Patriotism and nationalism

This is such a shot for a 1950s movie poster, isn't it. From the White House state dinner in April, photo by AFP/Getty.

Trump's making the US irrelevant, forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to do things without us. It's a good thing in some places, as I've said with reference to South Korea, which has taken to managing its own foreign policy because they can't trust Americans to be consistent or coherent, but I'm not sure about others. Very cool column by David Ignatius/WaPo interprets the Armistice Day events in Paris in this light:

Last weekend’s events in Paris offered a dramatic demonstration that “other things being equal” is not a safe assumption. The world is moving to adapt to the reality that Donald Trump is president of the United States. Our friends and allies may hope his election eventually will be reversed, and maybe they think the United States turned a corner with the 2018 midterm elections. But they can’t count on it, so these countries must consider that the United States may be a different country from what they had believed.

French President Emmanuel Macron articulated this reality last week. In one of his World War I remembrances, he told a French radio station that Europe needs a “true European army” at a time when the United States is a less reliable ally. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” Macron said.

Trump blasted Macron’s comments as “very insulting,” and he continued to complain in tweets Tuesday about French ingratitude and claimed that Macron was trying to distract from his “very low” approval ratings. But joining Macron on Tuesday was German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who told the European parliament that she shared others’ view that “a common European army would show the world that there would never again be war in Europe.”

That—Macron suggesting a "European army"—seems to have been a major part of what triggered Trump's weird behavior beginning over the weekend, alongside dawning realization that he just lost an election, bigly, and as we're told that Corsi and Stone and apparently Junior himself are getting busted, and that his brilliant maneuver of planting his own personal agent at the attorney general's desk to protect him is a failure, and maybe even, Steve suggests this morning, a crash from some prescription high.


You never want to accuse Trump of understanding too much about foreign policy, but he does have a keen sense of when people are trying to insult him, and that's clearly what Macron intended. I don't think he understood the exact point, which was to call Trump's bluff on his threats against NATO.

I'm not a big fan of Macron in domestic policy, where he seems to just as neoliberal and anti-labor as he promised and a good deal more autocratic in intent, but also considerably less politically skilled, whence the bad approval ratings, but I do admire the classicism with which he represents France on the world stage. I especially liked the other big thing he said:

Le patriotisme est l’exact contraire du nationalisme : le nationalisme en est la trahison. En disant « nos intérêts d’abord et qu’importent les autres ! », on gomme ce qu’une Nation a de plus précieux, ce qui la fait vivre : ses valeurs morales.

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) November 11, 2018

"Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is its betrayal. When someone says, "our interests first and who cares about the others," they are erasing the most precious thing a Nation has, the thing that gives it life: its moral values."

I wonder if capitalizing "Nation" is specifically trolling the American president.

I'm in a better position than most to understand exactly what Macron was saying there, and so are you, thanks to Dinesh D'Souza of all people, because of the tweet he posted a few weeks ago trying to explain that Trump's ("we're not supposed to say it") nationalism is actually a perfectly normal sentiment shared by Gandhi, Mandela, and General de Gaulle. While I was busy showing Dinesh was an idiot, I found this wonderful quote from De Gaulle on the subject,

"Patriotism is loving one's country. Nationalism is hating other people's countries."
--Charles de Gaulle

You might want to scratch him off your list, I think he was on my side. pic.twitter.com/ewqSI9bguB

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) October 23, 2018

and it's clear that Macron's remarks were built off of that, developing the thinking of the first president of the Fifth Republic (who pulled France out of the NATO integrated military command in 1967, because of his distrust of the US—when he threatened NATO he wasn't bluffing) and situating himself in the tradition. I'll bet this pushes the poll numbers up a bit for him, too.

Moreover, he's right on this point: there's a good thing, which you can call patriotism if you want, and a bad thing that dresses up like the good thing, and the bad thing says Me First, or America First, and it needs to be shunned.