The only real losers are going to be the far left....in the US and Europe.
Two Trumps on the French Ballot
How France might influence the White House’s own debate of protection vs. growth.
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
March 14, 2017 6:22 p.m. ET
French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron in Angers, France, Feb. 28.Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Delayed by a blizzard, Angela Merkel arrives this week in Washington, an emissary of a worried Europe. But it’s the presidential election in France next month that Americans really should be watching.
With the coming and going of candidates and near-candidates, the French race has suddenly shaken out in a remarkably auspicious way. In the confrontation between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, we basically have a confrontation of the two sides of Trumpism: pro-growth Donald Trump versus protectionist Donald Trump.
While it remains uncertain which way the actual Mr. Trump will jump (or tumble) along this fundamental fault line in his administration, just possibly the French outcome could be more immediately decisive for the U.S. than for France.
Mr. Trump himself likes to associate with whatever side is winning. He practically took credit for Brexit last spring. He occasionally likes to see himself as the progenitor of a global swing toward economic nationalism. If Mr. Macron, with his pro-euro, pro-reform, pro-openness policies, squashes Ms. Le Pen, with her National Front agenda of Frexit, it would amount to a psychological blow against the protectionist duo Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro.
If not Mr. Bannon’s banishment, it might at least result in Mr. Trump doubting whether the disheveled one really inhabits the global zeitgeist.
Wall Street likes pro-growth Trump. It doesn’t like protectionist Trump. And as multiple reports tell us, the White House is riven by a “civil war,” with the internationalists, led by Goldman Sachs alums Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, lately gaining influence with everybody except Mr. Trump himself.
Mr. Trump is not a man of deeply held ideological convictions, even on trade, about which he has ranted for 30 years. He’s a deal maker, an opportunist (in the nondefamatory sense), a man who understands the flow of events and works within it. And it matters in this case, because a president has powers over trade that Congress and the courts are not necessarily well-positioned to counter.
Thus, more than any foreign election in a long time, the French presidential race lands at what might be a crucial moment in the internal White House debate over the future of trade and economic policy.
Turned on its head here is much feverish reporting that suggests Europe’s future instead is being decided in Washington. It’s not.
A Politico cover story, running at 5,000 words, claims that the European togetherness project is at the mercy of the Trump White House. “Europeans are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU in his cross hairs,” the report says.
Talk about gazing through the wrong end of the telescope. Mr. Bannon is a nationalist opponent of globalization, all right. But if Europeans think he’s their major problem, consider it a symptom of their real trouble. The EU’s problems are massive and self-made, beginning with its inability to reconcile the euro with a crying need for economic growth.
No, the European Union need not fail. It can survive as a common organization of European states, serving the interests of its members without imposing so much regulatory overreach from Brussels.
The euro itself can survive without the politically impractical, and likely impossible, dream of member states ceding control of taxes and spending to Brussels-based Eurocrats. To survive, the eurozone would only have to become a currency zone in which members fully and truly accept the discipline of the markets over their borrowing, including the possibility of national default.
OK, a metamorphosis into adulthood is unlikely to happen. It would require a Thatcherite, even Milton Friedmanesque, revolution in how Europeans run their domestic economies. But the end of the euro in its present form would only be a bow to reality, strengthening the EU by helping prosperity to return to its weaker members.
Europeans have long sold themselves a bill of goods. They tell themselves that the European Union and euro somehow have been the creators and keepers of the peace after World War II.
Such flummery is irresistible for those trying to hold the rickety structure together but it has always been nonsense. It was the East-West divide, the NATO alliance and, more fundamentally, the invention of nuclear weapons that imposed peace on Europe.
A Le Pen victory is deemed unlikely by pollsters, for whatever that’s worth. A decisive Le Pen defeat, however, might be the truly consequential outcome if it arrives in time to tilt the White House debate against the Bannonites in favor of the Goldmanites. That is, against an anti-internationalism that reflects a passing if understandable neuralgia, in favor of a grown-up view of our problems.
Western electorates naturally resist an inconvenient truth. Foreigners are not the cause of their problems. Those problems have a lot more to do with the natural limits of the regulatory and welfare states that we in the West have let blossom over the past 70 years.
Appeared in the Mar. 15, 2017, print edition.
Two Trumps on the French Ballot
How France might influence the White House’s own debate of protection vs. growth.
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
March 14, 2017 6:22 p.m. ET
French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron in Angers, France, Feb. 28.Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Delayed by a blizzard, Angela Merkel arrives this week in Washington, an emissary of a worried Europe. But it’s the presidential election in France next month that Americans really should be watching.
With the coming and going of candidates and near-candidates, the French race has suddenly shaken out in a remarkably auspicious way. In the confrontation between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, we basically have a confrontation of the two sides of Trumpism: pro-growth Donald Trump versus protectionist Donald Trump.
While it remains uncertain which way the actual Mr. Trump will jump (or tumble) along this fundamental fault line in his administration, just possibly the French outcome could be more immediately decisive for the U.S. than for France.
Mr. Trump himself likes to associate with whatever side is winning. He practically took credit for Brexit last spring. He occasionally likes to see himself as the progenitor of a global swing toward economic nationalism. If Mr. Macron, with his pro-euro, pro-reform, pro-openness policies, squashes Ms. Le Pen, with her National Front agenda of Frexit, it would amount to a psychological blow against the protectionist duo Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro.
If not Mr. Bannon’s banishment, it might at least result in Mr. Trump doubting whether the disheveled one really inhabits the global zeitgeist.
Wall Street likes pro-growth Trump. It doesn’t like protectionist Trump. And as multiple reports tell us, the White House is riven by a “civil war,” with the internationalists, led by Goldman Sachs alums Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, lately gaining influence with everybody except Mr. Trump himself.
Mr. Trump is not a man of deeply held ideological convictions, even on trade, about which he has ranted for 30 years. He’s a deal maker, an opportunist (in the nondefamatory sense), a man who understands the flow of events and works within it. And it matters in this case, because a president has powers over trade that Congress and the courts are not necessarily well-positioned to counter.
Thus, more than any foreign election in a long time, the French presidential race lands at what might be a crucial moment in the internal White House debate over the future of trade and economic policy.
Turned on its head here is much feverish reporting that suggests Europe’s future instead is being decided in Washington. It’s not.
A Politico cover story, running at 5,000 words, claims that the European togetherness project is at the mercy of the Trump White House. “Europeans are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU in his cross hairs,” the report says.
Talk about gazing through the wrong end of the telescope. Mr. Bannon is a nationalist opponent of globalization, all right. But if Europeans think he’s their major problem, consider it a symptom of their real trouble. The EU’s problems are massive and self-made, beginning with its inability to reconcile the euro with a crying need for economic growth.
No, the European Union need not fail. It can survive as a common organization of European states, serving the interests of its members without imposing so much regulatory overreach from Brussels.
The euro itself can survive without the politically impractical, and likely impossible, dream of member states ceding control of taxes and spending to Brussels-based Eurocrats. To survive, the eurozone would only have to become a currency zone in which members fully and truly accept the discipline of the markets over their borrowing, including the possibility of national default.
OK, a metamorphosis into adulthood is unlikely to happen. It would require a Thatcherite, even Milton Friedmanesque, revolution in how Europeans run their domestic economies. But the end of the euro in its present form would only be a bow to reality, strengthening the EU by helping prosperity to return to its weaker members.
Europeans have long sold themselves a bill of goods. They tell themselves that the European Union and euro somehow have been the creators and keepers of the peace after World War II.
Such flummery is irresistible for those trying to hold the rickety structure together but it has always been nonsense. It was the East-West divide, the NATO alliance and, more fundamentally, the invention of nuclear weapons that imposed peace on Europe.
A Le Pen victory is deemed unlikely by pollsters, for whatever that’s worth. A decisive Le Pen defeat, however, might be the truly consequential outcome if it arrives in time to tilt the White House debate against the Bannonites in favor of the Goldmanites. That is, against an anti-internationalism that reflects a passing if understandable neuralgia, in favor of a grown-up view of our problems.
Western electorates naturally resist an inconvenient truth. Foreigners are not the cause of their problems. Those problems have a lot more to do with the natural limits of the regulatory and welfare states that we in the West have let blossom over the past 70 years.
Appeared in the Mar. 15, 2017, print edition.
