(Dec. 12, 2024 / JNS)
The famous Harvard University law-school professor and lawyer Alan Dershowitz once said, “Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you’re moral, saying you’re moral is not the same as acting morally.” If one objectively evaluates French President Emmanuel Macron’s policies from Ukraine to Iran and beyond, one will find that France pursues hypocritical policies that make a laughingstock out of the Macron government.
On the one hand, Macron met with President-elect Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and tried to shore up support for the war-torn country, even though Trump is someone who has promised to end the war in Ukraine. On the other hand, Macron had previously said U.S. President Joe Biden made “a good decision” in allowing Ukraine to use weapons manufactured by the United States to strike inside Russia. Earlier this year, Macron said he was in favor of allowing Ukraine to strike military targets inside Russia, given Moscow was taking advantage of Western limitations on the use of donated missiles. France and the United Kingdom will support Ukraine for as long as necessary “to thwart Russia’s war of aggression,” Macron and British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer have said.
Yet France’s economic interests tell a very different story. According to a recent report in Bloomberg, France imported a record amount of natural gas from Russia in 2024. This means while Macron supports Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia in theory—and while he stands beside Zelenskyy and Trump during a meeting in Paris—he doesn’t carry out such threats against Russia in practice. After all, Russian gas can be sold all over the world from French markets, thus making Macron’s rhetoric against Putin rather meaningless. The reality on the French market makes a laughingstock out of Macron.
Another example of France’s hypocritical position is the close ties between Tehran and Paris. In recent days, Macron has been highly critical of Iran’s missile program. Ahead of the ceasefire signed between Hezbollah and Israel, the French president called upon the Iranian leadership to urge its proxies to support a ceasefire. “I condemn in the strongest terms the unprecedented attack launched by Iran against Israel, which threatens to destabilize the region,” Macron said on X after Iran had attacked Israel earlier in the year.
And, as we speak, the European Union, of which France is a member, is beefing up sanctions against Iran because of its nefarious activities in the Middle East.
Despite all of France’s rhetoric against the mullahs, there is extensive cooperation between France and Iran via Armenia. This cooperation was even highlighted in a meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Macron, where the French leader gave Armenian contemporary implicit instructions on how to relay messages to Iran. In other words, while the E.U. implements more sanctions on Iran, Macron is engaging in secret talks with Iran via Armenia.
France’s Iran and Ukraine policies are not the only instances where French politicians implemented duplicity. From the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2020, France displayed a biased position that contradicted its leadership role in the MINSK Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, where it was supposed to be an impartial negotiator. Working with the MINSK Group, France did everything necessary to block a resolution to the Karabakh conflict.
At the same time, Paris has also pursued a colonial policy towards Corsica and other overseas territories, thousands of miles away from its borders. For the French, human rights seem nothing more than a battle cry to expand its own imperial interests. Thus, Azerbaijan does not have the right to Karabakh, but the French have the right to colonize other countries and expand their imperial sphere of influence. This hypocritical position is just one more instance that makes a laughingstock out of Macron.
The opinions and facts presented in this article are those of the author, and neither JNS nor its partners assume any responsibility for them.
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