Elected, she s famously anti-nato and how would that impact the incredible unity we have seen among countries in response to the war in ukraine. she s also an admirer of vladimir putin. you will remember she went to the kremlin in 2017 to meet with putin. all of those things hang in the balance, katy? thank you. and with me, his latest book the power of crisis, ian bremer. thank you for being here. what would it mean if marine le pen wins? she would try to end french
President emmanuel macron facing a serious challenge from a far-right candidate with an anti-nato and pro-putin past. cbs elaine cobbe is in paris. reporter: five years ago, he rode in on a wave of change and a rejection of extremism. but now, the woman he roundly defeated in 2017, far-right leader, marine le pen, is practically tied with incumbent president emmanuel macron in the opinion polls. and the prospect of an extremist president of france is very real. that was unthinkable a few weeks ago. while macron was engaged in shuttle diplomacy on the war in ukraine, le pen was pushing her new, toned-down image. gone is her extremist rhetoric about immigration and nationalist. but martin quencez of the transatlantic think tank, the german marshal fund, says le pen s ideology remains the same. she still advocates for an alliance with russia, strategic
Corner so we don t have a european war what s the we need to ask ourselves what are they thinking, how can we help them out of the corner. putin laid this out. he wrote it clearly in a speech he wrote last year where he talked about ukraine is part of russia and i feel, you know, i feel he clearly felt the russian-ification of that part of the world. any thoughts? i think the proposals revealed from spain to russia speak to the russian anxiety about security. they say, we will never station u.s. troops permanently in ukraine. it is not promising ukraine will never be a nato member, you can t promise that. it is speaking to the concern. one thing, there are polls in russia that are pretty reliable show that the younger you are,
3,000 troops to europe. this is not something that vladimir putin or any of the military want to see. they don t want to see f-35s on their borders. this has really turned out to be the opposite of what vladimir putin was hoping for. my god, you look at all of the troops that are now moving to eastern europe. they have to know if they go in they re going to see even more. you know, joe, i think putin must have calculated that biden was the person in some ways that his biography suggests. he is a career politician, he s careless, he talks too much, he s good old joe biden and putin thought he could roll him. biden has been resolute in the last weeks. he started by saying the right thing, we need to do this together with nato allies.
Extraordinarily unpopular question with an extraordinarily unpopular uh-oh. it is just questions we don t ask in america for the most part. here is a country that lost 27 million people in world war ii. 27 million people slaughtered in world war ii because of an invasion. they lost their empire in 1991 and you have people talking about expanding nato into ukraine, a region that, yes, most russians still consider to be a part of sort of this greater soviet state. you look at ukraine and it is like a knife that cuts straight into the heart of russia. i always think about when we re lecturing israel, when we have people that want to win nobel prizes for peace and are