Macron accuses US of ‘turning away’ from allies, breaking rules

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech to French ambassadors during the Ambassadors' Conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris on January 8, 2026. Photo / Michel Euler, POOL, AFP

French President Emmanuel Macron has warned that the United States was “gradually turning away” from some of its allies and “breaking free from international rules”, offering some of his strongest criticism yet of Washington’s policies under Donald Trump.

Macron delivered his annual speech to French ambassadors as European powers were scrambling to come up with a co-ordinated response to Washington’s capture of Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro and the US President’s designs on Greenland.

“The United States 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 United States 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.

Here to act

Macron 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 spoke after US special forces snatched Maduro and his wife from Venezuela on Saturday and whisked them to New York, sparking condemnation that the United States was undermining international law.

Trump then set off alarm bells in Europe by repeating his insistence that he wants to take control of Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory.

The US President has repeatedly refused to rule out the use of force to seize the strategic Arctic island, prompting shock and anger from Denmark and other longstanding European allies.

Copenhagen has warned that any attack would spell the end of the Nato alliance.

Reinvest fully in the UN

Macron did acknowledge that “multilateral institutions are functioning less and less effectively”.

But the French leader insisted that “global governance” was key at a time when “every day people wonder whether Greenland is going to be invaded” and whether “Canada will face the threat of becoming the 51st state”.

He said it was the right moment to “reinvest fully in the United Nations, as we note its largest shareholder no longer believes in it”.

The White House on Wednesday flagged Washington’s exit from 66 global organisations and treaties – roughly half affiliated with the UN – it identified as “contrary to the interests of the United States”.

Macron said Europe must protect its interests and urged the “consolidation” of European regulation of the technology sector, a source of frequent tensions between Brussels and Washington.

He also stressed the importance of safeguarding academic independence and hailed “the possibility of having a controlled information space where opinions can be exchanged completely freely, but where choices are not made by the algorithms of a few”.

Brussels has adopted a powerful legal arsenal aimed at reining in tech giants – namely through its Digital Markets Act (DMA), which covers competition, and the Digital Services Act (DSA) on content moderation.

Washington has denounced the tech rules as an attempt to “coerce” American social media platforms into censoring viewpoints they oppose.

“The DSA and DMA are two regulations that must be defended,” Macron said.

- Agence France-Presse