Monday, April 10, 2023

Macron's Words After Meeting With Xi Are So Bad, They Should Be Setting off Alarms for U.S. And Taiwan

Macron's Words After Meeting With Xi Are So Bad, They Should Be Setting off Alarms for U.S. And Taiwan

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

Joe Biden tells so many lies, I’m not sure he knows what’s true and what isn’t at this point.

But one lie he’s told frequently is how he’s strengthened our alliances and we had nothing to fear from the moves of China and Russia. He said it during his visit to Canada last month when he was asked about Saudi Arabia moving toward Russia and China. It was straight-up delusion.

As we look around the world, we see our adversaries on the move. People with whom we had reasonable relationships, before Joe Biden — like Saudi Arabia — are mocking Biden and now moving towards our adversaries, joining coalitions with them.

Even France, our oldest ally, is now making concerning statements after Emmanuel Macron just came back from visiting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Europe must reduce its dependency on the United States and avoid getting dragged into a confrontation between China and the U.S. over Taiwan, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview on his plane back from a three-day state visit to China.

Speaking with POLITICO and two French journalists after spending around six hours with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his trip, Macron emphasized his pet theory of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a “third superpower.”

He said “the great risk” Europe faces is that it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy,” while flying from Beijing to Guangzhou, in southern China, aboard COTAM Unité, France’s Air Force One.

and

“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. [….]

He also suggested Europe should reduce its dependence on the “extraterritoriality of the U.S. dollar,” a key policy objective of both Moscow and Beijing.

Yikes. If Joe Biden wasn’t seeing the big red flags being waved at him already, he should be seeing them now. Even Europe is now moving away from us under Biden.

Xi’s aim was to feel out Macron and Europe on how they might react to an invasion of Taiwan, and to slow Europe’s support and/or involvement when it comes to the island nation. Macron just said in that article he didn’t think Taiwan was worth it. That’s a green light to Xi.

Based on Macron’s comments, it sounds like Xi got exactly what he wanted.

If it wasn’t obvious, let me say it directly to Joe Biden, who has difficulty with these things: The invasion is coming. This is one big piece of evidence of it.

If Joe doesn’t understand this, it confirms again that he’s an idiot. If he doesn’t care, it confirms he’s compromised.

As I reported earlier, China was on the move, practicing encircling Taiwan on Sunday and simulating missile strikes.

China has been working on this for a long time. But with Joe Biden, now they think they have the go-ahead to act.

That’s a big story from Politico that I cited above. But as it turns out, there was even more. Politico let Macron’s people look at what quotes they were going to publish and let them cut some things out, according to their editor’s note. Click on the tweet to see the full text:

“[B]ut 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 Elysee,” the note says.

If what they left in is the stuff they felt comfortable letting people see — and it’s this bad for the United States — what the heck did Macron’s people have them edit out? One has to wonder how bad what he said truly was.

This is what Xi meant when he was talking about 100 years — overtaking the U.S. as the dominant world power.

All of this is very bad for us.