International security

The Sun King and The American Friend

So what did Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron really talk about throughout their effusive buddy-buddy Parisian act?

This being France, let's start where things matter: gastronomy.

Yes, that dinner at Alain Ducasse's overpriced Jules Verne restaurant at the Eiffel Tower. Cool window table with a view. Only the principals, along with wives Melania and Brigitte. The Macrons are fluent English speakers. No leaks from the Elyse'e Palace.The restaurant is part of Ducasse's sprawling empire, managed by businessman Xavier Alberti, who's married to Audrey Bourolleau, who happens to be the agriculture counsel to President Macron.

So it's all in the family. And Macron's extended family is a virtual French who's who. A serious misconception prevails, especially in the US, that Macron is an outsider, an anti-establishment maverick. Nothing is further from the facts.

Macron is the French establishment's golden boy. He has been groomed/supported by a vast "pragmatic" neoliberal galaxy, from the Saint Simon Foundation to the Edmond de Rothschild Group, the Montaigne Institute and the Terra Nova think-tank, modeled on the Progressive Policy Institute created by Bill Clinton and Joseph Lieberman, and whose task is to let French economic, political and social life be fertilized by American modernity.