Why does Macron keep meddling in international crises?

Just two months from the presidential elections, Emmanuel Macron’s self-belief and risk-taking — not to mention setbacks — seem to know few bounds. And no more so than in foreign affairs. Following the French President’s telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine on 20 February, the Elysée triumphantly announced that a Biden-Putin summit was agreed in principle, only for the Kremlin to pour cold water on the idea the next morning. Washington then followed suit, before Putin announced the recognition of the two breakaway Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

This humiliation comes after Macron’s Moscow visit on 7 February, which concluded with a live press conference in which Putin gently put down the French President’s youthful enthusiasm and suggestion that Russia had agreed to freeze escalation.

Macron had hitherto seen himself as the great international powerbroker. He struck up a strategic dialogue with Putin in 2019, essentially unilaterally, but on behalf of Europe, making many in Brussels uncomfortable. Macron laboured under the impression that he was the Putin whisperer, just as he thought he had been with Donald Trump.

We now see what many had suspected for some time: that Putin was playing Macron. The French President’s enthusiasm for negotiating directly with Putin may have worsened things by granting him diplomatic cover. Even before the latest military developments, Le Figaro carried an editorial asking whether the politics of ‘appeasement’ were appropriate with Putin.

Macron’s Russian failure comes on top of similar vainglorious forays into other international crises. In late 2017, in a bid to improve dismal Franco-Algerian relations, Macron visited Algiers, bestowing concessions galore, but later plunged relations even lower with an off-the-cuff remark that eventually led to Algeria recalling its ambassador. Two years after the visit, his surprise invitation to the Iranian foreign minister to attend the 2019 Biarritz G7 summit to engineer a breakthrough in Iran’s nuclear talks was also met with failure.