Having, in the past, dispraised President Emmanuel Macron, of France, for being unduly sunny in his belief that he could manage or manipulate Donald Trump, I will now, in this rainier moment, acquit him of that charge. For whatever reason—a dawning awareness of the American President’s unchangeable oafish cruelty may be the best guess—Macron has finally accepted that the only way to treat Trump is with curt and clear opposition. On Sunday—a day after Trump, in France with other heads of state to commemorate the centennial of the end of the First World War, had declined to visit a cemetery where the American dead lie buried, on account of the rain—Macron made a speech. It was a gesture as clearly directed at and against Trump as any he could have made, short of having Madame Macron wave a flag with “D.T.” and a diagonal bar across it, “Ghostbusters”-style.

Macron distinguished between nationalism (bad) and patriotism (good), but he did it in eloquent terms. “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” he said. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” he added, “In saying, ‘Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great, and that which is most important: its moral values.”

To use a long-forgotten Howard Cosellism, I was doubly delighted by the invocation, in part because the same terms had seemed so relevant not long ago in discussing Macron’s great predecessor Charles de Gaulle. He, too, had drawn that distinction, at the risk of his own life. De Gaulle knew that the patriot loves his place and its people and its idiosyncrasies; while the nationalist, of whom, for him, Adolf Hitler was the clearest and worst example, has no particular sense of affection for the place he advocates for (he is often an outsider to it, as Hitler, an Austrian, was to Germany) but channels his obsessive grievances into acts of ethnic vengeance.

It isn’t clear who first made the distinction between nationalism and patriotism. Perhaps it’s one of those observations that rises naturally in several places at once. Certainly, no one has made more of it in his work than John Lukacs, the American historian of Hungarian origin. Lukacs, in fact, has made it foundational to his understanding of twentieth-century history, with nationalism as the deadly solvent of civilization, and patriotism as its (partially) restorative glue. His heroes, for that reason, are the conservative patriots, Winston Churchill highest among them, along with de Gaulle. (The conservative patriots rate highly in part because the temptation of nationalism on the right is so extreme; the parallel temptation on the left is a blind faith in rational planning, even at enormous human cost.) Trump, of course, declared himself a “nationalist” at a campaign rally last month. It was an ugly thing to do, considering the history of the word and who has embraced it, though, as always with Trump, his saving anti-grace is that no one can be sure that he really grasped or understood all the ugliness, and wasn’t just making up ugly on his own.

Historical ignorance is a Trump leitmotif. He started attacking Macron on Friday, just before Air Force One landed in Paris, tweeting, “President Macron of France has just suggested that Europe build its own military in order to protect itself from the U.S., China and Russia. Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of NATO, which the U.S. subsidizes greatly!” Trump returned to the White House on Sunday, skipping the three-day Paris Peace Forum, and on Tuesday morning he resumed his mis-capitalized assault. He tweeted, “Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China and Russia. But it was Germany in World Wars One & Two - How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along. Pay for NATO or not!” And then: “On Trade, France makes excellent wine, but so does the U.S. The problem is that France makes it very hard for the U.S. to sell its wines into France, and charges big Tariffs, whereas the U.S. makes it easy for French wines, and charges very small Tariffs. Not fair, must change!” Lastly, he took a few weak shots at Macron’s low approval rating at home before thumbing out “MAKE FRANCE GREAT AGAIN!”

So much historical ignorance crowded into so few characters! Macron, in talking of “building his own army,” was actually talking about doing what Trump supposedly wants him to do, i.e., spending more on the military to let Europe protect itself. (This is, in fact, a long-standing French preoccupation; de Gaulle withdrew the French Navy from NATO because he didn’t want to be dependent on the Americans, whom he did not completely trust.) The actual logic of the alliance, from an American point of view, was always supposed to be: let’s all pay something, and we’ll pay even more, because it’s cheaper to protect Europe than it is to fight European wars, and that way we have reliable friends. The point of the alliance was to have allies, not shake-down victims. But long-term altruism for long-term benefit is not a concept that Trump can handle.

Indeed, Trump seems incapable of understanding the concept of an alliance at all, much as he does not seem to understand the concept of loyalty. When he cites someone as a friend, it means that he (usually mistakenly) thinks that the person has adopted a supine position. He’s almost always wrong, as with the case of Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, but it is the limit of his conception of alliances.

The subsidiary ugliness in Trump’s tweets, worth annotating in this memorial moment, is that line about fighting Germany: “How did that work out for France?” That taunt, reflective of Trump’s compulsive need to humiliate anyone whom he suspects of being insufficiently obsequious, is far off the mark. In the First World War, the Great War, the one that we are commemorating now, the Germans were the ones who regretted having fought the French. Though their casualties were insanely high—nearly a million and a half troops died—the French fought off the Germans repeatedly and ferociously and ended by winning the war, in alliance—that puzzling word again—with the British and the Americans and, for a time, the Russians.

It was a war hardly worth the winning, to be sure, but that was the final score. In fact, the price of victory was so high that it encouraged the reluctance that helped lame France’s efforts in the next one. (Though expert opinion is coalescing around the idea that it was not French military “cowardice” but the collapse of the governmental classes that led to Vichy.) The lesson of the Great War was that the French would go on fighting past the point of reason, as, indeed, everyone else did, too, thereby providing a better lesson: that there was never a good reason for a great war.