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Amid reports that some countries are “de-dollarizing,” French President Emanuel Macron suggested in a new interview that Europe should reduce its dependency on the United States.
There is a “great risk” that Europe “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy,” he told Politico this weekend as he flew on an airplane from Beijing to Guangzhou in China after meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have backed Macron’s “strategic autonomy” concept as CCP officials often refer to it when meeting with other European officials.
“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.
China began drills around Taiwan on Saturday in anger after the island nation’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, met with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Wednesday. China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control, while Taiwan’s government strongly objects to China’s claims.
Europe must better fund its defense industry, develop nuclear and renewable energy and reduce dependence on the U.
