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Mar 09, 2025
Headline: France, seen as the spearhead of European defense, worries Russia
Sub-headline :Macron and Putin on Friday engaged in a long-distance sparring match about Napoleon and imperialism.
As soon as the European Council ended, Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron launched into history lessons from a distance. “There are still people who want to return to the times of Napoleon, forgetting how it ended,” said the Kremlin chief. Without naming him, he targeted the French president, who, after the green light from the 27 member states to beef up their defense and support Ukraine, repeated in Brussels on Thursday, March 6, that “Russia is an existential threat to us. Not just to Ukraine, not just to its neighbors, but to all of Europe.” On Russian social media in Moscow, Macron was quickly mocked as a powerless Napoleon. And, on television, Putin responded by reminding him of the catastrophic outcome of the Russian campaign in 1812.
“All the mistakes of our enemies and adversaries began in the same way: with a profound underestimation of the Russian character,” said Putin. A history buff like the master of the Kremlin, Macron was quick to respond: “Napoleon carried out conquests. The only imperial power I see today in Europe is Russia,” said the French president. He accused Putin of making “a historical misreading” by comparing him to Napoleon, and described him as a “revisionist imperialist of history and the identity of peoples.”
Following the announcement of Macron’s plans to strengthen European defense, reactions in Moscow oscillated between irony and skepticism: He is suspected of trying to frighten the French by stirring up the Russian threat to better divert attention from domestic problems. “In Moscow, however, there is a palpable touch of anxiety about this new, more war-mongering Europe, at a time when the Russians were hoping to get out of it thanks to Donald Trump in the US,” according to Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean, director of the Russia-Eurasia Center at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris.
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Editor: Reader, compare and contrast this Macron commentary from Benjamin Quénelle, with this Duran commentary by Alexander Mercouris and Alex Cristoforou. To put it mildly Benjamin Quénelle writes a kind of political apologetic, where Mercouris and Cristoforou offer a realistic appraisal of Macron and Macronism. My thought is that Macron, and his politics have proved that Neo-Liberlism in its French iteration has been toxic and that Macron himself is an abject failure on all counts !
Editor: Benjamin Quénelle fires to final salvo!
Putin’s loyal foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, described as “absurd” and “delirious” accusations of Moscow wanting to attack Europe and said that Macron’s comments on the possibility of Europe being protected by the French nuclear umbrella amounted to a “threat.” In three years of war in Ukraine, however, the Kremlin has never ceased to wave the threat of nuclear blackmail.
Newspaper Reader:
As I approach my 80th Year, I grow weary of the journalistc hacks of the The Political Present, who act ‘as if’ the Cold War of The Post War Era, does not supply stunning object lessons for the political present! Allied to its toxic & malicious attacks on Dissenters of all stripes and hues: Quénelle contiues this malign tradition!
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