The Guardian view on Macron in Washington: a need for results | Editorial
A young European leader flies to Washington on an official visit. He is a modernising charmer from the progressive wing of politics, articulate and comfortable with the media. He arrives to meet an American president whose politics are emphatically not his, and whose election has dismayed US liberals, disrupted the transatlantic alliance and alienated European opinion. The new US president is an American exceptionalist. He is no respecter of human rights and international institutions. But the European leader has decided to hug him close in the hope of influencing his decisions. Washington rolls out the red carpet. It is captivated by the visitor’s eloquence and charisma, such contrasts to their own leader’s bombast. Improbably, the two men find themselves starting to make big plans together.
For anyone whose memory goes back to the run-up to the Iraq war, this is a sobering vision. When Tony Blair first visited George W Bush in 2001, he began a process that would end, among other things, in the wreck of his own reputation, the collapse of his party’s electoral ascendancy and the undermining of his country’s moral and international standing, all of which continue in some degree to this day. Whether Emmanuel Macron, who arrived in Washington on Monday for a two-day state visit to Donald Trump, will give way to a Blair-like hubris in his dealings with the White House is too early to say. There are sound, serious reasons for thinking history will not repeat itself. But the risk is undoubtedly there.
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