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.