

EVIAN-LES-BAINS, France, June 18 - When Donald Trump, flanked by the French president, signed the Iran memorandum in the opulent Palace of Versailles, the optics were vintage Emmanuel Macron: the full weight of French history, glamour and pomp deployed to win over a difficult counterpart.

The invitation to a grand dinner at the gilded residence of Louis XIV had been designed to persuade Trump to stay till the end of a three-day G7 summit - rather than leave early as he did in Canada last year — and to encourage the mercurial U.S. president to adopt a more conciliatory position towards fellow leaders whom he has often chided over trade and Ukraine.

French diplomats cheered a G7 they described as "a clean sweep", with Trump joining the other leaders in acknowledging Ukraine's improved battlefield fortunes with a unified pledge of support and fresh sanctions on Russia.

The weeks ahead will be a test of the durability of the impressions made on Trump — known for his frequently shifting positions on geopolitical matters — by the lakeside summit in eastern France and the Versailles dinner.

VERSAILLES' CHARM DOESN'T ALWAYS WORK

Macron described Versailles as "an instrument for influence" but it has not always delivered for the French leader, whose second and final term ends next year and who is now seen at home as a lame duck president after losing his parliamentary majority.

In 2017, early in his first term, Macron hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in the same ornate setting, with the same implied message: that France, and its president, belong at the centre of world affairs.

But that summit produced no breakthroughs and no lasting hold over Putin, who invaded Ukraine five years later — just two weeks after Macron visited Moscow in a vain effort to persuade the Russian leader to refrain from military action.

While Macron has shown a keen eye for the trappings of diplomacy — the grand settings, the symbolism, the personal connections — he has often failed to translate this into lasting strategic gains, analysts say.

"He has 'thought leadership' but he doesn’t necessarily always have 'action leadership'," said Rym Momtaz, a geopolitical consultant at Carnegie Europe, adding that France's strained finances and limited industrial weight have constrained his ability to project hard power.

"They have made up for their very limited concrete means by being intellectually, politically courageous, but that doesn’t make a power," she said. "France has not been capable of shaping its strategic environment."

BOLD WORDS, LIMITED ACTION ON UKRAINE

Ukraine offers perhaps the starkest example of the gap between Macron's rhetoric and action.

In February 2024, Macron stunned his NATO allies by floating the possibility of sending Western troops to Ukraine. The "strategic ambiguity" created by discussing the deployment of troops would complicate Putin's calculations, Macron argued.

"That was brave. That was something that had a price tag on it, a political price tag for everybody: for him, for his country, for those who are supporting him," said Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania's foreign minister from 2020 to 2024.

But Landsbergis said the Franco-British "coalition of the willing" eventually petered out in a cycle of summits and video calls, with no troops ever deployed.

Under Macron, France also became the first Western country to send armoured vehicles to Ukraine, a move that helped push Germany and others to follow with heavier Leopard tanks.

Yet France, hobbled by a deteriorating budget deficit, has faced criticism for providing less financial support to Kyiv than other major Western nations.

"He had intuition, a way with words, a form of panache, but that's incomplete when you haven't got financial solidity," a former EU official said.

EUROPE WHERE LEGACY MAY ENDURE

Analysts say Macron's legacy may prove most durable inside the European Union.

His vision of EU "strategic autonomy" — the bloc's capacity to act independently of the U.S. or China — is gaining traction, said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at CSIS.

"He's politically unpopular at home, yet I think (he's) sort of winning the overall battle of ideas in Europe about Europe’s trajectory," he said.

French proposals once seen as eccentric, such as joint EU borrowing, a carbon border tax, or channelling defence funds toward European rather than U.S. manufacturers, have all been adopted in some form during Macron's presidency.

Macron's move to involve European allies in nuclear deterrence operations has also drawn once-unlikely enthusiasm, after Trump's threats to annex Greenland deepened doubts over whether Europe could rely on the U.S. for its security.

"What we are increasingly seeing is Europeans beginning to think about a life with less America," Bergmann said. REUTERS