Can Keir flirt like Emmanuel?

THE visual images of French president Emmanuel Macron's fidgeting and flirting with Donald Trump during the photo opportunity in the White House will be dug up from time to time for decades to come.

Macron treated Trump like a troubled teenager, almost like someone mentally disabled, without Trump and his MAGA club even noticing.

Macron was, like other European heads of state, highly annoyed with Trump after he had sided with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine and he and his lieutenants had insulted Europe and excluded them from negotiations with Russia.

But Emmanuel's smile was broad when he shook hands with Donald and then hugged him tightly. Three Mississippis long. Looking at him with apparent hero worship, repeatedly touching his arm or his leg, making a few jokes during their press conference later.

Everyone knows you have to stroke Trump's ego if you want to get something out of him. As an American journalist colleague who has dealt with Trump before recently told me: “You want Trump on your side? A mental blow job is the surest way."

This is French diplomacy at its best. Because Macron very well knows he needs to twist Trump's head around in the interest of Ukraine and European security.

Even when Trump lied again about the supposed $500 billion that America had given Ukraine – the actual amount is around $114 billion – and Macron had to interrupt him to correct it, he did it with a broad smile and a touchy-touch on Trump's thigh so that his ego would not feel bruised.

The leaders of the three strongest European countries (yes, did you also notice how Britain has been seeing themselves as European again these last few weeks?), Macron, Keir Starmer and Germany's new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, last week impressed with the firm positions they took on the war in Ukraine, Nato and Trump's bootlicking of Putin.

Merz, whose Christian Democratic Union is just as conservative as the Republicans were before MAGA, has even started talking about a Nato without America.

The stiff and humourless Starmer has also discovered his mojo and started taking strong stances. He bluntly warned that Putin's aggression would not stop at Ukraine and said a peace plan should not mean surrender by Ukraine.

Starmer was set to meet Trump last night. I have never seen the man smile, and it seems to me that his English stiffness is far too rigid for flirting à la Macron.

He therefore announced just before his departure that Britain would spend £13,4 billion more on defence from next year, because one of Trump's big arguments is that Europe does not spend enough on its militaries and rather relies on America.

The big question is, if Trump continues to accommodate Putin, whether the European leaders will have big enough balls to hand Ukraine the $287 billion in frozen Russian assets in Europe.

Macron says a ceasefire might be possible within weeks. France and Britain will send soldiers to secure it, but without American air support and air defence they will be highly vulnerable.

Today Volodymyr Zelensky is at the White House – yes, the same man that Trump last week called an inept dictator and mediocre comedian. Because Trump wants Ukraine's scarce minerals in exchange for the support that has already been given and support that might still come. He demands more than $500 billion in value, even though America has only given $114 billion to Ukraine.

By tomorrow we'll know if in exchange Zelensky was able to get security guarantees from Trump.

What is crystal clear today is that Putin will be allowed to keep Crimea, which he occupied in 2014, and large parts of the Donbas region as Russian territory, regardless of the nature of the peace agreement.

The question is what guarantees will be included in the agreement that will prohibit Putin from invading Ukraine again – or Poland, the Baltic states or Finland.

The Boers are kosher again

The New York Times asked me a few days ago why I think Trump and his MAGA followers are so receptive to Solidarity/AfriForum's whining about Afrikaner minority rights and victimhood. It made me think.

Afrikaners were the darlings of Europe and America at the beginning of the previous century when the mighty British empire wanted to take away their Boer republics. There is abundant historical material showing the sympathy for and romanticising of the brave warriors of the Anglo-Boer War.

My old ancestor Paul Kruger was a big figure in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and France, also in America and Russia. People from these countries even fought alongside the Boers.

In the years after the Union in 1910, recognition was given to white South Africans' creation of modern infrastructure, their participation in the Second World War and global figures such as Gen. Jan Smuts.

And then came 1960. The beginning of the Uhuru era. On February 3, 1960, British prime minister Harold Macmillan declared to the white parliament in Cape Town: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it."

Just 46 days later the police shot dead 90 people at a protest action in Sharpeville. The “Sharpeville Massacre" was big news in the West, and a watershed.

It led to sanctions and boycotts and South Africa was even kicked out of the UN. The anti-apartheid movement became influential everywhere.

The images of Eugene Terre'Blanche and his khaki brigade on overseas TV screens and front pages were the face of the Afrikaner. We were the skunks of the world.

I still remember how as a young man in the 1970s and 1980s I tried to hide my Afrikaans accent abroad and, when questioned, I said I came from Australia or New Zealand. I wasn't willing to answer for my tribe's racism.

And then came FW de Klerk and his National Party and confessed that apartheid was a sin and handed over power to the black majority.

It was unexpected and unprecedented in modern world history and FW received the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Nelson Mandela.

The Boers were kosher again.

But then came the immigration crisis in America and Europe and, as we continue to see, it drastically changed attitudes. The fear, however irrational, among white Americans and Europeans of being engulfed, the fear that the mostly dark-skinned immigrants would undo their traditional lifestyle and culture, overwhelmed public opinion.

Along comes Clever Flip Buys and builds a new Boer empire, but without k-words, brandy, horses or guns. They want to live in peace with black compatriots, but the UN's charter of human rights guarantees their minority rights.

Our farmers are being slaughtered on farms, our language is being suppressed and our land is being taken away. We are such honest, hardworking Christians? Surely that's not right?

It shouldn't surprise us that this resonates in America and Europe among conservatives and ethnic nationalists. And in America, the former Pretorian Elon Musk, Trump's First Buddy, and some of his fellow ex-South African tech-bros helped to make it resonate in the White House too.

The brave little white tribe of Africa, ag shame man.

♦ VWB ♦

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