Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac DeVare. Today's guest, French ambassador Gerald Auro.

Arro has been the ambassador here in Washington since 2014. Before that, he spent five years at the UN.

In today's Washington, where foreign leaders talk with the president directly,

ambassadors aren't like they are in the movies coming in to represent their government in the Oval Office, making the case.

Oro certainly isn't.

He's never met Trump, and though he told me he spends a lot of time talking to people in the West Wing,

like National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster.

Most of his job is like what most of the other ambassadors in Washington do. Represent their country's interests in all sorts of ways around the country, fostering ties.

And serving as the eyes and ears for their governments back home to try to understand what's going on in Washington and in American politics.

Most other countries don't do ambassadors the way we do here, where presidents

pick their friends and allies and big donors for the jobs. France doesn't. Arose started out at the

UN as an ambassador under Nicholas Sarkozy, arrived in D.C. under Francois and is now serving under

the new president, Emmanuel Macron. That doesn't mean he's without his own views they come out a lot often on Twitter

and not always so diplomatically like what he tweeted on election night it's the end of the era

of neoliberalism we don't know what comes next when I asked him what comes next he started

off by saying he regretted tweeting that that night but that also he turned out to be right

the world is changing adapting to the reaction coming up through democracies to up by saying he regretted tweeting that that night, but that also he turned out to be right.

The world is changing, adapting to the reaction coming up through democracies to how governments were approaching trade and international agreements and all sorts of policies that depend on open

borders. It's pretty clear that a row wishes it weren't changing that much. President Trump is off to

the G20 for his third bankink international meeting of the year.

He was at the G7 and NATO, both in May. Then he'll turn around and head back to Europe to France,

where he'll go to the Bastille Day parade on invitation from Macron, continuing to sketch out the strange

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