Emmanuel Macron’s foreign policy doctrine(s)

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Emmanuel Macron’s foreign policy doctrine(s)

The newly minted French president knows Brussels, distrusts Moscow and must learn everything else.

By BEN JUDAH 5/8/17, 1:52 PM CET Updated 5/8/17, 3:13 PM CET

France’s President-elect Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old foreign policy novice, won the keys to the Élysée palace without giving a major address on international affairs.



His views, informed by a broad coterie of policy advisers and French grandees, are largely unformed — with one, new exception. To listen to his closest foreign policy advisers, this bitter campaign that saw Macron face off against pro-Moscow opponents including Marine Le Pen and hacked by suspected Kremlin operatives has been the making of a Russia hawk.



When it comes to Moscow, France will now respond with the Macron doctrine.



“Macron is extremely well-prepared on European, financial and macroeconomic affairs. His comfort zone stops there” — Bruno Tertrais

“We will have a doctrine of retaliation when it comes to Russian cyberattacks or any other kind of attacks,” Macron’s official foreign policy adviser Aurélien Lechevallier told me. “This means we are ready to retaliate against cyberattacks — not only in kind but also with any other conventional measure or security tool.”



A personal friend of the newly elected president since their university days at L’Ecole Nationale D’Administration, Lechevallier is a former diplomatic adviser to the mayor of Paris and a former cultural attaché in Beirut.



Macron’s centrist En Marche campaign believes it was the victim of a sustained Russian digital propaganda campaign, intended to spread fake news and smear Macron as a sexual deviant and the tool of an oligarchic “Rothschild” plot (in a reference to his spell as a banker at Rothschild in Paris). This culminated in a gigantic hack of En Marche, with documents dumped online only hours before France’s formal electoral media blackout began, which campaign staff said carried Moscow’s electronic fingerprints.



“Cyberhacks and info-ops would make you take a very dim view of the person governing Russia, even if you had no prejudices before you started campaigning,” said François Heisbourg, chairman of the council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who has been advising Macron on defense and security.



The candidate himself had no hard views on the Kremlin, Macron’s closest foreign policy advisers told me at the beginning of the campaign — a view echoed by Heisbourg. “To my understanding, he didn’t have any particularly strong feelings on foreign affairs in general,” Heisbourg said. “He hadn’t made any particular statements on China or on Russia. He hadn’t identified himself as being from a values-based or a realpolitik school. He came with a low base of knowledge and no biases.”



Russian President Vladimir Putin | Pool photo by Ivan Sekretarev/AFP via Getty Images

Russian President Vladimir Putin | Pool photo by Ivan Sekretarev/AFP via Getty Images

“The Russian attacks have backfired,” said Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of La Fondation Pour La Recherche Politique, who has been closely involved in both Macron’s foreign policy and defense expert group. “They have hardened him … and they have hardened his views on Russia.”



Emmanuel the Unready?



The new president knows the EU — and also the limits of his foreign policy knowledge.



“Macron is extremely well-prepared on European, financial and macroeconomic affairs,” said Tertrais. “Maybe the best prepared of any president of recent times. But his comfort zone stops there.”



Macron’s team brags of his understanding of Brussels, his expertise on the geopolitics of the eurozone and the fine points of international finance that have sunk so many Europeans leaders since the 2008 financial crash. Summits are nothing new to Macron, who served as President François Hollande’s sherpa at critical EU gatherings on the Greek debt crisis and during both a G7 and G20 summit.



Macron’s debut on the foreign stage, and first meeting with Donald Trump, will be at the NATO summit later this month in Brussels.

“Yet, I think it’s possible that he underestimates how much time foreign policy defense and counter-terrorism will take him. They take up about half the job,” said Tertrais. “It won’t be long before the 3 a.m. phone call.”



He won’t have long to prepare.



Macron will meet U.S. President Donald Trump in less than three weeks at the NATO summit in Brussels on May 25.



To prepare for that encounter, he will draw on both French diplomats but also on six months of discussions and position-building by several groups of informal advisers.



Lechevallier has guided a foreign policy and security team of about 50 people over the past half year, with Heisbourg leading on defense and national security. Macron’s chief European affairs adviser Clément Beaune has steered a parallel group on EU affairs. “Think of this as a guerrilla army,” said Heisbourg.



But the list of Macron’s advisers on security and foreign affairs read less like a guerrilla army and more like a who’s who of the French policy establishment, including Jean-Claude Cousseran, the former head of the French secret service; Justin Vaïsse, the head of policy planning at the foreign ministry; Antoine Michon, the head of the climate desk at the foreign ministry; Nathalie Loiseau, a former director general of the foreign ministry; Muriel Domenach, the director of the anti-radicalization commission; Guillaume Ollagnier, chief of staff for the foreign minister and Gérard Araud, the ambassador to Washington.



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Informally Macron has also sought the advice of ex-President François Mitterrand’s diplomatic adviser and later foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, and former President Jacques Chirac’s ex-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. Jean-Yves Le Drian, the incumbent defense minister, has also been providing advice to En Marche and is tipped to remain in his post.



Despite the marquee names, the foreign policy group was widely seen by those who participated in meetings as something of a failure, with many saying it contributed to Macron’s poor performance during the foreign policy segments of the debates. “Alarm bells rang after that,” said a senior campaign adviser. “But little was done to change things.” Twice, a major foreign policy interview was scheduled with a newspaper, only to be canceled, with sources suggesting the team wasn’t confident enough to carry it through.



“The group lacked a strong, respected, figure to impose himself,” said one senior campaign adviser. “Briefing papers, often contradictory, were flying around, and more often than not confusing him.”



Favorite for the influential Elysée post of diplomatic adviser is Gérard Araud, the outgoing Washington ambassador.

The senior rank of those advising and the junior rank of those closest to Macron repeatedly created friction in the campaign, multiple sources said. The work on defense and national security was seen as more successful, with Macron feeling confident enough to make major speeches on the issues and to start pushing them during the debates. When it came to terrorism, En Marche decided to bring Macron together for hours-long sessions with policemen, teachers, psychiatrists and others seeing radicalization close-up.



“Ask him what the new pensions regime will be and he would explain it in five minutes — beautifully and luminously,” said Heisbourg. “But ask him what his policy is on Syria and he will line up sentence after sentence and speak for fifteen minutes in a way that people will have difficulty understanding. It shows on television. But this doesn’t worry me — it’s called the learning curve.”



Given the new president’s relative unfamiliarity with the issues, Macron’s foreign policy is expected to be heavily shaped by his foreign minister. He has as yet to make a decision on who will be his man in the Quai d’Orsay. Who is eventually selected will depend on the coming June legislative elections, sources said.



France's former prime minister Dominique de Villepin | Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images

France’s former prime minister Dominique de Villepin | Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images

Favorite for the influential Elysée post of diplomatic adviser is Araud, the outgoing Washington ambassador. Multiple campaign sources expect that should En Marche win a majority in the June elections, it would free Macron’s hands in appointing political novices to high office.



However, should En Marche not win a majority, Macron’s ministerial picks will become hostage to coalition building. Multiple campaign sources said Macron might use the foreign ministry to tempt a Républicain grandee to cross the floor. Former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is said to be under consideration.



Manu, meet Donald



Macron’s most worked-over dossier is the Trump folder.



“As far as the United States is concerned,” said Lechevallier, “we have a full working agenda.”



Lechevallier said that France wants to propose “a new security initiative on Libya” and discuss Syria and Ukraine. “These are the three core security issues.” Simultaneously Macron will seek “clarification” from the White House on its position on free trade, the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords.



“We will be a little bit worried if the United States revises its participation in the Paris Accords and we want the United States to remain in it,” said Lechevallier. “Potentially we can be more flexible but we want the United States to remain in the agreement.


“When it comes to the Iran nuclear deal, we want to work very closely on the follow-up making sure it remains in place but is diligently executed,” he added. “We understand there is a policy review in place and we want to test some options.”



The fight against terrorism will be France’s priority at the NATO summit in Brussels and high on the agenda at Macron’s first European Council meeting in June. Meanwhile, in Paris, one of the president’s first acts will be to create a 24/7 anti-ISIS task force to coordinate France’s operations in Iraq and Syria with allies and partners.



“The president has one challenge,” Lechevallier said. “We have a lot of reforms to do in France. We have a very packed schedule for the first hundred days.”

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