Macron to Biden: Cooperation cannot be dependence
PARIS» President Emmanuel Macron of France said in an interview Friday that for Europe to be a credible partner to the United States it also had to be “an autonomous partner” with its own military and technological capacities, because “cooperation cannot be dependence.”
Speaking to a dozen foreign correspondents, Macron said he had a long telephone discussion last Sunday with President Joe Biden in which he explained his thinking on the future of NATO.
“It’s not that we want to undo the existing alliances or partnerships,” he said. But, he continued, “Cooperating is choosing to work together for shared values and objectives. The day that cooperation becomes dependence, you have become somebody’s vassal, and you disappear.”
The unreliability of the administration of former President Donald Trump, and his persistent criticism of NATO and the European Union, accelerated a European strategic reassessment. Macron has been the European Union’s most forthright voice, calling for investments in more jointly developed European military equipment and deploring the bloc’s technological dependence, whether on China or, as he put it, “even on an ally like the United States.”
Of his conversation with Biden, the French president said: “I told him we are for European strategic autonomy because Europe must bear its share of the burden.” The exchange was “very agreeable and pleasant,” ending with an agreement to work together, Macron said.
Other European countries, including Germany, have been cautious about using the word “autonomy.” The French president is facing an election next year, and a posture asserting French and European sovereignty is likely to play well on the center-right of the political spectrum, an important potential constituency for him. It also reflects deep personal convictions that Macron has expressed since 2017.
By turns philosophical and pragmatic, always intense, the president interspersed his arguments with broad reflections, like: “You know, one cannot master the course of history, but one can try to find its thread.”
One such thread, Macron suggested, alluding to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, is the rise of violence that has become a direct threat to democracies.
Without “the capacity to respect individual freedoms and create a framework for peaceful debate,” democratic societies face collapse, he said. But some people, in France as in America, have concluded that “there is so much economic, social or other violence that physical violence in the street is justified. I believe this is a profound error that menaces democracy.”