The World Economic Forum at Davos has acquired an increasingly negative reputation, even among those whose interests it allegedly represents.
Business leaders from across the developed world pay a fortune to stay in the Swiss ski resort and rub shoulders with their peers, or with those they like to think are their peers.
The mix is spiced up by the presence of finance ministers from major economies and, occasionally, the odd head of government and head of state.
This year’s Davos was out of the ordinary, with the notional – and certainly soi-disant – leader of the free world, Donald Trump, in attendance.
However, there was additional excitement the day before Mr Trump turned up through the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron.
He caused a flurry, both by being highly robust about Europe’s determination to resist Mr Trump’s proposed acquisition of Greenland (which belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark), and by talking about it while wearing the sort of sunglasses one would usually associate with an August holiday on the Côte d’Azur.
Did Mr Macron have a hangover? Was he trying to look ultra-cool and slightly menacing in anticipation of the arrival of The Donald? Had, as some sources joked, Brigitte Macron smacked him about the head again?
No: he had an eye infection, though if he had taken to drink no-one could blame him, given the rapid deterioration in Franco-American relations in the first year of the second Trump term.
Mr Trump swept in with a threat to impose a 200% tariff on French wines unless France joined his ‘Board of Peace’, an alternative United Nations run along absurdist Trumpian lines. Mr Macron would be mad to sign France up to it, and American consumers would never tolerate such a tariff on wine.
France and America have long had their own variant of the ‘special relationship’.
The revolutions that instituted their republics happened within a few years of each other, in 1776 and then in 1789. There were significant cultural exchanges, such as the export in the 1920s of Art Deco from France to America. And American troops helped drive the German invader from northern France in 1918, and again in 1944.
Of course, France has not always appeared grateful for American support and protection. Charles de Gaulle stuck to the shameful fiction that France had liberated itself in 1944, when war cemeteries from the invasion beaches to Paris were filled with the bodies of the American (and British, and Canadian) soldiers who had actually done so.
His barely-concealed resentment that his country had to ask others to free it from Nazism was slow to fade, and played a part in 1966 in his bizarre decision to take France out of NATO’s integrated command.
Under Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2009, France rejoined the integrated command, the folly of General de Gaulle’s absurd petulance having been recognised.
NATO challenges
Now the boot is on the other foot. Mr Trump says, quite accurately, that the proportion of GDP America spends on its armed forces is far higher than that spent by most of the alliance’s other members, and that Europe is getting a free ride on the back of the American taxpayer.
As with most of what Mr Trump says, the free ride metaphor is an exaggeration: but Europe, including France and the United Kingdom, is certainly getting a heavily subsidised one.
Now, however, NATO is under threat not from Trumpian economic demands, but from the hitherto unconscionable prospect of one member committing an act of aggression against another – by America threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark.
France, quite properly, finds itself as one of the greater advocates for and defenders of NATO, a role gladly embraced by Mr Macron, even if it means upsetting Mr Trump: as it inevitably has.
Drama at Davos
At Davos, Mr Trump (who changes his tune from day to day, which is why he is so dangerous) taunted European leaders that if it had not been for America they would all be speaking German today.
He dropped his threat to take Greenland by force (perhaps he was listening to Mr Macron, though he would never admit it) and impose additional tariffs on France and other European countries that stood in his way, following talks with Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary-General.
However, knowing him, Mr Trump could just as easily threaten them again in the weeks ahead.
Mr Macron then became the main target for his undiplomatic abuse, in a speech that will have confirmed the view of most objective observers that the US president is a bully, an ignoramus and quite possibly mentally unstable.
His deranged tirade about the French president underlined this, but also did something almost impossible in France today – uniting the country behind its leader.
Mr Trump mocked the sunglasses, he mocked the tough rhetoric, and yet claimed he liked Mr Macron: “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
The problem for Mr Macron is the old one that you cannot argue with a sick mind. There are no rules in international relations so far as Mr Trump is concerned, and since he is mainly surrounded by sycophants, there are few who can try to persuade him to play by what the rest of us thought were the rules.
Having said that, somebody appears to have succeeded in making him back down on tariffs and on the ghastly prospect of trying to take Greenland by force.
Mr Macron has sought to fight back using Trumpian tactics: when the US president accused him of raising drug prices, he used a tweet on X to point out that he had no power to do so, and that Mr Trump had unleashed ‘fake news’.
Sadly, all France can do is wait for January 20, 2029, when this brute leaves the international stage – and hope for better relations with whoever succeeds him.
