 Le Bonjour à tous. Good afternoon everyone. Very welcome to this session. Could I just put a few housekeeping things? Switch off your mobile phones, but I'll take the advice myself as well. The initial address as usual we operate to the Charlem Hasse rule of the initial address is on the record. The question and answer session afterwards is according to Chatham House rules. Now, this morning we have, this afternoon rather, we have a very important subject to my mind, the subject of Macron. Since his remarkable election in 2017, he has been rarely out of news in France or somewhere else and certainly in Europe. He seems to be extraordinary with his energy, with his intellectual prowess, and so many other things, and makes one really envious, I have to say, at this time of my life, when all of these things are failing. But he has been to say the least controversial and no more controversial than the last fortnight or so with his interview with the economist in which he talked about a lot of things, but the thing that has attracted attention is his remarks about NATO and using the term brain dead is hardly going to win your friends in NATO or indeed in a lot of the Eastern European countries and indeed elsewhere. But he has been controversial in France, of course. The gilisone, I think, almost saw the end of him. It was touch and go whether he would survive. He did survive. He went out into the countryside, presented his case to all and suddenly, and he seems to rely on argument on trying to convince people than any other way. But he's now faced, of course, with upcoming elections. The elections come around very quickly. The local elections, of course, early next year, and of course there's the big one of the presidential election. Now, the Assembly National is dominated by his own party, which he founded, La Repubblico March, again an extraordinary leap in the dark. And a lot of those people are without political experience. This may have been a thing that has dogged Macron as well. He hadn't got the old wily experience politicians that the Socialist Party certainly had and which indeed the centre right had. And this is sometimes shown in his decisions and so on. But he's certainly courageous and so on. So it's a matter, and I don't know, in fact, where Europe would be without this figure because I don't see anything else coming out about where Europe is going, how it defends itself now in the presence of Trump and all he's saying, how it's going vis-a-vis Africa. Macron has raised all of these things particularly in a speech to the Sarban in September 2017, which by any stretch of their imagination was an incredible speech and will stand the test of time, I think, in the main. And of course, there are things that are totally unachievable in it, but there is a lot that Europe would need. But there doesn't seem to be any reaction coming from Europe on these things, even on the NATO thing. We know that Poland and these countries are frightened by his remarks about getting close to Putin. It's not exactly popular these days, but in that, of course, Macron is only repeating what the goal said. There can be no Europe without Russia. So anyway, look, we have this cheaper with us to say all of these things. You're quite right. You took the words out of my mouth. Vector is a wonderful person to have with us. He started his career really reporting French politics with Reuters in 1982. He's going on to serve with the Financial Times in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe and is now a bureau chief for the Financial Times in Paris. He has written several books. Won't go into them, but you can Google all of these things. So Vector, you're very, very welcome and delighted you're with us. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you very much. And it's great to be invited to the IIEA. Thank you very much. We had a very high-powered lunch with a lot of scarily knowledgeable and intelligent people. So it put me in a nervous mood for this, but no, it's really great to be back in Dublin. I last came a couple of years ago for the Dorky Book Festival and I came also for my nephew's wedding. He was also married in Dorky. And I'm still sort of kept in touch with Ireland by your wonderful ambassador in Paris, Patricia O'Bran, who really keeps us very well informed about what's going on here and the connections with France and the chaos of Brexit and its impact on Ireland, impact across Europe. And I never heard of the land bridge until I met her and she was telling me all about the importance of the trading routes that run through England to get to Ireland. So I'm going to talk a little bit about French President Emmanuel Macron. He's, as you described, very active foreign policy and what it means for Europe and the world. And when I say active, you mentioned the NATO comments, an outburst almost, in an interview in the Economist. He ruffled a lot of feathers by saying that NATO was suffering from brain death. He's also throwing his weight around in Europe in European institutions, although it has to be said this is not new for France. France and Germany have obviously always been the prime movers in the EU. And it's been a French tradition to try and impose itself on Brussels, and that still continues. But he's also made very controversial statements about European enlargement and taken positions that are very controversial, for example, keeping Macedonia and Albania out of the enlargement process or the application process. But he's also done a lot of other things like trying to make peace in Ukraine and to ease the crisis in the Gulf. He's become, in a sense, Europe's Trump whisperer and perhaps the man best qualified to bring the rather errant US president to heel. And I'll come back to some of those in a minute. I should start by saying that he does, as you mentioned, he does excite strong passions, Macron, certainly in France, but even abroad. And I hope I can count myself as reasonably detached from this because I've only been in France this time for about a year. But I did spend previous stints in France when Mitterrand was president and when Chiric was president. And now, yeah, so Macron has just been for the past year. And I didn't witness his extraordinary rise to power except from a distance in 2017. So I'm not a fanatically devoted Macronist, as some of his followers are, but nor am I a sort of angry, macro-hating detractors. A lot of people are in France and especially I think quite a few people in the French press and certainly on the French left. There's quite a lot of anger and even hatred of Macron at the moment. But he is, whether you love him or hate him, he's certainly a fascinating figure to study for historians and for journalists like myself. So to try and explain what it is that he's been doing, I'm going to take you back to a statement that he made to French ambassadors who were gathered in Paris for their annual meeting at the end of August. And then I'm just going to mention briefly the French Revolution. So I think this is quite an important speech that he made and I'm just going to paraphrase the French here. I've got the French quotation here, but he says, I think France's vocation is what is required now, which is to try and impose ourselves on the world order with the cards that we have and not to give up to the inevitable things that are being done by other people, but to try and build a new order in which not only we would have our place, we as in France, but also the interests that we have would also have their place. So I believe in only one thing, this is what he said, it is the strategy of audacity, la strategie de l'audace, and the taking of risk, la prise de risque, strategy of audacity and taking of risk. Now remember this was to ambassadors to diplomats, he's saying this. And what that means is that maybe a lot of the things we are doing, this is still Macron speaking, maybe they won't succeed and there will be a lot of commentators who will say that we failed at certain times and that is not a problem, he said. What is a problem, what is absolutely fatal today is to not try and do what we need to do, given what I've just said. So my strategy is one of audacity, boldness, it's a vision and it's to try and find in this context a way of refounding European civilization. And I think that's what should be our aim in this country and our European strategy and our international strategy. So that's a bit of a paraphrase so it's not as elegant as his original French. But so the key concept here is clearly audacity, boldness. And that was conveniently explained to us by Le Drian, his foreign minister a couple of days later in his closing speech to the same French ambassadors. And he ended up by quoting Dante, the French revolutionary, whose phrase was, do le das, encore do le das, toujours do le das, so audacity, more audacity, always audacity. And that was a short but very famous speech that he made in the assembly in 1792 to rally the revolutionaries against the approaching Austrians and Prussians and French monarchists. And the call to save revolutionary France was indeed a success in the days that followed that speech by Dante. But Le Drian didn't actually mention that Dante was executed by guillotine less than two years later in the terror, but that is what happened. So audacity is the key to the way he thinks about what he's doing and the manner in which he does it. And in talking about his modus on operandi we should also not forget, and a couple of people mentioned this at lunch, that he explicitly models himself on Charles de Gaulle, who was, of course, almost alone among French leaders in keeping a light, the flame of the free French after the Nazi occupation of France and the formation of the Vichy government. Churchill found de Gaulle impossibly arrogant and difficult, but stuck with him to the very end because de Gaulle was right about the really important things. And incidentally was also extraordinarily perceptive about a lot of international events from Algeria to the progress of the Second World War, both militarily and in terms of alliances, and the Vietnam War and many others. If you look back over his life and the statements he made, he really was extraordinarily perceptive about a lot of things on international policy. So macros audacity, some people have called it disruptive diplomacy. I think that's the title of the talk. It's about constant movement and energy. One of my colleagues, Sylvie Kaufman, said his enemies were immobility and paralysis. These are the kind of attributes of the way he acts of his diplomacy of his international strategy. But we should recognise that one reason he is so prominent, one reason he stands out as a protagonist, is that it's in a very particular context in Europe at the moment. The rest of the stage is occupied mostly by minor actors or diminished actors. Britain, even under the ebulliant Boris Johnson who like himself to Churchill, not aptly I think but does. So Britain is fatally distracted by Brexit. Angela Merkel in Germany is clearly in the closing years of her leadership and the coalition in Germany, as we know from the news over the weekend, is in very deep trouble about the SPD. Spain and Italy embroiled in internal political tussles in which populists or the far-right have made gains. Trump strategies on almost all fronts seem to be incoherent and quite often damaging to US interests, let alone those of US allies. We could have a whole talk about that, but that's not the moment. So let's look at some of the issues where Macron has been rocking the boat, where he's been accused of overstepping the mark. I'm not going to endorse him, but I'm going to argue that he's not quite as outrageous as his detractors make out. If you take NATO, the key issue you mentioned, it's meeting for its summit in London tomorrow. We need to look at exactly what he said and in what context. He did say NATO was suffering from brain death, but he said it in the context of the US, the sudden US withdrawal from northeast Syria of its forces and Turkey's subsequent invasion of northern Syria. There was no consultation either by the Americans or the Turks on this. They're both members of NATO and Macron's argument is that they should have consulted. So as Macron pointed out, you have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision making between the United States and its NATO allies. None. You have an uncoordinated aggressive action by another NATO ally, Turkey, in an area where our interests are at stake. He said he had no problem with the military interoperability of NATO, but strategically and politically we need to recognise we have a problem. He is right in what he says, although you can argue with how he said it. He's also called into question the future of Article 5, which obliges members to provide mutual assistance in the event of an attack. In a way, that's probably a more significant statement than what he said about brain death and Turkey. Angela Merkel immediately criticised his drastic words. Polish and other leaders were quick to condemn what they saw as an attack on NATO. But again, if you look at the days that followed, Heiko Maas, the German Foreign Minister, was more or less echoing Macron in slightly more moderate language a couple of days later, calling for NATO cohesion for Europe to take more responsibility for its security. Charles Michel, the incoming head of the European Council, also took a pretty Macronist line in an interview with my paper with the FT, saying that the EU needed to do more to ramp up its joint defence capabilities and avoid becoming collateral damage in the tensions between the US and China. Now, when they interpret Macron's words, his advisers in Paris make it clear that he did not make a gaff, he did not speak by accident. It was quite deliberate because he didn't want the NATO summit, which is a 70th anniversary celebration, just to be another photo op. And I think it's fair to say he has succeeded in doing that. He has succeeded in ensuring that there will be some serious discussion that takes place. So that's NATO. Moving on to Europe more broadly, I think it's crucial to understand that the French recognise, and Macron said this himself, that it's not simply enough to wait out Donald Trump and hope that he's replaced by a US president, as a US president, by somebody who's more rational and more Atlanticist than he is. So Macron spoke of the exceptional fragility of Europe and, of course, its need to build its own defence security and technology strategy rather than merely rely on the Americans. And he then said their position has shifted over the past 10 years and it hasn't only been the Trump administration. You have to understand what is happening deep down in American policymaking. It's the idea put forward by Obama who said, I am a Pacific president. So this is America's famous pivot to Asia. And again, I think Macron is right on this, and he's not even the first person to say it, but he does say things in a dramatic and attention-grabbing manner. And anyone who's followed Macron since he was swept to power in the 2017 presidential election can hardly claim to be amazed by the kind of things he's saying and doing two years later. You mentioned that speech in September 2017 at the Sorbonne. He laid out a very typically ambitious, typically for him, ambitious European agenda in the speech in that speech at the Sorbonne, calling among other things for a military intervention force, a common military budget by 2020, a European agency to push radical innovation in the economy, a European public prosecutor, a carbon tax at the frontier on imports into the EU, a harmonisation of corporate tax rates. The list, as you said, is very long. And in a way what is surprising is not how many of these things have gone nowhere, but how many of them have either actually been done or are being in the process of being done, or indeed are being contemplated quite actively by other members of the European Union as well. Now none of this means that Macron and the French have not made mistakes. We definitely have. But I think his principal message that he has for Europe and his European partners is the right ones, the right one. It's not just that Europeans must do more for their own security and must stand united, but they're doing so for a particular reason, which is that they need to be able to negotiate as a superpower, at least as an economic superpower that can defend its interests, whether they're commercial interests or technological interests or strategic interests, in the face of an increasingly unilateralist United States and an increasingly aggressive China. So it is hard to argue, I think, with Macron's view that, for example, you look at the roll out of 5G telecoms, the issue there and Huawei. The issue there is when it comes to the manufacturing process, it's about Chinese manufacturers. When it comes to data and the way data is handled around the world, we're talking about American tech and internet platforms. In both cases, Europe is, both in terms of software and hardware, is left at the mercy of foreign providers. That's where a lot of his industrial nationalism comes from. His decision, again we mentioned this at the lunch, it's very important, I think, that his decision, Macron's decision when he met Xi Jinping this year in Paris for a summit at the Elysée, he deliberately invited Angela Merkel and Yungka to come with him for that meeting to meet Xi Jinping. Most people think this was a pretty smart act of diplomacy. And I think, again, I think it was too. And the reason for that is that I've worked many years in Asia and I'm absolutely certain that if you have a strong and united stand in defence of your interests, that is really the only strategy that works in dealing with China. And it's the only strategy that carries any weight in Beijing. I didn't think I would have to mention this word, but just when we're talking about European unity, we probably have to talk about Brexit very briefly. Again, Macron's been faltered in both London and Brussels for being overly antagonistic, for example by opposing lengthy extensions to the Brexit procedure. And Macron and his advisers just say they're being realistic. They didn't want Brexit in the first place and they're just trying to ensure the continuation of obviously the stability of the EU itself, but also they want a very strong Franco-British bilateral defence and security relationship to continue afterwards. And since the British people voted for Brexit, Macron's view is that they should get it and the sooner the uncertainty is out of the way, the better. And you could argue that this is a kind of gaullous trait of just being realistic about what's happened. It's that sort of realism, that sense of taking the facts as they are rather than trying to pretend that something has happened that hasn't happened. It's one reason why I think he's become quite good at dealing with Donald Trump. At the G7 summit in Beirats, Macron kept on talking about how there was no point that a lot of the things that the Europeans hate about Trump are simply things that he promised to do in his election campaign. His view is we've got to move on. If he pulled out of the climate accord now Macron would say there's no way we can get him back in. We just have to work around it and deal with it, deal with the situation as it is. So unlike Trump and unlike several other prominent world leaders today including I think we could say Boris Johnson across the IRC, Macron is extremely well read. He has a great sense of history. He is relentlessly logical and cartesian in the way he considers the great international policy questions of our time. When he was asked at the beginning of his Economist interview where he wasn't being too somber and overdramatic about the state of Europe he just recalled the triumph of peace in post-war Europe and noted alarming things that would have been absolutely unthinkable five years ago the exhausting mayhem of Brexit and he used struggling to find a common voice and an American ally turning its back as he was quoted as saying an American ally turning its back on us so quickly on strategic issues. Again he's not wrong. Just a couple of other big foreign policy issues that I think it's worth looking at to sort of try and understand the way Macron works and the way he thinks. He's pushing a couple of things. One is Iran and the Gulf and it's striking how much effort Macron has put into trying to resolve the crisis triggered by Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear agreement that limited Iran's nuclear ambitions in exchange for renewed economic ties with the rest of the world. I mean he's engaged in really quite frenzied diplomacy on this front both in bureates at the G7 but also at the UN and indeed every other week in Paris. In the G7 he invited Zarif, the Iranian Foreign Minister, as a surprise guest at the town hall in bureates on the sidelines of the meeting and in New York the following month during the UN meetings he even got to the point of preparing Trump for a phone call with Rouhani and Trump was game and then Rouhani himself, it was Rouhani who pulled out at the last minute because he did not have the green light from the hardliners in Tehran. The question here is why are the French making this big effort and it's not for domestic political gain. I think it's fair to say. I don't think French voters are very concerned about this particular issue. Macron's argument is that they should be concerned about this issue because unlike Trump he realizes that the crisis in Iran and the Gulf and don't forget that Iran destroyed Saudi oil facilities and took out half of the country's oil supply a couple of months ago with impunity so far, he says and his advisors say and his government says that this is really the gravest danger to world peace at the moment, the most dangerous crisis of the moment in the world and he's talking to people who aren't listening but that is definitely his view. Then there's the issue of Russia and Ukraine. Again there's not much to be gained, I don't think in French domestic politics from trying to make peace in eastern Ukraine where Russia having grabbed Crimea is still running the civil war to destabilize Kiev in the east of Ukraine but Macron has gone out on a limb to court not only Zelensky but also Vladimir Putin and that of course as we all know has risked the wrath of Germany and East European capitals because he's being too nice to Moscow they think but whereas Trump was clearly interacting with the Russians and the Ukrainians for domestic political gain as we know from the impeachment hearings this is not the case again with Macron as with Iran there's nothing really to be gained and his efforts interestingly may finally be bearing some kind of fruit because we've got the first summit of the so-called Normandy 4 which is Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine in Paris a week from today and it's the first meeting for several years to try and enforce a ceasefire and find a lasting solution. I'm not saying that Macron is not a French nationalist because all French presidents of the 5th Republic I think we can agree sort of nationalists almost by definition or that he doesn't press for French advantage in Europe and the wider world but I think it's his assessment of what constitutes the French national interest that is interesting and what constitutes the broader European interest that's what marks him out from some of his rivals his brief televised address before the G7 to try and explain his thinking to the French people ahead of that meeting and he said I'm acting in your name we're going to talk about all these really important things like wealth inequalities by diversity, deforestation, climate change and peace and security across the world and he said when France was hit by terror attacks in 2015 they were prepared in Syria by jihadists if tomorrow Iran obtains a nuclear weapon we will be directly concerned if the Middle East goes up in flames we will be affected if we don't solve the situation in Libya which is flaring up again today we will continue collectively to suffer the disaster of migration across the Mediterranean instability across a large part of Africa on these matters I want us to strike useful chords and to defend peace and security so he is giving a sort of domestic political rationale which I don't think anybody is listening to but that's his point of view so he is a nationalist who understands the importance of internationalism he doesn't want his country to turn in on itself with the kind of isolationist policies that Marine Le Pen of the far-right Rassemblement National has he continues to defend his methods the audacity that I was mentioning at the beginning and he did not apologise to Merkel or the others for his forthright words on NATO in fact he's kind of doubled down on it on the need to speak frankly about the challenges of what he sees as a very dangerous world so opening the Paris Peace Forum the other day he said the real risk was not him being outspoken but was laziness or coyness or prudishness of hypocritically not questioning the value of international institutions we need truth he said so he is not backing down from his overturning of the apple cart and shaking things up is he effective I think this is if we understand his thinking the reasons for his thinking that's all very well but does he actually have the ability to do what he says he wants to do and can he last he himself said about his rapprochymar with Putin and Russia that he wouldn't yield results in 18 months or two years and some things that he's doing but it doesn't take five years or even ten years to come to fruition and I think the words of an editorial in my paper are quite relevant on this which is that so the editorial said this the French leader has proved better identifying problems than building alliances to solve them and one of you here raised this issue of his inability or his difficulty in forming alliances and I think this is the crucial thing so he is determined, he's persistent, he's energetic he tends to take very quick decisions without consultation and that of course has infuriated Germany France's key partner in the EU and it's infuriated other governments as well particularly those in the east and we had that issue the other day with the poorly signaled rejection of opening the door to Macedonia and Albanian accession to the EU I think it's probably inevitable that Macron is going to find the going hard given that he is an increasingly rare example of a centrist liberal in charge of one of the world's major economies and given that potential partners Germany being the obvious example are politically weak or fractured at home I'm conscious that I'm close to running out of time but oh no we're okay so I'll just a couple more minutes so I think he, despite his problems of not being very good at consulting with people particularly Angela Merkel he has been quite successful broadly successful in pushing forward his agenda internationally given that his approach as he himself explained is to sort of demand ten big things and then settle for three and a half if you take the latest changing of the guard of the EU we get an example of that yes his first candidate for commissioner Sylvie Goulard was humiliatingly rejected by the European Parliament but his second Terry Bratton is certainly a candidate of equal stature and got through the parliamentary process and will arguably be just as effective and he retains the big portfolio of internal market defence and data that Paris was demanding for its commissioner and he also has allies or associates or people he can work with at the head of all the major European institutions including the European Central Bank so Macross real challenge I think and again this came up when we were talking among some of you earlier is not actually the real challenge to his ambitions is not in Brussels or Washington or Paris sorry in Paris yes actually necessarily but in places in sort of small towns in France or non metropolitan areas of France where the voters the citizens are deeply distrustful of Macross of some of his elite associates the party that he runs is not deeply embedded in the sort of rural France in the countryside certainly even outside Paris it's not very embedded at all I was in Marseille the other day and I was struck by how nobody really talked about Macross whereas in Paris people tend to talk about nothing else so it is there it's in Amiens and the towns of villages of France that his future will be decided I think not so much in international policy but it will have an effect on that international policy so it's voters there in the rest of France and we have an election coming up in March who will decide whether he and his Lerrie public on March party get another five years from 2022 to pursue their goals but that as they say is another story so thank you very much