PARIS: Offering some of his strongest criticism yet of Washington’s policies under President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron warned on Thursday the US was “gradually turning away” from some of its allies and “breaking free from international rules”.
Macron delivered his annual speech to French ambassadors as European powers were scrambling to come up with a coordinated response to Washington’s capture of Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro and the US president’s designs on Greenland.
“The US is an established power, but one that is gradually turning away from some of its allies and breaking free from international rules that it was still promoting recently,” Macron told ambassadors at the Elysee Palace.
“We are living in a world of great powers with a real temptation to divide up the world,” he said, rejecting what he described as a “new colonialism and new imperialism”.
While he criticised both China’s “increasingly uninhibited commercial aggressiveness” and Russia as a “destabilising power” whose nearly four-year war in Ukraine has no end in sight, his remarks about the US stood out the most.
Macron, however, stopped short of calling for a break with Washington, after US envoys earlier this week took part in a key Paris summit to discuss security guarantees to uphold any potential ceasefire to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.
He urged his diplomats not to be “spectators of things coming undone”. “It’s the opposite! We’re not here to comment. We’re here to act!” he said.
Macron did acknowledge that “multilateral institutions are functioning less and less effectively”.
But the French leader said it was the right moment to “reinvest fully in the United Nations, as we note its largest shareholder no longer believes in it”.
Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2026