Macron’s Art of the Deal

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/opinion/columnists/macron-trump-paris-climate-iran.html

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If there’s a better angel of President Trump’s nature, a doubtful proposition, then President Emmanuel Macron of France is determined to summon it through a mixture of Gallic logic and alpha-male charm. In a wide-ranging conversation in English with a handful of journalists in New York, Macron said that with the Paris climate accord as with the Iran nuclear agreement, “What I want to convince him is that the solution is not to break what we have.”

Trump has said he’ll withdraw from the Paris deal unless it can be renegotiated, but no concrete steps have been taken for the United States to quit. The president has also been implacably hostile to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, although it has slashed Iran’s enrichment program under strict international monitoring and stopped the country well short of North Korea’s nuclear-weapon status. Trump keeps hinting he’ll tear up what he’s called “the worst deal ever.”

Macron, who described his relationship with Trump as “extremely direct,” said he wants to show the president “that he puts himself in deadlock because on these different issues, what’s his alternative? He doesn’t have any. On climate, even on Iran, there is no alternative. So we have to rebuild some multilateralism where your president finds his place.”

That’s a tough assignment in that Trump has not yet met a multilateral organization he doesn’t disparage, embraces an America-first ideology, and loves the idea of “sovereignty” so much he referred to it more than 20 times in his United Nations speech this week. But Macron, who upended France’s political landscape in the space of a year, is not one to be daunted by near impossible challenges.

Descending from the Jupiter-like heights that have marked the early months of his presidency (an attempt to reignite French pride through the Gaullist majesty of his office), Macron was frank and chatty as he outlined his ideas to cajole Trump from self-defeating rage toward productive reason — a thankless task in which the French upstart should have the world’s full backing.

With Trump and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany at odds, and the initial American-British love fest fraying over wild Trump outbursts, Macron is probably the last best hope for America’s allies to restrain the apocalyptic side of Trump’s nature. There’s chemistry in the relationship. Of course, if he fails, the risk for the French president is that he will be seen as Trump’s lackey.

On the Paris deal, Macron said he’d told Trump: “That’s a big choice because you can be the great power within the multilateral framework taking the lead and sometimes trying to impose your view, but leaving the club is something totally different because you take the risk to be much more marginalized.” He added that if Trump does take America out, “I do believe in the mid-run it’s very negative even for U.S. business.”

Macron said he didn’t know if Trump had second thoughts. But it was clear the French president doesn’t consider Trump’s climate decision final. He wants to find “concrete solutions” that, short of a renegotiation of the Paris accord, still provide Trump with “something belonging to him regarding climate.”

As an example, he cited the International Solar Alliance, designed to ramp up solar energy in sun-rich countries. Macron will travel to India later this year and, together with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, convene the alliance, a Franco-Indian initiative. Trump is “very sensitive to the Indian approach, he likes Modi a lot, and affection is a driver for him,” Macron said, suggesting that Trump “can be part of it.”

Turning to Iran, Macron said it would be a “mistake” for the United States to break the accord. “We will put ourselves vis-à-vis Iran in a North Korean situation — breaking any discussion, trying to put them apart from the rest of the club, and discovering in X years that they get to a nuclear weapon.”

Instead, Macron argued, the deal must be preserved and complemented with discussion of Iran’s ballistic missile program, of its “very unacceptable strategy” in the region, and of what will happen after the agreement expires in 2025.

These are very ambitious, probably unattainable ideas, especially after Trump’s United Nations dismissal of Iran as a “murderous regime” and the prompt retort from Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, that Trump’s was a “hate speech” worthy of “medieval times.”

But on the core point — the folly of any United States abandonment of the nuclear accord — Macron has every reason to try to hold Trump back. The president, who has until Oct. 15 to certify Iran’s compliance with the deal to Congress, says he’s made a decision. The signs are that it could well be negative. That could set in motion a disastrous unraveling.

Preserving the Iran deal, which is working, is a no-brainer for all but those with an interest in seeing Iran cast in permanence as a kind of Middle Eastern Satan. It has increased the distance between Iran and a bomb even as it has reduced the distance between Iran and the world. As I wrote when the deal was concluded in 2015: “The Iran nuclear deal is not perfect, nor was it ever intended to address the long list of American-Iranian grievances, which will persist. It must be judged on what it set out to do — stop Iran going nuclear — not on whether Iran has a likable regime (it does not) or does bad things (it does).”

Macron argued repeatedly for multilateralism as the means to exercise effective sovereignty in the 21st century. It is to this view that he wants to coax Trump. A lot hinges on his success.

“It’s impossible for France to be sovereign vis-à-vis these great risks, I mean regarding terrorism, migrations and so on, and be alone,” Macron said. He added that Trump sometimes gave the impression that, for him, sovereignty equaled isolation. But that, Macron said, is “not even feasible for the United States today.”

On the domestic front, where polls show his popularity falling sharply, Macron said he’s in a hurry to pass labor reforms intended to make the French job market more flexible and cut unemployment, which at almost 10 percent is more than double the German level. “I was not elected to preserve the status quo,” he said. “My program was based on a transformation agenda for France.”

The president, whose new political movement shattered the dominance of the traditional parties of left and right, said he had political capital that would be squandered if he does not use it fast: “That’s why I have to rush. It will take months, it will be tough, but we will, I will complete the labor market reform.”

Labor union protests against the reform of the 3,324-page labor code have already erupted — and will get worse. As Macron said, France is a country where “if they can block, they block.” Other presidents have failed in the reform endeavor.

Among other measures, the overhaul would allow small companies to negotiate some workplace issues directly with employees outside of industrywide agreements or unions. It would cap compensation limits in unfair dismissals and shorten the time employees have to challenge them in court. The number of bodies through which workers consult on health and safety issues would be reduced from three to one.

Parliament has given Macron the green light to make these changes by ordinance, meaning they will go into effect after he signs them.

It’s a big gamble, of the kind by now familiar to Macron. He’s well aware of the dangers. He talked about how the roots of the surge in populism and illiberal authoritarianism lie in a failure of Western democracies to “regulate the excess of capitalism” and provide prosperity to the middle class. Without the support of the middle class, he suggested, democracy wilts.

So Macron’s will be a balancing act. Its success is crucial to the stemming of authoritarianism — both in Europe and in Trump’s United States. I would not bet against him, especially if the French-German alliance can be revived in the name of a liberal, democratic European Union.