This article is also available in French.
NAVE COTAM UNITÀ (FRENCH AIR FORCE PRIME) – Europe must reduce its dependence on the United States and avoid getting drawn into the conflict between China and the US over Taiwan, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview on his plane from the trip. the date of the state visit to China.
Speaking to a French politician and two journalists after spending six hours with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his trip, Macron highlighted his desire for “strategic autonomy” for Europe, led by Franco, to “become the third superpower”.
He said that Europe faces “a great risk” because “they are not included in our crises, which prevents them from building their strategic autonomy”, while flying from Beijing to Guangzhou in southern China, COTAM Unite, Air France was killed. One god.
XI Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have enthusiastically endorsed Macron’s concept of strategic autonomy and Chinese officials have consistently endorsed it in dealings with European countries. Party leaders and theorists in Beijing are convinced that the West is in decline and that China is overreaching and that undermining the transatlantic relationship will help accelerate this trend.
“It would be ironic that, struck by terror, we believe that we are just followers of America,” Macron said in the interview. “The European question must be answered… is it in our interest to accelerate” [a crisis] in Taiwan? No. It would be very serious to think that we Europeans should become followers of this argument and get distracted by the US agenda and accept the Chinese overreaction,” he said.
Just hours after his flight left Guangzhou for Paris, China began large-scale military exercises around Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China claims as its territory, but the US has promised to arm and defend it.
Those exercises were in response to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen’s 10-day diplomatic tour of the American nation, which included a meeting with Republican US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy while in California. People familiar with Macron’s thinking said he was happy Beijing had at least waited until it was out of Chinese airspace before conducting a simulated encirclement exercise on Taiwan.
Beijing has repeatedly threatened to invade in recent years and has plans to isolate the democratic island by forcing other countries to recognize it as part of “one China.”
Taiwan is speaking
Macron and Xi have dealt with Taiwan “intensely” according to French officials under the president’s comte, who appears to have taken a more lenient approach than the United States or even the European Union.
“Stability in the Taiwan Strait is of the utmost importance,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who accompanied Macron as part of his visit, said he told the 11th at his meeting in Beijing last Thursday. “The Threat” [of] the use of force to change the status quo is unacceptable.’
XI responded by saying that anyone who thinks they can move Beijing on Taiwan is deluded.
Macron seems to agree with the assessment.
“The Europeans can’t solve the crisis in Ukraine; how can we credibly say in Taiwan, ‘look, if we’re going to do something wrong’? If you really want to increase tensions, I’ll do it,” he said.
“Europe is more willing to accept a world in which China becomes a regional hegemon,” said Yanmei Xie, a geopolitical analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics. “Some of their leaders also believe that such a world order is more convenient for Europe.”
In a trilateral meeting with Macron and von der Leyen in Beijing last Thursday, Xi Jinping went on record on only two topics — Ukraine and Taiwan — according to someone who was in the room.
“Xi was visibly upset that he was held responsible for the conflict in Ukraine and canceled his recent visit to Moscow,” he said here. “He from the US is angry and very upset over Taiwan, by the passage of the Taiwanese president through the US and [the fact that] questions were raised outside the policy by the Europeans.”
In this meeting, Macron and von der Leyen took a similar line on Taiwan, this person said. But Macron later spent more than four hours with the Chinese leader, much of it with interpreters present alone, and his tone was far softer than von der Leyen’s speaking to the press.
‘The vassal’ warns;
Macron also argued that Europe has increased its dependence on US arms and energy and should now focus on boosting European defense industries.
He also suggested that Europe should reduce its dependence on the “extraterritoriality of the US dollar”, a key policy objective of Moscow and Beijing.
“If the tensions between the two powers heat up … we don’t have the time or the resources to spend on our strategic autonomy and we will become vassals,” he said.
Russia, China, Iran and other countries have been hit with US sanctions in recent years based on their access to the dollar-denominated global financial system. Some in Europe have complained about the “weapons” from Washington that force European companies to give up business and weaken ties with third countries or face secondary sanctions.
While sitting in the cockpit of an A330 aircraft with the words “French Tech” emblazoned across his chest at the start of his career, Macron claimed to have already “won the ideological battle for strategic autonomy” for Europe.
It did not address the issue of ongoing security for the Continent, which is critical to American defense support during the first major ground war in Europe since World War II.
As one of the five permanent members of the Security Council and the only nuclear power in the EU, France is in a unique position militarily. However, it contributed far less to the defense of Ukraine against Russian invasion than many other countries.
As is common in France and in many other European countries, the office of the French President, known as the Elysée Palace, has insisted on slowing down and “proving” all the powers of the president to be published in this article as a condition of granting the interview. This violates editorial standards and political policy, but we have a verbal agreement to speak with the president in French. POLITICO insisted that it could not deceive its readers or preach what the president did not say. The authorities in this article were all actually spoken by the president, but some parts of the conversation in which the president spoke even more freely about Taiwan and Europe’s strategic autonomy were cut out by the Elysée.
