Because of his title and the office he holds Western leaders must privately grumble about Donald Trump but have been timid about speaking back to him, until Emmanuel Macron let loose, writes Joe Lauria.
Macron. (President of Russia/Wikimedia Commons)
Thursday, April 2 to Friday, April 3
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Donald Trump has been running his mouth about his war on Iran for more than a month now.
He’s been insulting Iran, U.S. allies and the intelligence of the American people.
He alternatively says he’s won, achieved regime change, never sought regime change, beat the shit out of Iran, destroyed their air defenses (then ignores his planes being downed); and then says there’s nothing left to bomb, except to bomb it back to the Stone Age.
He should know the era. With a caveman’s touch he launched an aggression that closed the Hormuz Strait, and plunged the world into economic chaos. Now he says it’s up to others who he didn’t tell about the war, to reopen it because America doesn’t need the oil from the Strait but they do.
Rather than ignoring such ignorance, U.S. allies reacted, trying to flatter him, placate him and avoid his wrath. They have in effect normalized Trump’s insanely dangerous behavior, as Prof. Jeffrey Sachs explained in this extraordinary video on Friday.
Iran has stood up to Trump with missiles and drones. They have retaliated in ways that should not have surprised Trump, but did. They damaged 13 U.S. bases in the region, causing the evacuations of troops, including 1,500 soldiers and sailors back to Virginia from Bahrain.
Iran has battered Trump’s Gulf state vassals and his partner in world-historical crime, Israel. It has now shot down two U.S. F-15 fighter jets with one American pilot still on the run on Iranian territory.
The Europeans say it’s not their war and won’t get involved, but still allow their U.S. bases to be used. Keir Starmer held a virtual meeting with 41 nations to talk about opening the Strait.
Any unhinged man spouting the inanities and threats that Trump spouts would be ignored. But with the greatest military might of any empire in history at his command, he inspires a fear that he feeds on.
Aside from the Spanish premier, no one on the Continent has had the guts to tell him to shut up. That is, until Emmanuel Macron on Thursday. The French president said:
“Some people defend the idea of freeing the Strait of Hormuz by force via a military operation, a position sometimes expressed by the United States, although it has varied. This was never the option we have supported because it is unrealistic. It would take forever, and would expose all those who go through the strait to risks from the guardians of the revolution but also ballistic missiles.”
Macron added: “They [the U.S.] cannot … complain about not being supported in an operation they decided on their own. It is not our operation.”
He backed up those words up with action. France joined Russia and China at the U.N. Security Council on Friday in vowing to veto a resolution from Bahrain that would have authorized military force to reopen the Strait.
France put forward its own draft that didn’t even mention Iran or U.N. Charter Chapter 7 enforcement. It instead called on the parties to avoid escalation, cease hostilities, and go back to diplomacy. The draft encourages “strictly defensive measures,” such as escorting merchant vessels, instead of authorizing offensive action.
Bahrain has toned down its resolution as a consequence, removing references to Chapter 7 enforcement.
A day after Macron spoke up, news came that Iran allowed a French vessel to pass through the Strait, the first Western ship to do so since the start of the U.S.-Israeli attack.
Does it matter to talk back to Trump? Maybe not. But maybe he’s the paper tiger that he thinks NATO is.
At home, where he commands more authority, he demands loyalty. Three more top generals were axed on Friday by War Secretary Pete Hegseth in the middle of a war.
Trump’s desperation, a pilot on the run, 1,500 troops evacuated back to Virginia, direct hits on Israel, an unpopular war at home, a defiant French president and the firing of more generals doesn’t exactly project the image of a military on the verge of winning.
And Trump can’t find a way out.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
Don’t be fooled by Macron. The only reason he has the guts to do this is the immense unpopularity of Trump in Europe. He would never have dared do this with Biden in office. Macron has ruled France in a profoundly undemocratic fashion, setting his goons loose on legitimate demonstrators (i.e., the Gilets Jaunes, who suffered over 30 blindings in one eye by the Gendarmes and five deaths) and resorting frequently to the “43.1” clause of the constitution–one almost never invoked before him–to ram unpopular legislation through a hostile Parliament (Assemblee National).
Macron is playing Realpolitik, but he is not to be trusted. Not for a second. Another possible motive for the present move is that his approval rating stands at a dismal 12%. The whole country has wanted him out of office for a long time For once he has done the right thing, but for the wrong reason.
The excellent Joe Lauria should know this and probably does. His article, however, should have had some kind of disclaimer. (I live in France.)
Regardless of his motives, Macron did what Western leaders need to do immediately to try to stop the madman from destroying the world: stand up to the bully. The days of stroking his ego are over. Macron’s domestic issues are not relevant to the bigger picture.
The Chump makes Biden look good!
We have found the short in the wiring
Thanks to the Macron-No-Meter ?
The caption for the photo of Macron (“President of Russia”) is simply wrong.
That is not the caption. Anyone who has seen a newspaper caption will know that the photo credit follows in parenthesis and in smaller type. That is the way the photo is credited, to the President of Russia. Do you really think Consortium News didn’t know what country Macron is president off?
Well said…!
Macron is just trying to score some Brownie points with the millions of pissed off voters back home.
He’s another WEF puppet.
This is the genocidal zionists war prosecuted by the US, paid for by the US taxpayer and the US will suffer much greater consequences than the zionists. Stop sending Israel any money, bombs or support.
Since about December of 2023, three months into the genocide, I had been saying several times on this CN comments forum that Tel Aviv must be hit. That force and violence are the only things the Jewish supremacists respond to, that maybe, perhaps force and violence could stop the Zionist mad dogs or at least curtail most of their grotesque conduct.
It’s looking like this could possibly be the case.
Apparently, Jews residing in Israel who aren’t wholly committed zealots of the Smotrich, Ben-Gvir et. al. flavor are souring on the Greater Israel project and are beginning to become wary of this dangerous and destructive war. Scurrying back and forth to bomb shelters every single night for a full month tends to do that to a person.
If (a big if) the Jewish supremacists in Israel relent with the Greater Israel movement it’s a testament to Tehran’s bravery and determination to face this sadistic monstrosity with force and violence.
Unfortunately, these were evidently the only things that could work with them.
Macron may have stood up to Trump, but Trump is just a mouth piece for the real movers and shakers here, the Zionist lobby and Israel. They control Trump, all his henchmen and Congress.
Macron, Starmer and the rests of the Western leaders are cowards, they’re afraid of the Zionist lobby and Israel, and are allowing, and encouraging genocide, ethnic cleansing and the destruction of Iran to continue, unabated.
That’s exactly correct. I live in France, and we all despise Macron.
The ugly slogan “…bomb ’em back to the Stone Age” came from right wing Gen. Curtis LeMay during the Vietnam war. A war carried out by an arrogant D elite so well described by David Halberstam’s book /The Best and the Brightest./
Now that the worst and he stupidest in charge, what’s the chance this will go any better?
A recent tweet pointed out: “The difference between Vietnam and Iran is that Trump knew how to get out of Vietnam.”
“Escorting merchant vessels” seems hardly a “strictly defensive measure” as escorting an unfriendly nation’s vessel would result in precisely what an “offensive measure” would, namely kinetic warfare.
What Macron’s initiative did achieve, assuming he sticks to it, is to model the right way to deal with Iran’s control of Strait, which is to establish friendly, noncombatant relations with the Islamic Republic and negotiate a mutually acceptable modus vivendi as opposed to issuing ultimatums and blowing things up in Iran when they are refused.
If other countries followed France’s example and Iran started to give them passage through the Straits, it would very quickly show up the USA/Israel ‘paper tiger’ and set a precedent.
All they have to do is to deal with Iran openly, without judgement and without aggressive rhetoric or actions, and most importantly, stop supporting the USA and Israel.
After Trump’s statement about leaving NATO, this would be the perfect opportunity for Europe to reverse course ideologically and start making peace with other countries, including Russia.
They desperately need to recover their independence from the US energy (LNG) stranglehold.
Will they do it? Somehow, I doubt it because European leaders are still very badly infected!
There is a chance, despite wall-to-wall warmongering propaganda across European media, that politicians wanting to do precisely as you described might win upcoming elections in Portugal, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Latvia, Bulgaria, Spain, and France.
Trump actually said he would bomb Iran back to the “Stone Ages”. Does he mean the First Stone Age or the Second one? Does he mean the Stoned Ages? Or does he mean the Flintstones or the Rolling Stones?!
Either way, Our Commander will explain everything in a coherent fashion.
So much for ’Our’ Commander explaining everything in a coherent fashion, the man doesn’t know his arse from his elbow – apologies, for the coarse language, can’t seem to find a more exceptionally polite American expression that conveys stench, after all, one cannot separate an instinctive Ass, from an Arse with no aptitude for critical thinking; when it comes to world geography and history to name only two academic subjects of study that don’t directly have anything to do with greed and plutocracy.
What he knows most about is drains and sewers of an Anthropocentric Age, which he has plumbed for most of his adolescent life, disconnected from anything relating to actual human rights and democracy for all.
Trump is attempting to take civilized humanity back to the unfathomable, prehistoric Ice Ages and Stone Ages of which, according collated AI data details:
There have been three main, widely recognized periods in the Stone Age of human history: the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), and Neolithic (New Stone Age).
Spanning roughly 3.3 million years to 2,000 BCE, this era covered 98–99% of human technological history, marking the transition from nomadic hunting to settled farming. History.com +5
The Stone Age did not happen before the Ice Age; rather, multiple Ice Ages (glacial periods) occurred during the much longer Stone Age. The Stone Age began roughly 2.5–3 million years ago, with the majority of it taking place throughout the Pleistocene epoch, an era defined by intense, repeated freezing and thawing. Wikipedia +4
The Age ‘we’ are now entering and being shepherded into coercively is a more than just an ice age.
The updated linguistic term is now simply the “Obscene Age” wherein the Emperor definitely wears no clothes, except for the starkly colorful, “smooth as Satan” Ascots strung around his neck, not broad enough to cover his deceits .
Or are ‘we’ all just hallucinating?
Please pass the psychoactive CBD to allay the anxiety, which the more poisonous ‘actively psychotic’ Commander-in-chief is causing, through autocratically forcing his diktats down ‘our’ gullets.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Perhaps he’s referring to the “Stonehenge” stones. (Or maybe he’s confusing stones with boulders as in Sisyphus’ Crimes and his subsequent punishment.)
Stones?
The man has rocks in his head.