Newsman: French president Emmanuel Macron said “the great risk” Europe faces is that it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy.”
Emmanuel Macron said, Europe must reduce its dependency on the United States and avoid getting dragged into a confrontation between China and the U.S. over Taiwan.
Speaking with POLITICO and two French journalists on his plane after his trip to China, Macron emphasized his pet theory of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a “third superpower.”
President Emmanuel Macron claimed to have already “won the ideological battle on strategic autonomy” for Europe.
Macron gave the interview while flying from Beijing to Guangzhou, in southern China, aboard COTAM Unité, France’s Air Force One after spending around six hours with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“The paradox would be that, overcome with panic, we believe we are just America’s followers,” Macron said in the interview. “The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he said.
Macron and Xi discussed Taiwan “intensely,” according to French officials accompanying the president, according to POLITICO report.
“Stability in the Taiwan Strait is of paramount importance,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who accompanied Macron for part of his visit, said she told Xi during their meeting in Beijing last Thursday. “The threat [of] the use of force to change the status quo is unacceptable.”
Xi responded by saying anyone who thought they could influence Beijing on Taiwan was deluded.
Macron appears to agree with that assessment.
“Europeans cannot resolve the crisis in Ukraine; how can we credibly say on Taiwan, ‘watch out, if you do something wrong we will be there’? If you really want to increase tensions that’s the way to do it,” he said.
