A wonderful speech about Ukraine, Trump and Europe by French senator Claude Malhuret
Brigitte DEMEURE
Peter Petschauer
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Brian D'Agostino
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Michael Britton
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Brigitte DEMEURE
Thanks Michael,
What is happening in France ? it's a long story.
Below the automatic translation of an article about Le Pen and trupmism.
Today the French (and Jewish) liberal philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy cancelled his conference in Israel about antisemitism. Because the Israeli government invited to this conference about antisemitism Jordan Bardella, head of the Rassemblent National and his ally Marion Maréchal, grand-daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen. This conference will bring together members of the far right in the European Parliament from Spain, Hongary, Swieden..., as well as Bolsonaro's son, and one of Trump's friends Matt Schlapp, among others. It will be concluded by a speech by Netanyahou. Bardella will hold a speech alone onstage as well. The rapprochement initiated by Israeli diplomacy with European far-right parties was made official last month by Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
I wonder what will be the reaction, besides cancelling his presentation, of Bernard Henri-Levy, who is a strong supporter of Israel and a strong opponent of the far right.
Best
Brigitte
Le Monde
Marine Le Pen, between attraction to Trumpism and anti-American tradition
Despite her party's ideological convergences with the American head of state, the three-time presidential candidate is wary of the consequences of too much support for the leader of a foreign power.
Marine Le Pen knows the risk of overtly coddling an authoritarian and illiberal foreign leader. She is still struggling with her “admiration” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, assumed and repeated for more than a decade, until the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
This lesson in caution does not prevent the leader of the French far right from being complacent towards Donald Trump since his return to the White House. Regardless of the diplomatic, commercial and ideological offensives carried out against Europe by the American and his administration, Ms. Le Pen observes a benevolent silence that is all the more significant as it marks a clear break with the anti-American tradition of the National Front (FN), which became the National Rally (RN) in 2018.
Taking an American president as a model is not a first for the party with the flame. In the 1980s, Jean-Marie Le Pen posed as the “French Ronald Reagan”, celebrating the former B-movie actor with the visceral anti-communism, which obsessed the FN, and the ultra-liberalism, which irrigated his programmes. More than an inspiration, an appropriation: Le Pen senior then plundered Mr. Reagan's slogans against taxation and administration.
As strong as it was, this Atlanticist influence is a parenthesis in the history of the FN. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and especially after the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1990, communism ceded to the United States its place as the party's priority enemy. Taking up the old antiphons of the radical far right, Jean-Marie Le Pen accuses the Americans of diluting “identities” on the hotel of “globalism” and the promotion of liberal ideas such as democracy or human rights. “Nationalists of all countries, unite!”, proclaimed the former paratrooper at the time, maintaining, in July 1991, in the pages of Identité, the FN's magazine, that "the peoples of Europe, an interweaving of families and strongly rooted intermediary bodies, remain the main obstacle to the cosmopolitan enterprise".
International wait-and-see attitude
The succession at the head of the FN in 2011, between Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, did not change anything in the movement's international doctrine. The daughter takes up the father's anti-Americanism, almost accusing her opponents – “official parties” and “elites” – of dual allegiance to the ally of a France that has become “the doggie of the United States”. "In this context, our national interest is to renew the traditional alliance with Russia to counterbalance the exacerbated imperialism of an America today without a counterweight, seeking to obtain the containment of this resurgent power," she wrote in 2012 in her book Pour que vive la France (Jacques Grancher).
If Mrs. Le Pen was already using the concept of “power” at the time, it was above all to turn her back on the United States and open her arms wide to Vladimir Putin's Russia by dreaming of a “real European area from the Atlantic to the Urals”. An attraction for the Russian dictator that has been untenable since the revelation of his interference operations – against the European Union and France – and the confirmation of his imperialist aims with the aggression against Ukraine.
Cooled by the consequences of her long fascination with Mr. Putin, she refuses to display too openly her affiliation with any foreign power. More timid in this area than her European partners – from Hungary's Viktor Orban to Italy's Matteo Salvini – who have never renounced their Putinophilia, the MP for Pas-de-Calais prefers to appropriate the figure of General de Gaulle and his concern for “independence” to justify her wait-and-see attitude in international matters. There is no question of her celebrating the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024, eight years after she waited in vain in the billionaire's New York tower to meet him.
The risk of an in-between
But the policy he has been pursuing since January has forced the RN to make a clear break with its anti-Americanism. The first weeks of Trump's second term in office gave pride of place to the Front's designs. Within his borders, the American president gives free rein to an exacerbated populism, besieges the administration and institutional counter-powers, and assumes a xenophobic and violent policy against immigration. Externally, he is sweeping away the world order shaped since the Second World War, undermining international organisations and establishing a direct dialogue with Vladimir Putin to the detriment of Ukraine. "The conversion, for the first time, of such a great democracy to illiberalism opens up a field of possibilities that is totally new for this political camp," observes historian Nicolas Lebourg, a specialist in the far right. Trump's break is both internal, with the return of Caesarism, and external, with an attack on any transnational organ. »
Despite the convergence of their visions, Marine Le Pen is careful not to set up Donald Trump as a “model”. The three-time presidential candidate has real reservations about the American, because she is opposed to any conservative and liberal revolution, unlike Eric Zemmour or Marion Maréchal. But she is especially wary of the consequences of following an authoritarian and unpredictable leader. At the risk of an untenable in-between, between his caution learned from the Russian lesson and the inevitable attraction of some of his elected representatives to Mr. Trump. On February 21, the president of the RN, Jordan Bardella, gave up speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a conservative forum held in Washington, only after the fascist salute of Steve Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump and guest of honor at the RN congress in 2018.
Corentin Lesueur
envoyé : 12 mars 2025 à 21:40
de : Michael Britton <mfb...@gmail.com>
à : clios...@googlegroups.com
objet : Re: [cliospsyche] A wonderful speech about Ukraine, Trump and Europe by French senator Claude Malhuret
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Brigitte DEMEURE
Hi Michael,
Another very interesting article in Le Monde by an historian, about the defence issues in Europe presently and its link to the US and Trump.
Le Monde - Automatic translation :
The American disengagement from the Atlantic Alliance casts a harsh light on the strategic solitude of Europe, which Charles de Gaulle had anticipated in 1959, recalls the historian Maurice Vaïsse, in an article in “Le Monde”.
"Who can say whether, in the future (...), the two powers that would have the monopoly of nuclear weapons would not agree to divide the world"?General de Gaulle wondered in November 1959, referring to the debate between him and American President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) that autumn.
It is vain to solicit the General's thoughts and declarations on any subject. In this circumstance, however, one cannot help but be struck by the visionary nature of the remarks made by Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) nearly seventy years ago, which are in line with the current events of 2025: the sudden U-turn of the American administration, choosing to end the war in Ukraine by aligning itself with Russian positions over the heads of Ukrainians and Europeans. The unthinkable is happening before our eyes: the American disengagement casts a harsh light on Europe's strategic solitude. Was it unimaginable?
In an exercise in political fiction, de Gaulle tried his hand at it in 1959. The context is worth remembering. At the international level, in October 1958, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), triggered one of the crises of the Cold War, by threatening the “Westerners” to put an end to Berlin's quadripartite status and force them to recognise the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This crisis lasted until 1963, with more or less serious moments, such as during the construction of the Wall in August 1961.
Eisenhower is taking his second term in the White House. Charles de Gaulle has been President of the Republic since the beginning of 1959. As soon as he returned to power in June 1958, he confirmed the decisions taken by the previous governments of the Fourth Republic to acquire atomic weapons and to test a French atomic bomb in the Sahara.
This prospect is at odds with the policy of the nuclear powers: the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, which agreed in November 1958 on a moratorium on nuclear experiments in the atmosphere that would precede a summit conference to conclude a test ban agreement.
Within the framework of the Atlantic Alliance, de Gaulle raised the flag by making it known in his memorandum (September 1958) that France intended to have a say in the matter. And he questions the American refusal, enshrined in the Mac-Mahon Act [a 1946 law that determines how the United States will manage nuclear technology developed jointly with the United Kingdom and Canada] to provide assistance in the acquisition of nuclear weapons by France, unlike what happened with Great Britain.
Visionary words
During Eisenhower's visit to Paris in September 1959, the two presidents frankly addressed this dispute, but these two old soldiers did not exchange recriminations, as Vernon Walters (interpreter of the American president and future deputy director of the CIA) reminds us, because, in essence, Eisenhower agreed with de Gaulle: “We would react like de Gaulle if we were in his place.”
It is in this context that the President of the Republic is laying the foundations of his military and foreign policy. On November 3, 1959, at the Ecole Militaire, de Gaulle declared: "This defense of France must be French (...). Naturally, French defence must be combined, if necessary, with that of other countries (...). But it is essential that it be our own, that France defend itself by itself, for itself and in its own way. »
A few days later, during his press conference on 10 November 1959, de Gaulle justified his policy, in particular his desire to carry out atomic experiments, by concerns about the future:“Who can say what will happen tomorrow?” And he clarifies his fears, referring to technological advances and, above all, implying that the two superpowers could agree to “share the world” or to “crush others”.
De Gaulle became a visionary when he prophesied: "Who can say whether, in the future, political data will change completely? It has already happened on Earth. The two powers (...) would not agree to divide the world. De Gaulle even went so far as to imagine that "the two rivals, as a result of [he] do not know what political and social upheaval, would come to merge." Of course, for de Gaulle, it was a question of justifying the fact of equipping himself with nuclear weapons, of which he went so far as to say that by doing so “France is doing a service to the balance of the world”.
On November 17, 1959, Eisenhower reacted strongly and was astonished that the General could have imagined such things. In his reply of 24 November, Charles de Gaulle assured him that "[t]his words did not mark any doubt with regard to the United States and its government as they are today". And he develops his thoughts. He fears that solidarity between Americans and Europeans will be called into question in the future. He recalls that, in the First World War, America entered the conflict late, in 1917, and that it was not until 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor that the Americans participated in the Second World War, even though France had been occupied for eighteen months.
Insisting on the vulnerability of his country (which is not protected by the “beautiful ocean”, as Volodymyr Zelensky would say), de Gaulle appeals to Eisenhower's national conscience, and he has this admirable sentence: “Without questioning the sincerity and resolution of its American allies, my country must take into account what the future holds for it that is unknown and the past of experience.”
Defence, a national totem
In this conviction, one can imagine the weight of Charles de Gaulle's historical memory, the memories of the Great War and the withdrawal of the Anglo-American guarantee up to the Yalta Conference, raised by the General as a true myth of the division of the world. The Suez crisis was another litmus test in relations with the United States, which on 2 November 1956 voted with the Soviet Union for Resolution 997 (ES-I) demanding an immediate ceasefire.
Moreover, without calling into question France's membership of the Atlantic Alliance, de Gaulle questioned military integration, which he considered incompatible with the defence of France, which would constitute a real national totem. His successors will never cease to defend their conviction that they have a nuclear deterrent, an instrument of national independence, for lack of assurance that the Atlantic Alliance is an eternal guarantee, while trying to build a European pillar.
But, so far, no answer has been found to resolve the compatibility between national defence and European defence, unless the concept of “European strategic autonomy” is given real content. In any case, by explaining to Europeans that it is up to them to ensure their own security, the Trump administration is giving them a lesson in political realism and justifying General de Gaulle's caution in the face of what the future holds in international relations.
Maurice Vaïsse, historian and specialist in international relations, is the author of "La Grandeur. Politique étrangère du général de Gaulle, 1958-1969" (Fayard, 1998).
Maurice Vaïsse (Historian)
envoyé : 12 mars 2025 à 21:40
de : Michael Britton <mfb...@gmail.com>
à : clios...@googlegroups.com
objet : Re: [cliospsyche] A wonderful speech about Ukraine, Trump and Europe by French senator Claude Malhuret
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/CAOd-ijOY3tZRe5WLS-1KNQe%2BXC3Y-rtTSq%2BvrpWsgMvRGozj2w%40mail.gmail.com.