NEW YORK — High above the Atlantic Ocean, Emmanuel Macron is plotting to corner the president of the United States.

The French leader is sitting with his top advisers at a beige, oval table in a boardroom on his presidential plane. Though he usually appears in public in a crisp suit, for the flight he’s dressed casually: dark-wash jeans, a navy blue zip-up hoodie emblazoned with the slogan “La French Tech,” a two-day beard.

It’s the second all-hands meeting of the eight-hour flight to New York City for the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly and Macron is plotting how to pull off his most audacious foreign policy move yet — putting U.S. President Donald Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the same room, to engineer a breakthrough in their two countries’ 40-year conflict.

But in high-stakes diplomacy, like everything else, logistics are key, and Macron’s time in New York will be short.

“Trump is Tuesday?” Macron asks his advisers, referring to his own scheduled encounter with the American leader. “Can we try pulling him up to Monday?”

“He first thinks in terms of France shining in the world" — A high-level Elysée adviser

“No,” answers Emmanuel Bonne, his chief diplomatic adviser. “We already know that he is busy all Monday afternoon.”

“When does he speak at the General Assembly?” Macron shoots back. “We should try to catch him after his speech, that’s when it makes sense.

“What we should do is go catch him in the room in the back,” he concludes. The plan is set. All that’s left is to carry it out.

Call it the Macron method.

POLITICO was granted access to the French president and his entourage during his two-day visit to the U.N., as Macron sought to broker the first face-to-face meeting between a U.S. and Iranian president in four decades.

What emerged was an inside look at a hyperactive, disruptive foreign policy that’s highly dependent on the French president’s personal relations with other leaders — and above all, ambitious.

Halfway through his five-year mandate, Macron has set himself apart with a series of high-profile diplomatic interventions that are as bold as they are seemingly intractable.

The balls he is currently juggling include an attempt to reboot the European Union, a play at resetting relations between Russia and the West, a bid to save the Iran nuclear deal — and an effort to literally try to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.

“He first thinks in terms of France shining in the world,” says a high-level Elysée adviser, who asked to remain anonymous because he’s not allowed to speak publicly. “Then in terms of European sovereignty [promoting EU interests]. And then in terms of creating new dynamics.”

Ukraine, the Amazon, Libya, the United States, Venezuela — no part of the world is too far outside the traditional French orbit, no scheme too bold, no possibility of disappointment enough of a deterrent.

“Mister President, we need hope! Help us!” — Two Venezuelan women shout to Macron in New York

Just as Macron broke free of his country’s left-right ideological divide during his long-shot campaign for the presidency, so has he tried to shrug off the traditional constraints to international decision-making.

In pursuing his diplomatic ambitions, the French president has consistently courted disruption — even if it ultimately backfires — in order to try to advance his country’s interests on a global chessboard that hasn’t seen so much unpredictability since the end of World War II.

If that leaves Macron frequently exposed to failure, his advisers say, it also opens up opportunities — however slim — to punch through seemingly insolvable problems.

“He has the courage to act,” the high-level adviser said. “Today who is willing to expose himself on the Iranian file? Who is willing to expose himself on the Libyan issue? Who is willing to seek out Trump? If Macron doesn’t do it, who will?”

Price of ambition

This is what it’s like to walk the streets of New York with Macron.

The French president is strutting through midtown Manhattan with a coterie of advisers, ministers and bodyguards. He walks with confidence, hands in the pockets of his perfectly tailored navy blue suit, enjoying shoutouts from onlookers behind the wooden security barriers set up around the U.N. perimeter for the duration of the summit.

“Mister President, you are magical!” a Frenchman shouts from a street corner.

“Thank you for everything!” an American woman chimes in.

Macron stops, asks the man where he’s from in France, and his Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire leaps out to volunteer to snap a picture.

“Mister President, we need hope! Help us!” two Venezuelan women plead with him. He approaches them and cups their hands in his.

“I spoke with the Bolivian president yesterday, and we are going to continue working on this,” he says. He looks at them intently. He gives the impression that he’s letting them in on a secret.

And yet, accolades aside, the results of the Macron method have been, at best, mixed.

The French president caused a stir this summer when he hosted Vladimir Putin at his presidential summer retreat in Brégançon in the south of France, a week before the G7 summit. The move was widely seen as a prelude to reintegrating Moscow into the Western world order despite the Russian president’s bloody track record in Ukraine, Syria, and — with the use of a nerve agent to try to murder a former Russian spy living in the U.K. — on EU soil.

“Russia is very profoundly European,” Macron said at a joint presser with Putin. “Russia fully belongs within a Europe of values.”

Macron is so adamant about resetting relations with Russia that he publicly threatened his own foreign service over it, warning a gathering of over a hundred ambassadors at his yearly address to the diplomatic corps not to undermine his efforts.

“We have a deep state,” he said at the August gathering. “The collective tendency might be to say, [the French president said something] but we know the truth, we will continue the way we always have. I would recommend you not take that path.”

What France lacks in hard influence, Macron tries to make up for with sheer audacity and willpower.

And yet, so far, Macron and his advisers have been hard pressed to point to concrete action — beyond a recent prisoner exchange with Ukraine — Russia has taken that indicates Putin is ready for a fundamental overhaul of his country’s relationship with Europe.

Similarly, Macron has struggled to get traction with his attempts to overhaul the EU, a key part of his foreign policy. Since his election as president, Macron has laid out an agenda of reform, with speeches and proposals — but his efforts have been met with institutional, diplomatic and German reluctance and suspicion that his professed Europhilia is nothing more than blue-and-gold plating on the traditional French agenda.

He emerged from May’s European Parliament election in control of the institution’s third largest political group, breaking the two-party stranglehold that had dominated European politics for decades. He also came out looking like the winner from the negotiations over Europe’s top jobs, with his last-minute candidate Ursula von der Leyen nominated for European Commission president, his Belgian ally Charles Michel in the European Council and France’s Christine Lagarde headed for the European Central Bank.

But his disregard for established political practice has not just ruffled many feathers in the hallways of Brussels; it seems to have turned many in the city — and the Parliament — against him.

The initial sense, reinforced by French boasting, that Macron had pulled off a coup by backing von der Leyen has cooled, with some questioning whether his support of a German conservative closely allied with Chancellor Angela Merkel will work out to his advantage. He also suffered one of his most high-profile defeats yet, when his nominee for French commissioner, Sylvie Goulard, was overwhelmingly voted down in her confirmation hearing at the European Parliament last week — in no small part as retribution for his hubris.

Mano a mano

Back in New York, the U.N. General Assembly has started. It’s an hour and a half before Macron is scheduled to deliver his speech, and he and his advisers are working on the wording, huddled inside the tiny “France bureau” in the U.N. headquarters in New York, with its view of the East River.

Every few minutes, one of his aides opens the door and hurries into the hallway. “Where are the speeches from last year and the year before? He wants to see them!” one says.

“One hour to go, version eight coming out,” sighs another, standing over the portable printer the president’s aide de camp carries with him.

France may be a regional power, a cultural power, an economic power — a nuclear power with a seat on the U.N. Security Council. But it’s not a superpower. Macron may be a player, but he can’t act as the sole protagonist. He can mediate and create opportunities, but he’s not in a position to force concessions.

So what France lacks in hard influence, Macron tries to make up for with sheer audacity and willpower. An amateur boxer, he has turned global diplomacy into a contact sport — with a willingness to throw out the rule book and go mano a mano if that’s what it takes to move forward his agenda.

“The calling of France is to try and weigh in on this world order with the cards that we have,” Macron told the gathering of his ambassadors in August. “It’s this strategy of audacity, of taking risks, which means that everything we are doing and everything we will do will maybe not succeed … what is fatal today is not trying.”

Macron seems fatigue-retardant. He is said to sleep very little and work incessantly. His advisers stay up answering messages over an encrypted app until 1 or 2 a.m. on a daily basis, including weekends.

His aides joke among themselves about one of his favorite catchphrases. “The funniest is when he comes up to me and says, in a genuine, earnest way: ‘Hey, get some rest,’” one of them says, with a hint of irony. They would love to do just that — if only their boss’ demands weren’t so constant.

Despite his seemingly boundless energy, the frenetic pace of work has taken a physical toll on Macron. His two and a half years in power have aged him. His sideburns — which he keeps long, almost ’70s style — are grayer, the lines around his eyes and the carving of his cheeks more pronounced.

His constant juggling has caught up with him, publicly, at least once. At a joint press conference with Chilean President Sebastián Piñera at the G7 in August, Macron seemed distracted.

“Regarding President Trump, I think what works is the direct relationship" — Emmanuel Macron

He kept checking his phone, prompting Piñera to ask him at one point: “Do you agree with what I just said?”

Behind the scenes, discussions were ongoing about what to announce after the surprise visit of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, a prelude to his efforts in New York.

Zarif’s presence, for a little over three hours, in a building across the street from where G7 leaders, including Trump, were meeting was a quintessential Macron moment.

Had it been handled differently, the invitation could have made Trump feel like he had been both ambushed and upstaged. Instead, it focused the world’s attention on a summit that many had dismissed as yet another useless gathering of leaders who can barely agree among themselves, let alone constructively work together on the world’s problems.

Shuffle diplomacy

No relationship with a foreign leader has taken up as much of Macron’s time as his relationship with Trump.

After an initial bromance forged over white-knuckle macho handshakes, Trump repeatedly took aim at the French president, ostentatiously withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, making terse threats of sanctions over a French effort to provide a financial lifeline to Iran and even publicly siding with the Yellow Jackets protesting against Macron’s government.

More recently, however, things have been mostly going well between the two men — as Macron has developed a strategy of smothering the U.S. president with attention.

“Regarding President Trump, I think what works is the direct relationship,” Macron told reporters at his closing press conference at the G7.

It’s that relationship that allows Macron to execute the plan he hatched on the plane, when Trump shows up unexpectedly for part of the U.N.’s climate summit on the first day of the assembly. Seeing his opportunity, Macron pounces, pulling the U.S. president aside as he leaves the hall.

The next day, Macron tries to close the deal. After Trump delivers his speech at the General Assembly, Macron takes another opportunity to grab him. As the two men talk, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, who was meant to meet with Macron, is kept waiting for half an hour in the “France Bureau.” He’d come with three of his grandchildren, eager to take their picture with the French president.

After Macron takes the stage at the U.N. General Assembly a little later that afternoon, he and Trump hold a third meeting, sitting down with their ministers and advisers at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel where Trump had set up shop.

French and U.S. officials have been in contact for hours, if not days. So it takes just a quarter of an hour for Trump to agree to a four-point plan as a basis for a meeting with Rouhani.

From there, Macron and his entourage are off to the Millenium Hilton New York One UN Plaza Hotel, where the Iranian president is staying. Kissinger may have invented shuttle diplomacy, but Macron does shuffle diplomacy, moving by foot between Trump and Iranian officials in an increasingly high-stakes mediation.

As he waits to be invited up to the room where Rouhani holds his meetings, Macron huddles with his team in a small conference room, tucked behind a hidden door in the bustling lobby.

Together with his foreign minister and his trade minister, as well as his two top diplomatic advisers, he discusses how best to convince Rouhani to sign up to the agreement he’s struck with Trump.

“The second point is going to be difficult for him to accept, but I will mention the ballistic [missile program] here in this context,” says Macron, in reference to a clause in the document about Iran’s aggressive activities in the Arab world.

Trump, he says, is expecting his call when the meeting with Rouhani is over.

Macron's hands are in his pockets. He’s walking with a swagger. He hasn’t given up hope on striking an agreement.

After the huddle, Macron and a small part of his team are taken by the Iranians up to the elevator to meet with Rouhani.

Fifteen minutes later, he comes back down — empty handed. Rouhani had agreed in principle on the document’s points but did not yet have authority to go ahead with a meeting with Trump. He needed to consult Tehran. “We still have some work to do” Macron announces when he reemerges from the elevator.

The French president and his advisers walk back to the nearby French mission. Deep in conversation with his top diplomatic adviser Bonne, Macron goes over next steps.

“[Iranian nuclear negotiator Abbas] Araghchi is going to call Tehran now, discuss the technical details,” Bonne says.

Macron shoots back, “We’re not going to start renegotiating.”

His hands are in his pockets. He’s walking with a swagger. He hasn’t given up hope on striking an agreement.

“I’m wondering if we’re going to have to push back our take-off time,” he tells POLITICO. “We are making progress. We are seeing that the positions are growing closer.”

The day ends in disappointment. Macron makes one last try to strike a deal. Sensing a meeting might be too big a step for Iran to take, Macron and his team suggests a secure phone call with Trump at 9 p.m. that evening.

Macron delays his departure, and returns to Rouhani’s quarters to facilitate the call, but in the end it’s a no-go. Tehran insists that Trump needs to lift his sanctions before any contact can take place.

The plane takes off later that evening, three hours after the planned departure. Macron walks up and down the aisles, checking in on his aides, thanking his support staff. It’s not the ending he wanted. But he’s already thinking about the next episode.