Self-Serving "Opinion" in France: Donald Trump’s (or Netanyahu’s) policies are dictated by emotion, say French VIPs, while Emmanuel Macron’s are grounded in reason

 

One certain brand of politics is dictated by nothing other than emotions, many French VIPs assert, while a certain other brand is grounded in reason. 

It is Trump’s brand (and Netanyahu’s) that — by the sheerest of chances — falls into the first category, whereas it is Macron’s brand that—here, too, by the strangest of coincidences — falls into the second.

 

That is what Philippe Karsenty et Pierre Lurçat are saying in a Causeur article entitled Anti-Americanism and the Denigration of Israel: A Familiar Tune…

Geopolitical analyst Dominique Moïsi has just published a book … with an evocative title : Le triangle des passions du monde (which is a sequel to his previous book, La géopolitique de l’émotion). In Moïsi’s work … an occasionally pedantic intellectual veneer struggles to conceal a simplistic thesis: that the politics of Donald Trump (or those of Netanyahu) are dictated by emotions, whereas those of Emmanuel Macron are grounded in reason.

 … This anti-American — and, by extension, anti-Israeli — "tune" reigns supreme today, virtually unchallenged across the entire French media landscape. "The America of Omaha Beach exists no more!" declares Moïsi at the Ouest France daily, imagining a “Donald Trump strolling along the beaches of Normandy [who] would have reacted with a mixture of cynicism, vulgarity, and brutality, asking: 'But why did we spill American blood for this decadent continent—with its obsolete principles—which betrays us at every opportunity?'"  In truth, this portrayal of a cynical and brutal Trump reveals just as much about the passions driving this French geopolitical analyst and his colleagues — at the Quai d’Orsay and within the mainstream media — as it does about the actual object of their detestation.

 … If … Donald Trump’s United States acts in accordance with its own interests, it is because states — as everyone knows — have nothing but interests… Yet this did not prevent Trump from taking the risk of jeopardizing the American economy in a determined attempt to bring down the Mullahs’ regime — whereas Emmanuel Macron made a point of reassuring the Mullahs as early as February 28th that he had been unaware of the Israeli-American operation… out of courage, no doubt.

 … Indeed, France ultimately came around, nolens volens, to Donald Trump’s point of view, albeit without explicitly admitting it, needless to say. 

 … Yet this convergence of interests will not stop geopolitical analysts from continuing to mock Trump’s "vulgarity" and "brutality," driven as they are by their anti-American fervor and their loathing for both America's President and Israel's Prime Minister.