Still smarting from his ill-received trip to France, Donald Trump marked the three-year anniversary of the November 13 terrorist attack that killed 130 people in Paris by launching into a tirade against Emmanuel Macron, the charismatic young French president with whom Trump has enjoyed a physical, but tempestuous, relationship. “Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China, and Russia. But it was Germany in World Wars I & II—How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along,” he wrote, adding that Europe should pay more for NATO, taking a shot at the French for not drinking more American wine, needling Macron for his “very low approval rating,” and, finally, calling to “make France great again.”
The proximate cause of Trump’s outburst was Macron’s remark last week, during an interview with Europe 1 Radio, that Europe should have its own military “to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia, and even the United States of America.” Macron apparently misspoke: he immediately followed up by clarifying that Europe would defend itself better “without just depending on the United States.” Nevertheless, Trump—then en route to Paris for the World War I armistice centennial—was incensed. The two leaders appeared to make up after Air Force One touched down at Paris Orly Airport, but on Sunday, Macron used his centenary speech to take another dig at Trump. “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” he said. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.”
Trump looked sullen throughout the event. When he returned to Washington, the aggrieved tweeting began in earnest. “Never easy bringing up the fact that the U.S. must be treated fairly, which it hasn’t, on both military and trade,” he wrote, over the course of several posts. “It is time that these very rich countries either pay the United States for its great military protection, or protect themselves.” It is somewhat curious, then, that Trump should be so triggered by the thought of a European army. Macron, after all, is hardly the first European leader to propose such a thing. On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel joined the French president in calling for the formation of a “common European army” to serve as a complement to NATO. “The time when we could rely on others is over,” Merkel said in an address to the European Parliament. As she noted, European countries currently employ a vast, uncoordinated network of weapons systems, which cannot be easily integrated. A centralized military would also be a more efficient military. (No wonder the Germans are on board.)
Perhaps it is this possibility that has gotten under Trump’s skin. While he rails about the costs associated with protecting Macron and Merkel—the U.S. currently has about 60,000 troops stationed in Europe—America also benefits from billions of dollars in weapons sales to Europe. In the 2018 fiscal year alone, European countries accounted for $37.4 billion of U.S. defense companies’ sales—the most of any region in the world, beating out the Middle East ($22.1 billion), which was previously the biggest spender in the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years. The Macron-Merkel pivot away from the U.S. could jeopardize all that. In an interview taped Sunday, before the centenary event at the Arc de Triomphe, Macron told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that he wants Europe’s increased military spending to go to European companies—not American ones. “What I don’t want to see is European countries increasing the budget in defense in order to buy Americans’ and other arms or materials coming from your industry,” Macron said. “I think if we increase our budget, it’s . . . to build our autonomy and to become an actual sovereign power.” As Politico notes, France happens “to have one of Europe’s biggest defense manufacturing industries.” Make France great again, indeed.
