“I believe that against ignorance we have education; against inequality, development; against cynicism, trust and good faith; against fanaticism, culture; against disease and epidemic, medicine; against the threats on the planet, science,” Macron said. After the speech, one commentator on French television said that Macron, over the course of his three-day state visit—the first of the Trump presidency—had tried his best to bring the leader of the free world back into the fold of Western democracy. Welcome to 2018.

In substance, there was nothing new or groundbreaking in Macron’s speech. In style, it was a primer in how to clean the floor with your host—and how to do it elegantly, with a smile, drawing on Macron’s innate talent and the best special-ops debate skills an elite French education has to offer. Macron, the now-40-year-old boy wonder, was elected against all odds one year ago in what seemed like an upsweep of “hope not fear,” given the immigration and economic scaremongering of the far-right candidate he defeated. He is a man acutely aware of, and driven by, the urgency of the historical moment. “Today, the call we hear is the call of history,” Macron said in his conclusion. “This is a time of determination and courage. What we cherish is at stake. What we love is in danger. We have no choice but to prevail, and together we shall prevail.”

This is more than lofty rhetoric. The mood here in Europe these days is very worrisome. The transatlantic order is at risk, in part because of the Trump administration’s disdain for NATO and the United Nations. The European Union is weakening. Autocracy is on the rise in Eastern Europe. Structural unemployment seems intractable in Europe and won’t be helped if Trump starts a trade war. Homegrown terrorism remains a threat. Decisions taken in Washington land abroad, not least in Europe.

Macron’s speech also made clear how Macron is in many ways a transitional figure between the 20th and 21st centuries. He founded his République en Marche movement as an end run around France’s Socialist party, which has been crumbling along with the political and social order it once represented. Here in France, Macron is the young fresh face on an old country undergoing a generational shift. But as he addressed Congress and spoke of the need for multilateralism, it also seemed that Macron might actually represent the end of an era—the postwar order, a certain vision of the European Union and liberal democracy—rather than the beginning of a new one.

A week ago, two French journalists of the 1968 generation interviewed Macron on live television in France. In their aggressive questioning, and in calling the president “Emmanuel Macron,” as if he were a comrade, not a head of state, the two offered a “total lack of deference and a barrage of hostile questions,” Adam Nossiter wrote in The New York Times. But Macron has a remarkable command of the issues, and can calmly disarm any debate opponent. He won that debate. The cover of last week’s Charlie Hebdo had a drawing of the two journalists with bandages on their face, with the headline “Two Journalists Beat up by a Head of State in Central Paris.”