Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
Understanding Macron Strategy on the War in Iran
Paris—To comprehend Emmanuel Macron is to grasp what occurs when a polity trained above all else to appear arrives at questions admitting of no appearance whatsoever. The French president’s posturing around Tehran reveals less any coherent doctrine than one might expect from a statesman who has never learned the difference between presence and intention. Victor Hugo, whose ocular preoccupations were well-documented, once observed—without reference to statecraft but with uncanny application—that “Il n’y a rien de si grand que ce qui semble petit.” Nothing is so vast as that which appears small. Macron’s Iran posture, one might say, fits this dictum almost obscenely: an effort of immense theatrical proportion whose substance remains vanishingly brief.
Camus—ever the surgeon of vanity—understood precisely such a disposition when he noted that “Le mensonge est une autre forme d’orgueil.” The lie as yet another form of pride—and Paris, in Tehran’s direction, was lying principally before its own mirror.
Yet beneath the vanity one might detect something genuinely structural. Consider the Charles de Gaulle, dispatched toward Iranian waters like an answer to a question never properly posed: positioned at such measured distance from any plausible strike zone that it communicated neither deterrence nor genuine capacity, only hesitation dressed as deployment. Forward merely enough to signal; distant precisely enough to nullify effect. The contradiction is here—the policy—a vessel whose mass exceeds its purpose, deployed toward resolution while held at exactly that distance which makes resolution impossible.
Kafka saw this clearly where others could not—indeed he wrote in The Castle, with characteristic precision regarding gates and thresholds: one may always step back; no instant truly arrives to justify forward movement. What is the carrier so carefully stationed beyond effective range but this Kafkaesque threshold? Between declaration and consequence, between gesture and its completion: perpetually suspended in a state of purposeful impotence.
Macron’s Iran strategy—the only term sufficiently desperate for purchase—thus operates as institutional paralysis masquerading as diplomacy. He cannot decide because deciding would require choosing among options his vanity renders equally intolerable, and so all governance becomes performance. A gesture toward action whose risk remains perpetually postponed by the actor’s own indecision.
What Camus named without naming—the absurd gentleman who moves through a milieu demanding meaning while expunging that demand at every turn—applies here with surgical accuracy: “Ce n’est pas assez de savoir ; il faut parfois appliquer ce que l’on sait.” Macron has known and applied nothing, preferring the permanent threshold—a gatekeeper forever outside his own castle while polishing the photograph of himself awaiting entry.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.