Trump in Britain for NATO meetings. Macron talks may be more important

President Donald Trump lashed out at French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday as the two leaders met for talks on the sidelines of NATO meetings taking place in Britain's capital.

Quarrels over defense spending, fights about trade and climate policy, rifts over Turkey's actions in Syria, and Iran – Trump is in London for a gathering connected to the military alliance's 70th anniversary. The official program starts Wednesday.

But ahead of that, Trump said Tuesday recent comments from Macron that NATO is experiencing "brain death" were "very nasty" and "very insulting" to the alliance's other 28 members. "Nobody needs NATO more than France," he said.

"It's a very dangerous statement for them to make," Trump also said as his NATO visit now risks being overshadowed by his meeting with Macron.

"Macron is seizing (the) moment, seeking to be disruptive in his own way, and so we will see how that works," said Heather Conley, a foreign affairs expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Among Macron's disruptions: continuing to argue for the relevance of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump has withdrawn from; announcing at the end of August that Europe needed to seek a greater accommodation with Russia and China; and his "brain death comments," made in an interview in The Economist, and a reference, in part, to NATO member Turkey's incursion into Kurdish-held Syria to root out fighters it considers terrorists, but who had also been successfully assisting U.S.-led forces battling the Islamic State group. Macron has long argued that Trump's exit from the international climate accord was a mistake. France's president wants the military alliance, founded in 1949 to act as a bulwark against the then-Soviet Union, to pivot more toward fighting global terrorism.