New York: French President Emmanuel Macron had nothing but good things to say about Australia and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a function at the St Regis in New York.

“Your prime minister took a very bold and important decision to join our club of 11 countries recognising Palestine,” Macron told this masthead on Tuesday night (Wednesday AEST). France was keen to work with Australia on a range of matters, he said, including energy, free trade, climate change, defence and, of course, the war in Ukraine.

“It’s very important to have a country like Australia,” Macron said. “Your participation as a member of the coalition of the willing is testament to the fact that [Ukraine’s security] is not just a European issue; this is a global issue.”

How things change. It was only a few years ago that Macron famously branded Australia’s then-prime minister Scott Morrison a liar when asked by this masthead’s now-editor, Bevan Shields, whether he thought Morrison had lied to him about the scrapped French submarine deal. “I don’t think – I know,” Macron said at the time.

In a show where Donald Trump was always going to be the star, the best supporting actor of United Nations 2025 must surely be Macron. President of France since 2017, he is – at 47 years old – the elder statesman of Western democracy. He was there at the G7 in Canada in 2018, in that infamous photograph where Trump is being stared down by then-German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Macron may be the Merkel of our times. He is, in a way, the conservative voice of calm to Trump’s contemporary voice of chaos. The charming European antidote to American brashness.

And he has been everywhere at the opening of the 80th General Assembly in New York this week. He received a hero’s welcome after his speech on Monday, having taken on a leadership role in the two-state solution conference and the global move to recognise a Palestinian state.

He met separately with Trump, Albanese and the president of Kazakhstan, and delivered arguably the most viral moment of the summit when he called Trump on his mobile to banter about being blocked on the street by New York police as the US president’s motorcade passed.

“Guess what? I’m waiting in the street because everything is closing for you,” Macron was filmed saying into his phone.

It ought to be the most compelling dynamic between any two world leaders for the next 18 months. Macron is on a farewell tour, of sorts – his term ends in May 2027. He is terribly unpopular at home, but it hardly matters – his usefulness now is on the world stage, not in Paris.

Trump is against recognising Palestine, but Macron’s driving of it has had no bearing on their friendship. “He’s doing a really good job,” the US president told reporters at their meeting. “He’s fighting hard. He’s fighting on a lot of fronts. He’s helping with regard to the Russia-Ukraine catastrophe. And his words of wisdom mean a lot. We’ve been friends for a long time now, really from the first term on.”

Among Macron’s other friends? None other than Australian mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest. The Fortescue chairman was by Macron’s side as he entered an event marking 60 ratifications of the High Seas Treaty on Tuesday night in New York.

The two men would have had much to discuss after Trump’s incendiary speech earlier in the day that labelled climate change a “con job” and carbon footprints a “hoax”. Forrest said the Trump administration needed to “look at the facts, not the fiction”, and accept climate change was real; at the weekend, he declared that Trump’s energy policies were “gobsmackingly illogical”.

Macron appears to be revelling in his role as the counterbalance to a dogmatic Trump on international affairs. The question is who will be brave enough to take up that mantle when Macron steps off the world stage in 2027.

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