French President Emmanuel Macron used his final address to the United Nations General Assembly to mount a direct challenge to President Donald Trump’s vision of a world ordered by American power, speaking in New York City on Sept. 22, 2026, a couple of hours after the U.S. president left the same podium. The world, Macron told delegates, has entered a “new era of barbaric acts.”
Trump, who spoke earlier that opening morning, built his speech around American supremacy, presenting the U.S. economy and armed forces as unmatched anywhere on the planet. Turning to his seven-month war with Iran, he asked: “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly?” Steve Bloomfield, a former international editor of the Observer, wrote in a Guardian column that the address was “a litany of false boasts and odd tangents, peppered with grim military threats.”
Macron’s reply was a defense of international law, multilateralism and the rules-based order. He named Russia and Israel as offenders, though much of the speech was plainly directed at the American president. “They say might is right … but we will not yield,” he said. “We cannot simply accept this new order of impunity which some are trying to erect.” He framed the choice before governments as one between “the law of the jungle” and “a civilized international society.”
He also turned the argument on his own side of the world, conceding the West’s “permanent temptation” to espouse double standards. How often, he asked, had the world heard that people’s sovereignty had value in Europe but counted for less in the Middle East and Africa? “No, that is unacceptable,” he said, according to UN News and the Guardian. “A life is a life. Peace and security are indivisible, and everyone has a right to them.”
A Voice for the Middle Powers
Macron, who steps down next spring after two terms, came to power in May 2017, four months after Trump first took office, with the European Union absorbing the shock of Britain’s Brexit vote, a eurozone crisis and the migration wave of 2015. His ambitious call for EU reform that year went nowhere, Bloomfield wrote, in effect killed off by then German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who praised his “passion” and “verve” without backing the substance. He has since worked alongside three German chancellors and is on his sixth British prime minister, Andy Burnham.
During Trump’s first term, Bloomfield wrote, Macron was the only major leader willing to say publicly that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could no longer rely on Washington, and he has pushed the case for European strategic autonomy harder than anyone else. His disastrous snap election in 2024 has left him, in effect, a lame duck for the past two years.
Bloomfield argued that Macron’s analysis in New York was sound but his solutions slight — and yet his resolve appears to have rubbed off on other middle-power leaders, among them Canada’s Mark Carney, Australia’s Anthony Albanese, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and Finland’s Alexander Stubb.
