There is, in the choreography of diplomacy, a gesture so fundamental that even the most negligent student of foreign affairs would recognize it as inviolable: when a host government summons an ambassador, the ambassador appears. It is not a suggestion.
It is not an invitation to be weighed against personal commitments or political convenience. It is the baseline grammar of sovereign relations, the minimum condition under which the vast machinery of bilateral engagement can function at all. On Monday evening, the French Foreign Ministry summoned Charles Kushner, the United States Ambassador to France and Monaco, to the Quai d’Orsay. He did not come. He sent a subordinate and cited personal commitments. This was the second time he had refused such a summons.
The consequences arrived with a swiftness that suggested they had been prepared in advance, awaiting only the confirmation of what Paris already suspected: that the ambassador’s absence was not accidental but deliberate, not a scheduling conflict but a strategy. Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot requested that Kushner be denied direct access to members of the French government. Not expelled. Not declared persona non grata. Something more quietly devastating: rendered functionally irrelevant. An ambassador who cannot meet with ministers is an ambassador in name only, a diplomatic mannequin occupying a residence on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré while the actual business of statecraft proceeds without him.
The Quai d’Orsay, in its statement, left a door ajar—as one must, for 250 years of alliance are not lightly discarded. It remains possible, the ministry noted with exquisite restraint, for Ambassador Kushner to carry out his duties and present himself so that diplomatic discussions needed to smooth over the irritants may take place. The choice of the word “irritants” deserves attention. In the lexicon of French diplomacy, where understatement is an art form and euphemism a weapon, “irritants” describes what most observers would recognize as a cascading series of provocations. The question is whether these provocations are the byproduct of incompetence or the product of design.
Consider the pattern. In August 2025, barely a month into his posting, Charles Kushner—a man whose principal qualification for the role appears to be that his son married President Trump’s daughter—published an open letter in The Wall Street Journal accusing France of failing to combat antisemitism. The letter was not a private diplomatic communiqué. It was not a discreet conversation between allies. It was a public broadside, deliberately placed in an American newspaper of record, designed to humiliate the French government before an international audience. Paris summoned him. He did not appear. France met instead with a representative, absorbed the slight, and moved on.
Now, seven months later, the same ambassador has ignored the same summons over a matter considerably more volatile. On 14 February, Quentin Deranque, a twenty-three-year-old far-right activist, died from brain injuries sustained in a violent brawl between far-left and far-right militants in Lyon. The incident occurred on the sidelines of a protest near a university where Rima Hassan, a hard-left MEP from La France Insoumise, was scheduled to speak. The killing was brutal, captured on video, and immediately seized upon by France’s political classes as an instrument of accusation and counter-accusation. Eleven people were arrested. Murder charges followed. The investigation is ongoing. It is, by any measure, an internal French matter—a tragedy embedded in the specific pathologies of French political violence, the bitter geography of Lyon’s extremist factions, and the gathering tensions of a nation approaching municipal elections in March and a presidential contest in 2027.
The Trump administration, however, did not see an internal French matter. It saw an opportunity.
The State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism—a body ordinarily concerned with matters like ISIS affiliates and transnational jihadist networks—posted a remarkable statement on X. Reports, it declared, corroborated by the French Minister of the Interior, that Quentin Deranque was killed by left-wing militants, should concern us all. The Bureau then added, with the studied cadence of a propaganda bulletin: Violent radical leftism is on the rise, and its role in Quentin Deranque’s death demonstrates the threat it poses to public safety. Separately, Sarah Rogers, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, described the killing as “terrorism.” The US Embassy in Paris dutifully amplified both statements in French on its social media channels.
Let us pause here and consider the architecture of this intervention. A counterterrorism bureau—whose remit is international terrorism, not street violence in a European city—issues a statement characterizing a domestic French incident as a manifestation of “violent radical leftism.” An undersecretary for public diplomacy labels it terrorism. The embassy translates and distributes the statements into the language of the host country. None of this is spontaneous. None of this is the work of a rogue communications officer. This is coordinated messaging, designed to inject an American political narrative—the specter of left-wing violence, a favorite motif of the Trump administration’s domestic culture war—into the internal political life of an allied nation.
And it landed exactly where it was intended to land. France was already convulsed. The far right was marching—three thousand people in Lyon, some wearing white nationalist symbols, some giving Nazi salutes. Swastikas appeared on the Place de la République. LFI offices were vandalized. The killing of Deranque, a young man linked to the neo-fascist Allobroges Bourgoin group, a former member of the antisemitic royalist faction Action Française, and a participant in the neo-Nazi May 9th Committee parade, was being presented not as the consequence of a street brawl between armed extremist groups but as a martyrdom—the death of an innocent at the hands of a left-wing mob. Into this volatile cocktail, the United States poured accelerant.
It was not only Washington. Giorgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister and one of Trump’s closest European allies, weighed in almost simultaneously, describing Deranque’s killing as “a wound for all of Europe” and condemning “a climate of ideological hatred sweeping several nations.” Macron’s response was characteristically pointed: Let everyone stay in their own lane. I am always struck, he observed from New Delhi, by the fact that people who are nationalists—who don’t want to be bothered in their own country—are always the first to comment on what is happening in other countries.
The coordination—or at minimum the convergence—between Washington’s intervention and Meloni’s echoing rhetoric raises a question that French officials are now openly asking: is this premeditated? Is the Trump administration, in concert with ideologically aligned European leaders, deliberately stoking political polarization in France and across the continent to benefit a political climate more congenial to its interests? The Trump administration’s December 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly identified supporting nationalist parties in Europe as a key element of US policy. If that document means anything at all, it means this: the instrumentalization of Deranque’s death is not an aberration. It is the strategy.
The Kushner summons and its contemptuous refusal did not occur in isolation. On the same weekend, it emerged that Emmanuel Macron had written personally to Donald Trump requesting the lifting of sanctions imposed on two French citizens: Nicolas Guillou, a judge at the International Criminal Court, and Thierry Breton, the former European Commissioner for the Internal Market. The sanctions against Guillou, imposed in August 2025, stem from his role in authorizing the ICC’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in Gaza. The sanctions against Breton, imposed in December 2025, target him as a principal architect of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which the Trump administration characterizes as extraterritorial censorship of American companies and viewpoints.
Guillou’s account of what the sanctions mean in practice is a portrait of bureaucratic annihilation. His French bank cancelled his Visa card—Visa being an American company subject to US sanctions law. Expedia cancelled his hotel reservation in France. UPS will not handle his packages. He cannot use most digital platforms. I am fifty years old, Guillou told journalists in Brussels. I have lived through the 1990s. It is not easy, but I can manage. But if sanctions were to hit young people today, who are twenty-five and have their entire lives online, the sanctions I am experiencing would be a true civil death.
Macron, in his letter, argued that the sanctions undermine European regulatory autonomy and the principle of judicial independence. He asked Trump to reconsider. The silence from Washington, as of this writing, has been eloquent. The sanctions against a judge for issuing judicial decisions and against a commissioner for enacting European legislation are not diplomatic instruments in any conventional sense. They are instruments of coercion—attempts to use American economic hegemony over global financial and digital infrastructure to punish individuals who exercise sovereign European functions that displease the White House. They are, in a word, interference. And they are premeditated.
What is emerging, when one steps back from the individual provocations and considers them as an ensemble, is something more coherent and more troubling than a series of diplomatic blunders by an unqualified ambassador. It is a strategy of deliberate destabilization directed at France and, through France, at the European Union’s capacity for independent action. The components are visible: the weaponization of social media commentary to inflame domestic political crises; the deployment of sanctions against European officials who act independently of American preferences; the appointment of an ambassador who treats the conventions of his office with open disdain; and the cultivation of ideological allies—Meloni in Rome, Orbán in Budapest, and the far-right factions now marching in Lyon—who amplify the message and extend its reach.
French sociologists tracking political violence have noted that of fifty-seven deaths linked to violence among political groups between 1986 and 2017, all but five were caused by right-wing extremists. Since 2022, six further deaths have been attributed to radical right-wing activists. The killing of Deranque, while committed by individuals associated with the far left, occurred in the context of a brawl between two armed groups in a city that researchers describe as the hotbed of political violence in France. To extract from this complex reality a simple narrative of “violent radical leftism”—as the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau did—is not analysis. It is propaganda. And it is propaganda with a purpose: to strengthen the hand of France’s far right at a moment when Marine Le Pen’s National Rally believes it has its best chance ever of winning the presidency in 2027.
The irony, which has not been lost on European analysts, is that even the far right is beginning to find Trump’s interventionism uncomfortable. Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella have had to distance themselves from Trump’s more egregious provocations—his threats to Greenland and the Panama Canal, his tariff wars, his contempt for NATO—as their own voters increasingly see the United States as a greater threat to global stability than Russia or China. Bardella notably urged his supporters not to attend the Lyon memorial march, recognizing that its organizers included groups too extreme for a party aspiring to presidential respectability. The sovereigntist international, as Foreign Affairs has termed it, is discovering the central paradox of nationalist cooperation: nationalists, by definition, struggle to cooperate, because each insists on the primacy of his own nation’s interests. Trump does not want allies. He wants subordinates.
It is worth recalling the broader context in which these provocations unfold. The Trump administration is not operating from a position of unchallenged strength. The Supreme Court’s recent 6–3 ruling against the President’s sweeping tariff regime—finding that IEEPA does not authorize unilateral imposition of import duties—has dealt a structural blow to the administration’s signature economic policy. The foreign policy ledger offers little comfort: Gaza remains deadlocked, the Iran negotiations are stalled, and the Ukraine peace process has produced nothing but empty chairs in Geneva. The Epstein files continue to generate headlines that creep closer to the President’s circle with each revelation. A presidency under pressure on every front tends to seek arenas where it can project strength without bearing cost. France, with its political tensions and its principled but constrained capacity for retaliation, offers exactly such an arena.
But France is not without resources, and the decision to restrict Kushner’s access—unprecedented in modern Franco-American relations—signals that Paris has crossed a threshold. The door, as the Quai d’Orsay noted, remains open. But the message is unmistakable: there are limits to what a 250-year friendship can absorb, and an ambassador who will not answer a summons, representing a government that will not respect sovereignty, has reached them.
The geometry of what is happening is not subtle. A superpower’s counterterrorism apparatus comments on a street fight in Lyon. Its ambassador twice refuses to explain himself. Its sanctions punish a judge for judging and a regulator for regulating. Its closest European ally echoes its talking points on cue. And all of this occurs in the weeks before French municipal elections, in the shadow of a presidential race that could deliver the Elysée to the far right for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic. To call this interference is accurate but insufficient. It is interference with a blueprint, interference with allies, and interference with timing. It is, in the fullest sense of the word Barrot used and Macron amplified, instrumentalization—the conversion of a young man’s death into a lever for the reshaping of a continent’s politics. The question is no longer whether the interference is premeditated. The question is what France, and Europe, intend to do about it.