President Emmanuel Macron landed in China to a red-carpet reception and all the pomp of a state visit, a three-day tour little short of a love-fest that he clearly hoped would further his ambitions for France to sit at the table of the great powers in a world changed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Beijing’s emergence as an arbiter of global conflict. ... Already embattled at home, facing huge weekly protests in the streets, he now finds himself excoriated abroad for what has been criticized as his naïveté — first with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom he failed to dissuade from war after an intense courtship, and now with China’s president, Xi Jinping, who wants to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States and has warned of American “containment.”
The article is outside the Times's paywall.
French leaders seem to have a penchant to cosying up to adversarial nations, while, at the same time, shivving their friends in the back. Macron got absolutely nowhere in trying to persuade Putin not to go to war and he's not going to make a dent in Xi's ambitions for China to dominate its neighbors and invade Taiwan.
Macron, and his predecessors, ignore reality. France's desire for the United States to disengage from Europe is second only to Russia's. Every time that thre has been a serious fight in Europe in the last century, the United States has had to get involved. European forces tried to handle the Balkan wars in the 1990s, but it took American airpower to end things.
French aid to Ukraine by any measure, whether by GDP or by amount shows that France has not exactly been stepping up to the challenge. The notion that France, let alone the European members of NATO, can deter Russian aggression by themselves is risible.
No, that's not accurate. It's a French delusion that certainly is not shared by those nations who are not as distant from the Russian border. Possibly because it's been two centuries since Russian soldiers marched through Paris.
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