On Friday 6 April 2023, Emmanuel Macron paid a state visit to China. He joined President Xi for a 6 hours afternoon tea. The tea must have been very special because, after another 3-day stopover in the Netherlands where he also granted the Oranges with a visit, he returned to France with new, fresh insights.
Moreover, during a flight between two Chinese cities, Emmanuel rushed to make his new views known to POLITICO journalists and 2 other media who accompanied him in his Presidential Airbus.
In these links you will find the full texts of the article which - as usual prior to publication - has been cleaned up by the Elysée Palace. Certain slips of the tongue by Macron have been neatly removed. So we only get to read what the Elysée approved. However, those who can read between the lines will immediately understand that daddy Xi Jinping paternally reprimanded Emmanuel, so harshly that he took off his vest and put it back on in reverse.
Analysis of key excerpts from the interview and article :
" As tensions escalate between China and Taiwan, French president calls for independence from US positions."
For Emmanuel Macron, Europe must reduce its dependence on the United States and avoid getting involved in a possible confrontation with China over Taiwan."
What is Macron actually saying here? That the EU has so far slavishly followed the USA's directives in all areas and matters and Xi has advised him to distance himself from the US, become autonomous in exchange for good business deals with China, and that the EU may continue to play war in Ukraine but shall not interfere in the conflict between China and Taiwan because otherwise this could cost the EU a sour price.
"The goal: to make the European Union a 'third superpower'."
For the president, "the big risk" for Europe would be "that we are dragged into crises that are not ours, preventing us from building our strategic autonomy," he said on board the presidential flight from Beijing to Guangzhou in southern China.
.... Party leaders and theorists in Beijing are convinced that the West is in decline and China is on the rise, and that the weakening of transatlantic relations will help accelerate this trend."
""The paradox would be that [...] out of a kind of panic reflex we are going to follow US policy," Emmanuel Macron said. "The question for us Europeans is this [...] Is it in our interest to speed up the issue of Taiwan? No. The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans should be followers on this issue and adapt to the US pace and a Chinese overreaction."
That the West is in decline needs no further argument. In a near future, the West will only be cited in history books under the heading of decaying civilizations, with the difference that the Roman Empire existed for several hundred years and enjoyed great prosperity for quite some time, while the West managed to smash the prosperity built up since WWII in as little as 75 years.
Macron may have gained new insights in terms of " crises that are not ours " insofar as it relates to the conflict between China and Taiwan, which has declared itself independent and is also behaving that way while it is still formally a province of China, but Emmanuel's nose is then again not so long that he can make the comparison with the declaration of independence of the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk ( which is exactly the same as the case of Taiwan ) and the war between Ukraine and Russia which is also a crisis that is not ours. Ukraine is not a member state of the EU and therefore cannot, in principle, boast of EU aid, yet both the EU and individual member states, including France, are throwing tens of billions of euros in funding and armaments towards Ukraine. Ukraine is also not a member of NATO, nor can it boast of financial and military aid from NATO countries, yet ...
On whose instructions is all this happening ? The USA, of course. Hence Xi Jinping's paternal rebuke.
"Macron and Xi have "intensively" discussed Taiwan, according to the president's entourage. However, the latter seems to have taken a more conciliatory approach than the United States or even the European Union.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who accompanied Emmanuel Macron for part of his visit, said she told Xi Jinping that "stability in the Taiwan Strait is of paramount importance" when they met in Beijing on Thursday. "Threatening violence to change the status quo is unacceptable," she added. Xi responded by saying anyone who thought they could influence Beijing on Taiwan was delusional.
... "During the meeting, Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen took similar positions on Taiwan but the French president then spent more than four hours with the Chinese leader, much of it only in the presence of translators, and his tone was clearly more conciliatory than that of the commission president when he spoke to journalists.
"The Europeans cannot solve the crisis in Ukraine, how can we credibly say about Taiwan: be careful, if you do something wrong, we will be there? If you really want to raise tensions, this is the best way to do it," he said."
Ursula's threatening language is similar to that of Stoltenberg ( Nato ), Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken and co. Xi did not hide his disdain for Ursula and put her on an ordinary civilian flight towards Brussels without an escort. She, like all other ordinary earthly souls, had to queue up in the waiting lines which she experienced as a humiliation.
"During his interview with POLITICO, the French president also stressed that Europe has become increasingly dependent on the United States for arms and energy and must now focus on building up its defence industry.
For Emmanuel Macron, Europe must also become less dependent on the "extraterritoriality of the US dollar", a key policy objective of Moscow and Beijing. "If the duopoly accelerates, [...] we will have neither the time nor the resources to finance our strategic autonomy and we will become vassals," he said.
Russia, China, Iran and other countries have been hit in recent years by US sanctions aimed at cutting them off from international economic and financial circuits controlled by the dollar. Some Europeans have complained about Washington's "weaponisation" of the dollar, forcing European companies to do business and cut ties with third countries or face crippling secondary sanctions.
... However, he did not address the issue of US security guarantees for the continent, which relies heavily on US protection and military aid in the context of Europe's first major land war since World War II.
Well, there you go. We now know what is going on. There is no war between Ukraine and Russia but a war between Europe, the United States and Nato against Russia.

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