Bonhomie? C'est Fini as Trump and Macron Seek to Defuse Tension.
*Mr. Trump will have another chance to pay respects to the war dead on Sunday with a scheduled visit to the Suresnes American Cemetery outside Paris following the ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe marking the anniversary of the armistice at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. But he will not stay for a Paris peace forum that Mr. Macron is sponsoring to bring together world leaders to discuss ways to avoid conflict.
“Trump’s absence from the Peace forum tomorrow, apparently alone among the 72 heads of state and government, will have a negative impact — the man who did not even pretend to work for peace, as it were,” said François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research organization.
In a five-minute session with reporters before their meeting on Saturday, Mr. Trump and Mr. Macron sought to defuse simmering tension over security and trade. Mr. Macron reassured his visitor that his proposal to create a “true European army” was in harmony with Mr. Trump’s repeated insistence that Europe stop relying so much on the United States for its defense.
“I do share President Trump’s views that we need much better burden-sharing within NATO, and that’s why I do believe my proposals for European defense are utterly consistent with that,” Mr. Macron said with Mr. Trump at the Élysée Palace.
Mr. Trump, who had called the idea of a European army “very insulting” in a tweet three minutes after Air Force One landed in France on Friday, said he was glad to hear Mr. Macron’s reasoning. “He understands the United States can only do so much, in fairness to the United States,” Mr. Trump said.
The flap may have resulted from misleading accounts of Mr. Macron’s comments, which came in an interview in French with Europe 1 radio this week. In the interview, Mr. Macron said that Europe needed to defend itself against the United States as well as Russia and China, but he was referring to cyberthreats, not the American government. The discussion of a European army actually came up later in the interview, and he characterized it as lightening America’s burden, not defending against it.
Still, Mr. Macron was critical in the interview of Mr. Trump’s move to scrap the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, a three-decade-old agreement that eliminated a whole class of missiles stationed in and aimed at Europe.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/world/europe/world-war-i-trump-macron.html
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