Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2023. © Richard Kemp
For a man who consistently churns out stupid comments, Emmanuel Macron is not a complete fool. He understands that limitations of range or geography no longer apply in the interconnected 21st-century world, where international threats cannot be compartmentalised by region. Taiwanese semiconductors and Pacific trade passages – and their potential disruption or denial – are just as important to Europe as they are to Japan, Australia, India and the US.
Yet this reality, and Mr Macron’s knowledge of it, has not stopped the French president from reportedly seeking to block the implementation of a Nato office in Tokyo – the alliance’s first outpost in the Indo-Pacific – on the basis that it is geographically far-flung.
Of course, this pathetic justification would not be the real reason for his objection. Rather, it’d be about two matters of pure self-interest. First, Macron hopes to avoid anything that might increase tensions with Beijing, especially after his attempts to cosy up to Xi Jinping in the interests of French business. This has led the French to distance themselves from American efforts to decouple from China. And it is why, after his recent visit to Beijing, Macron suggested Europe should recoil from the dispute over Taiwan to avoid becoming an American ‘vassal’.
This aversion to the US leads to the second point of self-interest: Macron wants to lead a Europe strategically autonomous from America and ‘brain dead’ Nato, albeit while remaining unable to pick up the price tag that would entail. It beggars belief that he should continue with this unrealistic obsession, driven as it is by hubris rather than realpolitik, even as the fact of European dependency on Washington has yet again been driven home by the war in Ukraine.
For some, it will be difficult not to suspect one more, even more parochial motivation for Macron’s position. He is still smarting from France’s exclusion from Aukus and the loss of its diesel powered submarine deal with Australia in favour of British-American nuclear Continue reading