The Speech: who wrote what?

The French input

The US contribution to Macron's speech: the anti-Trump crusade

Bromance and the stab in the back or payback that Macron's speech represented

How Macron came to power: US meddling in French politics

A study in the illegal intervention in US political life by our intelligence servicesIn this essay, I offer a detailed textual analysis of the speech which French President Emmanuel Macron delivered before the Joint Session of Congress, Washington, D.C. on 25 April 2018, in line with the kind of textual analysis which I performed on major political documents signed by heroic East European freedom fighters in 2007 and 2009, which were in fact authored by US intelligence operatives.I maintain here that a substantial part ofby reinforcement of centrist American predispositions from respected foreign actors.I will attempt to do that in the second part of the essay.But whereas the "most likely" reasoning of Theresa May is used to justify unprecedented verbal attacks on Russia and military attacks on the sovereign state of Syria, my reasoning, if unpersuasive, has no other consequence than to lose a reader here or there.On the other hand, if I indeed have touched gold, asthan anyone in our mainstream and alternative media has so far identified.* * * *They were, in the first case (2007) intended to raise public consciousness against Russia following President Vladimir Putin's shocking denunciation of US global hegemony at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. In the second case (2009), the objective was to mobilize opposition to President Obama's newly announced policy of "re-set" in relations with Russia. I described both frauds at length in my article entitled " The Strange Case of Yulia Tymoshenko's 2007 Article in Foreign Affairs ."Such invitations to foreign leaders are extended by Congress very rarely as a sign of great respect. The last time a head of state of the French Republic was so honored was 58 years ago when Charles De Gaulle was the speaker.Macron's entry into the chamber was met by rapturous applause and a standing welcome that lasted more than ten minutes.Now let us look to content.As I noted in my introduction,which he added to himself, even in the final moments before delivery,as well as the broader public watching on television.The introductory passages of the speech, andwere very likely conceived and formulated in Franceto upstage Angela Merkel and take the initiativefor a more integrated European UnionThat honor fell in the past to the United Kingdom, but Brexit has severely reduced the possible utility of London to Washington.Here we find his mention of François-René de Chateaubriand, Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Wright and James Baldwin.As Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said to Oxford alumnus Boris Johnson, who had mis-interpreted Crime and Punishment to explain Russian state behavior today:As for the personal input of Macron, surely his remark on Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire exchanging bear hugs upon their meeting in Paris in 1778 - "reminds you of something doesn't it?" was well-timed to make capital out of his embraces with Donald Trump the day before and point to a quick wit.when explaining French participation in the cruise missile attack on Syrian targets the night of 13-14 April.that the mission was to destroy chemical weapons facilities and degrade the regime's capability in this area.namely that the objective was "to restore the credibility of the international community in Syria."in the week preceding the cruise missile attack.No matter that this argument renders even more egregious the Allies' violation of the norms of international law while practicing naked aggression.Authorship of one curious inaccuracy and the use of peculiar language in the speech is hard to place butI have in mind Macron's delineation of French-American cooperation in the 20th century.Perhaps this is just Macron's political correctness, his attempt to avoid identifying Kaiser Wilhelm and the Prussian threat to civilization which were in fact the Allied rallying cry in WWI but which sound a note of discord that contradicts the myths of today's European Union.Macron comes back to the generally shared narrative only when speaking of the present joint effort to defeat global terrorism.The substance of Macron's speech was a well-argued denunciation of everything that Donald Trump and his populist nationalism stands for.Hence, the launch in the past week of the futile and wrong-headed lawsuit against Russia, against the Trump campaign and against Julian Assange.That is to say it corresponds fully to the bipartisan Center Right - Center Left of the American foreign policy establishment which rejected Trump and populism from the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign when his candidacy on the Republican ticket improbably became a reality. The text of the speech robustly promotes the notion of the joint interest of France and the United States in protecting the US-dominated World Order that Washington invented after WWII and developed with the support of its allies over many decades to deliver public goods while defending freedom, equality and human rights, that is our shared values.It must be stressed that this entire demolition of the Trump politics does not mention at all the phony issue of Russian meddling in the US elections of 2016 and collusion with the Kremlin.The constant refrain of the speech's core texts is appeal to our common values, democracy, liberty.What are the specific policy recommendations flowing from the foregoing?Macron argues against trade ("commercial") wars such as Donald Trump is now launching on all fronts.They destroy jobs, result in higher costs, and the middle classes, the backbone of our democracies in his words, pay for it all.Macron calls for continued adherence to the Iran nuclear agreement even as we may consider broadening the terms with Iran to keep in check that country's political influence in Yemen, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Syria."Now that we signed we will stick with it."While acknowledging policy differences with the current US administration, he expressed confidence that eventually the United States will return to the convention.that US municipalities and corporations continue to fulfill US obligations so long as the US is outside the convention in the anticipation of a change of policy at the federal level.Macron's remarks on Climate Change were the one point in his speech where the bipartisan consensus in the chamber broke down completely, with Democrats standing and applauding enthusiastically while Republicans sat sullenly in their seats.See his reference to the American poet who volunteered for the Foreign Legion in 1916, before the country was engaged in the World War, to fight for liberty and France, who died on Independence Day and whose memory is revered in the town near Amiens, close to Macron's own home town, in France. Then note Macron's hand on heart gesture of respect for the veteran of the D-Day landing in Normandy who was in the gallery of the chamber.The break with Trump in his speech to the US Congress was noted by many media commentators, though to my knowledge none has described it in the comprehensive, programmatic sense I give above.However, insofar as I could judge from the ABC and one other recording of the speech that I watched,The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of bromance as "a close nonsexual friendship between men," raises suspicions by the very word "nonsexual."It must be recalled that during the French electoral campaign in 2017,For those who play close attention to voice pitch, I suggest listening once again to how Macron delivered his speech. This is not merely a result of French versus American habits.For those who will criticize my ad hominem examination, I insist that an openly homosexual president of France is not an issue by itself. In Belgium not so long ago we had an openly gay prime minister, Elio De Rupo, nicknamed the "Bow Tie" for his sartorial preferences, without any ill effects for the commonweal.Quite apart from the sexual dimension, Trump's body language towards Macron during their time together was altogether overly familiar and patronizing.In polite society that is simply not done.However, as we saw in our examination of his speech before Congress,Any exploration of the relations between Trump and Macron cannot end here, however.when you consider that the Trump-Macron press conference the day before the address to Congress made it clearThe latter is, of course, further aggravated by the latest US sanctions on Russia, directed against Rusal, the world's second largest aluminum producer, which supplies 40% of all European imports of the raw material.before Congress and his renunciation of the populist, extreme nationalist foreign policy that Trump representsIf we were to look at the 2017 French presidential elections in isolation, my claim of US meddling might appear to be taken from thin air, because the US thumb on the scales was not visible.who had sent him off to work in finance for Francois Hollande. And, of course,But there was never any specific suggestion of a United States government role.There you have to be blind not to see the hand of the US in influencing if not determining the outcome, which was the selection of a dim-witted nonentity François Hollande instead of the favored front-runner in the Socialist Party, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.He had previously served very successfully in various high governmental posts in France including Minister of Economics, Finance and Industry.At the same time, as IMF boss DSK expounded what many construed as anti-American views, in particular his advocacy of dethroning the US dollar as the global reserve currency in favor of an abstraction not tied to one country, the Special Drawing Rights. Be that as it may, on 18 May 2011 Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York on charges of sexual assault filed by a hotel maid. He was taken off a plane at Kennedy airport just before departure for France, was put on display in manacles before the press for his accuser to identify him in a line-up and was threatened with a long term of incarceration for what some friends claimed was a politically-motivated entrapment.With the incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy accused of financial machinations relating to his first electoral campaign, compounded by allegations that he had received financing from Muamar Ghaddafi,Hollande's five years in office were a time of economic stagnation and a weak France in Europe, following timidly in the footsteps of the more dynamic Angela Merkel in the traditional French-German alliance at the head of the EU.As the 2017 elections approached, Hollande's popularity ratings had fallen to 5% and he withdrew from pursuit of a second term.Among the Republicans, François Fillon, Sarkozy's prime minister from 2007 to 2012, quickly emerged as the front-runner, winning the party primary on 20 November 2016 and remaining out in front in the early spring.Across the Atlantic, the prospect of either leading candidate winning the French presidency raised hackles.François Fillon had met Putin on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2015, had appeared on domestic state television advocating accommodation with Russia and had publicly opposed the U.S. sanctions.Thus, we may not be surprised that Fillon's candidacy was derailed just weeks before the first round of presidential elections when he was charged with embezzlement amidst allegations "that he had paid his wife and children hundreds of thousands of euros from the public payroll for little or no work."With Fillon publicly discredited, the anti-Le Pen torch passed to the dark horse candidate Emmanuel Macron who was running on an anti-corruption platform that was in its own way "populist," though safely friendly to the existing World Order.He had no experience of electoral politics, had no party machine behind him to go against the established parties and, as noted above, had certain personality quirks that could render him subject to blackmail.