Europe must resist pressure to become ‘America’s followers,’ says Macron | Hacker News Reader

Europe must resist pressure to become ‘America’s followers,’ says Macron

politico.eu

29 pointsRedCondor32 comments

Last paragraph: "As is common in France and many other European countries, the French President’s office, known as the Elysée Palace, insisted on checking and “proofreading” all the president’s quotes to be published in this article as a condition of granting the interview. This violates POLITICO’s editorial standards and policy, but we agreed to the terms in order to speak directly with the French president. POLITICO insisted that it cannot deceive its readers and would not publish anything the president did not say. The quotes in this article were all actually said by the president, but some parts of the interview in which the president spoke even more frankly about Taiwan and Europe’s strategic autonomy were cut out by the Elysée."

Hah! Yeah, pretty sure the Elyzee PR department gets cold sweats every time Macron does one of these interviews.

He has a bad case of "talking first, thinking later, checking with PR never", even about extremely touchy subjects.

Nothing here is so newsworthy it justifies violating their standards.

I understand sometimes papers have to make hard calls. An important source demands anonymity. A tyrant is threatening to murder family. An election can be swayed by important but misleading info.

Nothing in this article falls into that category.

It’s not even a new position of the French president.

A noble sentiment, but until Western Europe foots its share of the bill of NATO defense, Eastern Europe will stick with America. And if the EU keeps up with insane energy policy and regulating their tech sector out of existence, they will remain reliant on the US. So, for now this is all empty words

Insane energy policy? How so?

"Let's close all our perfectly functional nuclear power plants and build up unreliable intermittent solar and wind! That way, we will be forced to rely on fossil fuels—especially natural gas that we can't get because we banned drilling for it on our soil, and we are currently engaged in a proxy war with the nearest major supplier."

Let’s not forget:

„1. Let’s replace all cars and vans with electric. 2. Let’s make housing unaffordable by requiring removal of old heating systems and upgrades to insulation when a property changes hands. Let’s make it cheaper to build new houses than renovating old while making demolitions and recycling prohibitively expensive. All of that while we have a shortage of labour and material, and a difficult situation on the energy market.”

Also, Europe is much norther than America, so its generally the worst place on earth you could put solar panels.

As a French language learner who's been consuming French content including news as a means of supplementing my language acquisition journey, the "not being America's followers"-sentiment is unavoidable. It's no doubt a complicated relationship which I'm just beginning to understand because it seems to operate at several levels.

At the first level, I'll use the example of "le wokisme," where anti-"wokisme" is used as specifically in the context of not following American values. However, as you can quickly guess, simply picking an American stance, and producing its opposite ends up replicating the same political division.

I'd imagine there is a level above this which attempts specifically reframe issues in a different way than Americans, but that fails in a peculiar way, in that it doesn't retain hegemony on what the issues are. Trying to maintain a these are American issues, and these are French issues, I'd imagine also breaks down at some level as inter-cultural exchange can never been eliminated.

It's an odd thing to at some level partially adopt a "we are defined by what we aren't" mentality. But again, as an outsider, I can be sure I'm distorting (perhaps wildly) some of the perspectives I'm trying to observe.

Bloody stupid of him, even for his goal of European "third-pole". Pissed off the US, Taiwan, eastern EU, Ukraine, EU gov, Japan, South Korea, all the French citizens in the South Pacific, the list goes on. All at the exactly wrong moment too. Could have just not said anything, took the Americans money and worked towards that "third-pole". But what can you expect from a man whose recent actions could put the French euro-skeptics in power, thereby rendering France not part of that "third-pole". Or, who can't get France's economy to start growing for the first time in ten years due his own self-serving ineptitude, thereby rendering them, the...err, "12th pole" in 50 years and with a retirement age of 96!

He's right though, but easier said than done at EU level Macron.

France at least has a high amount of autonomy so it's easy for him to talk.

> He's right though, but easier said than done at EU level Macron

Gut read: he's messaging to RN voters. There is no intent to sell Beijing bombs with which to level Taipei. But appeasement and anti-Americanism are successful RN talking points.

Why are RN members anti-american?

Nobody wants to "level Taipei."

Stop attributing unsubstantiated, irrational desires to the people you consider your enemies.

The goal has always been reunification, and that's what it will remain even if the U.S. does something silly.

Had he not soured the french-german relations, Germany would've bought most of their new weapons from them. Instead now most of the German re-arming is coming from america.

I’m not familiar. What did he do to French-German relations?

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-german-meeting-p...

Creating the pipeline germany has been asking for a long time, just for green hydrogen instead of what everyone wanted, Gas.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/spain-france-portuga...

https://www.reuters.com/article/france-germany-relationship-...

The CCP has never governed Taiwan, but Macron wants to give it to them. Does he want to give Ukraine to Russia to or is there a double standard?

Macron wants whatever will allow him to sell weapons to Russia and China again

That's a non-argument and moreover, and more importantly, Macron never said or implied that.

Having productive relations with China does not imply agreeing to a forceful takeover of Taiwan.

> Having productive relations with China does not imply agreeing to a forceful takeover of Taiwan

It makes decoupling harder. Merkel said the same about Moscow. (To be clear, I do not believe we are at the point of decoupling from China. But in our needs for decoupling, there is trans-Atlantic alignment, which makes me skeptical of someone arguing for greater ties with China on a sovereignty-from-America line.)

There is no need for 'decoupling'. In fact, Macron and the EU (through Von Der Layen) have just rejected that stance during their trip to China.

This is actually what this is about: 'decoupling' is an American stance aimed at helping American interests. And so 'sovereignty from America' is indeed rejecting that stance if it does not fit your own interests.

More broadly, with China and Ukraine, those being the most salient issues, the US have pushed their interests at the expense of Europe. Macron is sending a very unsubtle hint that they can follow so far (and don't get him started on the little Australian subs issue...)

> 'decoupling' is an American stance targeted at helping American interests

Nobody is advocating decoupling right now, just being mindful of decoupling risk.

If Xi invades Taiwan tomorrow, Washington deploys the Russia playbook. The parts of the French economy that depend on China would overnight have to deal with sanctions compliance, payment risk, write downs and freezes. Having your ally’s economy go depression at the outset of conflict isn’t helpful.

> the US have pushed their interests at the expense of Europe

Europe pushed for tougher actions on Russian oil and gas than Biden wanted. Reality is more complicated than a one liner.

I agree that the US are powerful enough to bully everyone else. Up to a point.

> the US are powerful enough to bully everyone else. Up to a point

This is an adversarial model of international relations. It’s dated to the imperial era. One can model any countries’ relationships with it. (It’s vaguely tautological.) And it will make them all sound imperial. (For example, France with her former colonies. Or Norway with Denmark: they’re nice because it is below the limit of what they will tolerate from one another.)

For sake of argument, let’s embrace this flawed model. Using its lingo, the entire point of this discussion is whether that point of decoupling is before or after Beijing invades Taiwan. Whether France has the strength to stand up, or is constrained in its policy options in response to an invasion.

I an just stating facts and the way the US, and others, operate according to their relative strength.

I am hoping France has the strength to stand up for itself.

The United States is a paper tiger.

So Macron would rather France decouple from America than from China, then?

> Macron never said or implied that

Not helping the US defend Taiwan implies Macron accedes to the CCP's wish to govern it. That's why they are happy. Or are you being deliberately obtuse?

What about "productive relations with Russia"?

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