President Trump said on Tuesday that President Emmanuel Macron of France “always gets it wrong,” as simmering tensions between the two leaders over the Israel-Iran conflict blew up into insults.
As he made an early exit from the Group of 7 meeting in Canada and flew back to Washington, Mr. Trump called Mr. Macron “publicity seeking.” In a post on his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump said the French leader “has no idea why I am on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire.”
Mr. Macron had told reporters covering the G7 meeting in Calgary, Alberta, that the United States had given assurances that “they will find a cease-fire, and since they can pressure Israel, things may change.”
The speculation about his intentions clearly infuriated Mr. Trump, who said, without elaborating, that the real reason for his departure was “much bigger than that.” In an earlier Truth Social post, he had said that “everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran.”
There was no immediate response from the French presidency.
Mr. Macron — who said last week that Israel had legitimate reasons to defend itself against Iran’s nuclear program but that France did not support its decision to bombard Iran — has repeatedly called for a cease-fire.
But Mr. Trump, facing pressure from Israeli officials to more forcefully back their campaign against Iran, seems to be of two minds. He must decide whether to help Israel destroy the buried Iranian nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo, which only American B-2 bombers dropping the U.S. military’s biggest “bunker buster” can reach. Israel has no such weapon in its arsenal.
But such action would drag the United States into a war of a kind that Mr. Trump has suggested he would prefer to avoid.
Since Mr. Trump took office for a second term in January, the French and American leaders have strained to preserve the friendship they established during his first. Mr. Macron still calls Mr. Trump on a casual basis. But their stark differences over Israel, Gaza, Ukraine and now, it seems, Iran have made the veneer of camaraderie untenable.
Mr. Macron is now the European leader closest to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, whom Mr. Trump chose to humiliate in a White House meeting in February and missed seeing at the G7 summit because of his early departure. Mr. Trump spent much of the gathering regretting the absence of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, calling the group’s decision to expel Russia in 2014 “a mistake.”
Most recently, Mr. Trump has clashed with Mr. Macron over a planned United Nations conference to explore the creation of a Palestinian state, which the French leader has said he will recognize, most likely on that occasion. The Trump administration urged countries to shun the meeting, which was to have taken place this week but was postponed because of the fighting between Israel and Iran.
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
The post Trump Says Macron ‘Always Gets It Wrong’ as They Clash Over Mideast appeared first on New York Times.
