Macron snaps back at Trump, reflecting Europe’s growing anger over Iran war

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PARIS – After absorbing a steady drip of anger, contempt and mockery from US President Donald Trump over Iran, Europe’s leaders have begun to snap back – and President Emmanuel Macron of France has emerged as the most vocal.

On April 2, Mr Macron lashed out at Mr Trump for what he said was an unserious approach to the war and unhelpful attacks on NATO.

“When we’re serious, we don’t say the opposite of what we said the day before,” Mr Macron said during a visit to South Korea.

“We are talking about war, we are talking today about women and men who are in combat, about women, men and civilians who are being killed,” Mr Macron said. “We’re also talking about the impact of this war on our economies.”

It was a striking display of exasperation with Mr Trump, coming from a leader who has long prided himself on dealing tactfully with the US President and his mercurial ways.

But it reflected a growing defiance on the part of Europeans, who had previously tried to balance their deep reservations about the military campaign with a desire not to antagonise Mr Trump.

Tensions are flaring over the use of Europe’s airspace and military bases, as countries have refused access to US or Israeli warplanes on offensive military missions. Leaders, even from pro-American countries like Britain, speak openly about the need for Europe to provide for its own security, apart from the US.

Even Europe’s effort to marshal a coalition to secure the key trade routes through the Strait of Hormuz, which began as a response to Mr Trump’s demands for greater European support, has come to reflect how Europe is going its own way.

Its leaders, who met on April 2 in a call organised by the British government, have rejected his call to forcibly seize the strait, which Iran has effectively closed, or to act before the conflict has ended.

“That has never been the option we have chosen, and we consider it unrealistic,” Mr Macron said. Seizing the strait, he said, would take “an infinite amount of time” and would expose ships passing through the strait to Iranian attacks.

For all the insults flung at Europe by Mr Trump, European leaders have tried not to make it personal with the US President. Even Spain’s Prime Minister, Mr Pedro Sanchez, who has expressed more public criticism of the Iran war than any other major European leader, rarely cites Mr Trump by name in his statements.

But Mr Macron’s falling out with Mr Trump appeared to carry an extra tinge of bitterness because it is personal and involves the French President’s wife, Mrs Brigitte Macron. He was responding in part to remarks made by Mr Trump during an Easter lunch on April 1, which included a derogatory reference to an incident in which Mrs Macron was caught on video appearing to shove her husband.

Mr Trump’s mocking remarks “were neither elegant nor befitting”, a clearly bristling Mr Macron said to reporters in Seoul, the South Korean capital. “So I’m not going to respond to them; they don’t deserve a response.”

In this, he adhered to the turn-the-other-cheek policy of other European leaders, like Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, who has stoically deflected Mr Trump’s jibes that he is “no Winston Churchill”. But that did not stop Mr Macron from unloading on Mr Trump’s wartime leadership or his treatment of NATO.

He brushed aside Mr Trump’s latest threat to carry out devastating air strikes against Iran, delivered in a nationally televised speech on April 1.

“I’m not here to comment on an operation that the Americans decided on with the Israelis, on their own,” Mr Macron said. “They can later complain that they aren’t being supported in this operation that they decided on alone. It’s not our operation.”

But Mr Macron did weigh in on Mr Trump’s mounting attacks on NATO, which the latter has accused of not helping the US and which he has threatened, in an interview with The Telegraph newspaper published on April 1, to withdraw from.

Mr Macron said Mr Trump’s criticisms were weakening the alliance.

“If you create doubt every day about your commitment, you hollow it out,” Mr Macron said.

“When you’ve signed a treaty, when you’ve committed to an alliance, when you believe it’s important to defend the security of your allies – or at least your partners – you live up to the commitments you’ve signed,” Mr Macron continued. “You don’t comment on them every morning.”

Few leaders have had as full-bodied a relationship with Mr Trump as Mr Macron, in part because Mr Macron, having served for nine years, is in his second round of dealing with him. Their first meeting, in 2017, was memorable for the prolonged, death-grip-like handshake between the two men.

Later in the year, they bonded at a Bastille Day military parade in Paris.

But by November 2019, after Mr Trump had imposed tariffs on Europe, an impatient Mr Macron cut him off with a curt, “let’s be serious”, when the US President was trying to lighten the mood at a NATO summit.

Relations have not improved during Mr Trump’s second term. After an Israeli strike on Iran in 2025, Mr Trump complained that Mr Macron “always gets it wrong”. In January, he shared screenshots of texts from Mr Macron, who greeted him as “my friend” while pushing back gently on his designs on Greenland.

More recently, there appeared to be a thaw. In mid-March, after a phone call with Mr Macron about Iran, Mr Trump said: “On a scale of zero to 10, I’d say he’s been an eight. Not perfect, but it’s France. We don’t expect perfect.”

Now, as France has refused to get more deeply involved in the war, Mr Trump’s mood has soured again.

His mockery of the incident with Mrs Macron, which Mr Macron has denied was a dispute, is a new low in their relationship. NYTIMES