Despite the outcry, Macron is right about Europe – and much else

You can question the French president’s decision to make state visits to China and the Netherlands while his country remains mired in street protests and strikes, but the outcry that has met some of what he said and did on his travels – an outcry it should be said, expressed mainly in the English language – reflects a view of the world that is parochial, needlessly defensive, and stuck in the past.

The first objection, voiced in Washington by the UK’s former prime minister and foreign secretary, Liz Truss, was that Emmanuel Macron went to China at all – not because of any difficulties at home, but because his red-carpet trip could be seen as pandering to an adversary and exposing divisions in the supposedly united Western bloc.

But what, you might ask, would have been preferable? Macron’s China visit came less than a month after Xi Jinping’s state visit to Russia. Is the international diplomatic field to be left to a new and exclusive Russia-China entente? Is it really in Western – US, UK, EU – interests to ostracise a country that we trade with – so long as we look to our own interests – to shared advantage?

Not even the UK at its most hawkish has advocated cutting trade or diplomatic ties with China. Indeed, the government’s revised foreign policy prospectus, (the Integrated Review Refresh published last month), says we must work to engage as well as resist any attempted coercion, which seems a realistic and reasonable approach.

And, yes, Macron was making a statement by travelling to China just now – a statement to the effect that France, and by extension Europe, wants to maintain the trade and the talking, and that Russia should not be left as the only power to try to bend China’s ear.

Is such an approach wrong? As China stakes a claim to a slice of the diplomatic action outside northeast Asia – its mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran, its ceasefire plan for Ukraine – should Europe not make its voice heard, including directly, with the country that set these proposals in train?

Of course, it should. But the Sinophobes who have long shouted loudest in the US Congress, and their friends further afield thought otherwise. And things only got worse. Having been hosted with full honours by Xi Jinping, Macron vouchsafed some of his thoughts about the Europe-US-China triangle. “The worst,” he said, according to the French press, “would be to think that we Europeans must be followers on this subject and adapt ourselves to an American rhythm and a Chinese over-reaction.”

His cardinal offence, it would seem, was to suggest that if tensions between the US and China over Taiwan were to escalate, European interests might diverge from those of the United States. The risk was of becoming embroiled in crises “that are not ours”, which, in turn, would leave Europe with neither “the time, nor the means to finance our own strategic autonomy” and that “we will become vassals, whereas we could become the third pole [in the world order].”

Now it should be stressed that the big idea here – of the EU exercising “strategic autonomy” and becoming a “third pole”, independent of the US and China – is far from new. It has been a recurrent theme, indeed the recurrent theme, of Macron’s foreign policy pronouncements from the earliest days of his presidency.

There were those who hoped he might play such thoughts down after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought the US back into Europe in a big way, but they were wrong. Europe’s “strategic autonomy” remains crucial to Macron’s ambition for Europe.

While the big idea might not be new, the Taiwan aspect was. With China conducting manoeuvres off Taiwan and the US upping its rhetoric, Macron was arguing, in essence, that if the US seemed to be escalating the tensions, it could not necessarily rely on European support. The EU had its own interests to look after, and these might not include war with China.

In saying so, Macron infuriated not just sections of US opinion, but opinion in those EU members most wedded to the Atlantic alliance, starting with Poland. Worse, from their point of view, when invited to retreat from or qualify his remarks a few days later while on his state visit to the Netherlands, Macron stood by what he had said, warning once again against any escalation in the tensions over Taiwan.

An additional difficulty for Macron was that his apparent doubts about US Taiwan policy into the future seemed only to confirm that France was less than fully aligned with the US, whether on military assistance to Ukraine, or on Russia, where Macron had continued to talk to Putin even after the invasion of Ukraine, and said that Russia’s security had to be considered in any post-war settlement.

But the furore about Macron’s remarks had another effect, too. It has reopened the controversy about the whole idea of “strategic autonomy” for the EU, and whether it is even desirable, let alone practicable, for the Europeans – that is the EU excluding the UK – to pursue a foreign and defence policy that is distinct from that of the United States.

One of those entering the fray was the US senator and one-time presidential contender, Marco Rubio, who said, sarcastically: “Maybe, we should basically say we are going to focus on Taiwan and the threats that China poses, and you guys handle Ukraine and Europe.”

Rubio’s question presupposed the answer “no”. As seen from Europe, however, and perhaps through the eyes of the current occupant of the Elysee, a reasonable answer could well be “yes”. For what is the United States doing in Europe, so long after 1945? Is it not high time that the Europeans took responsibility for their own defence? And to those who might argue that this would allow Russia to roll over more of Europe, it can equally be argued that US support for Ukraine’s Nato aspirations helped lead to the war raging in Europe now.

It also needs to be asked how compatible, really, are US and European interests, especially since the US “pivoted” to think of itself as a Pacific power. Nato is turning attention to the Pacific largely at the behest of US. Macron made the point in the Netherlands that France and Europe were in favour of keeping open seas, but that this objective could and should be achieved without war with China. Does the US agree?

As for the practicalities of “strategic autonomy”, it has been argued that Europe cannot sustain itself without US support – whether in defence, in energy (Russian gas has now largely been replaced by US LNG), or in finance, with the dollar as reserve currency. In fact, there is no reason why Europe should not provide for its own defence (it started thinking about it during the presidency of Donald Trump). It makes no sense to import US energy, geographically or ecologically, and the dollar as global reserve currency is already challenged.

Macron may be wrong when he talks of three poles, with Europe, or the EU, as the third. But he is not as wrong as those, such as the United States and the UK, who still talk and act as though there are only two poles in the international order: whether those two poles are the industrialised North and the so-called global South, or the countries that adhere to “our values” and those who don’t. The multi-polar world is advancing apace, as shown by the successive votes in the UN against isolating Russia over Ukraine.

On Friday 14 April, Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to raise the state pension age in France will be validated, or not, by the Constitutional Council. This ruling could have more implications for the remaining four years of his presidency than anything he has said about Europe’s “strategic autonomy”.

In the broad sweep of history, however, he could well be remembered more for his vision of Europe as a distinct strategic player in a world still making the difficult transition from the Cold War order to something more complex. What is more, as a politician who will still be under 50 when he leaves office, he could yet be the elder statesman who makes the arguments that bring the new global institutions into being.