There was an unnoticed moment of old-school continental condescension from French President Macron yesterday regarding the nuclear deal with Iran:
"My view – I don’t know what your president will decide – is that he will get rid of this deal on his own, for domestic reasons," Mr Macron told a group of reporters in Washington.
"For domestic reasons." This was meant to be a snooty jab at America: "The nations of the world could work together to solve problems through reason and dialogue, but sadly the American president is beholden to the jingoistic masses, who prefer confrontation to diplomatic agreements."
Macron accidentally paid a great compliment to America. Here in our country, the people still matter. Unlike in Europe, our leaders are still constrained, to some extent, from substituting the pieties of the governing classes for the desires of the people. In both America and Europe, diplomatic elites view themselves as the enlightened opposition to the baser instincts of the public, which is motivated by irrational fears and hostility to foreigners. But in Europe, unlike America, the diplomatic classes largely control foreign policy, just as in Europe elites hold greater sway across virtually every part of society. It was easy for Angela Merkel to dismiss the concerns of Germans over the arrival of millions of Syrian migrants with a platitude about tolerance. An American president still cannot get away with such high-handedness and arrogance.
Macron is right that many ordinary Americans don’t like the nuclear deal with Iran. And he is right that "for domestic reasons" President Trump may pull out of the deal. Here in America, at least for now, fundamental national security decisions are not made by bureaucrats, academics, diplomats, and other classes of elites with great job security and enormous self-regard but track records of incompetence and failure. God bless America’s "domestic reasons." They may yet prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, just as in previous generations they supplied the moral and political will to win the Cold War.