Was That Emily In Paris? No, It’s Just Emmanuel Macron, Fresh Off the Heels of His Latest Flub

On one side of the Atlantic we have President Biden’s contumely in respect of Prime Minister Netanyahu and on the other President Macron’s threats to halt arms deliveries to the Jewish state. There is a cumulative effect to all this, as Mr. Macron’s latest foreign policy flub demonstrates.A few days ago the increasingly unpopular président announced that France would soon be hosting an international conference for Lebanon. “We will hold in the next few weeks a conference to provide humanitarian aid, support the international community and support the Lebanese armed forces to boost security, especially in southern Lebanon,” Mr. Macron declared.There is something off key about that announcement. Lebanon’s myriad woes are almost entirely self-inflicted. The reason that the Lebanese armed forces need “support” is because, in a Levantine twist on “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” they have over the years been rendered an imaginary zombie army thanks to Hezbollah and Iran’s largesse in underwriting that terrorist organization’s stranglehold on Lebanon’s political life.The reason that the southern part of the country is such a mess is because thanks to decades of turning a blind eye, the virtually non-existent Lebanese government allowed Hezbollah to turn it into an armed camp, with guns and rockets aimed at Israel. Where was Paris all these years, exerting its ostensible influence on Beirut to get a functioning government together? Why couldn’t France, as a permanent member of the Security Council, call for the vaunted — or imaginary — “international community” to summon an international parley to disarm Hezbollah, as called for as early as 2006 with Resolution 1701? That would required some real resolve and maybe a little muscle. Yet what President Macron is suggesting now borders on pathetic. Worse, albeit unwittingly, it serves to foist the blame of stirring regional instability on Israel, while Israel is the one responding to the chaos — not creating it. Mr. Macron pulled the same stunt last year with Gaza. To be fair, Presidents Obama and Biden haven’t had much to add to the Lebanese quandary over the years, or recently. The Democratic policy toward the slow-motion trainwreck that is Lebanon has over the years been reactive — and it still is, although thanks to Israeli progress on the ground there are now signs of improvement. On the French side though, could there be a genteel form of anti-Zionism at work? Given the fact that France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim population and has a long and conflicted relationship with its native Jewry, that would hardly come as a surprise. Jerusalem is a far easier target than the slums of Saint-Denis. Mr. Macron, in calling for an “immediate and lasting ceasefire” in Lebanon, hastened to add that he “regrets that Prime Minister Netanyahu has made another choice, has taken this responsibility, in particular, for ground operations on Lebanese soil.”It would be uncharitable to suggest that Mr. Macron is as far gone in his Arabist leanings as some other European politicians. He is not. However, if one has nothing to bring to the table as it is collapsing, perhaps it’s better to order takeout and watch some Netflix. Speaking of which, a Frenchman who knows how to pick his battles is a rare thing. One of the streaming service’s banal but highly popular shows, “Emily in Paris,” is taking a hiatus from the Seine and moving over to the Tiber for a season. That has Mr. Macron up in arms. “We will fight hard,” he told Variety. “And we will ask them to remain in Paris. Emily in Paris in Rome doesn’t make sense.”

Was That Emily In Paris? No, It’s Just Emmanuel Macron, Fresh Off the Heels of His Latest Flub

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