Macron ducks China fight
The EU cannot avoid the conflict over Taiwan. Matthew Partridge reports
The G7 group of leading nations has reaffirmed its support for Taiwan against Chinese aggression following remarks by French president Emmanuel Macron that “sparked an international backlash”, say Kana Inagaki and Joseph Leahy in the Financial Times. Macron suggested that the EU should distance itself from the conflict between Washington and Beijing over the self-governing island that China considers to be its territory. A “diplomatic uproar” followed when Macron argued during a trip to China that Europe should avoid the “trap” of getting “caught up in crises that are not ours”. The French president complained that Europe was being used as “a chess piece” in a competition between the US and China and “risked becoming a vassal” of the US.
Antagonising China
Little wonder that Western leaders have been left scrabbling to cover Macron’s “diplomatically dangerous” comments, says The Economist.
His remarks have damaged his personal credibility, undermined Western unity and given hope to “China’s ambition to divide Europeans and peel Europe from America”. Macron’s understandable reluctance to be drawn into war should be “for closed-door talks among allies, not public musings”.
Maybe, but Macron’s words are indicative of the fact that European nations have different views on how best to deal with Beijing, says Silvia Amaro on CNBC. Some countries favour a closer relationship with the US, given its critical role in security and defence; others are “afraid of antagonising China and endangering deep economic ties”. Even more hawkish leaders, such as Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, are resisting US ideas of completely dissociating from Beijing – the EU has too much of an interest in preventing Beijing from supplying arms to Russia and in getting China to reduce its carbon emissions.
The Opec of silicon
Still, Macron is naïve if he thinks Europe can just ignore China’s misdeeds, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. After decades of “resetting the world order through stealth and increment” and building alliances with autocracies, China is “engaging in ever-more blatant land grabs in the South China Sea, inciting border disputes with India, and threatening anyone who stands in its way”. Indeed, at the very moment Macron was in China, Beijing was telling senior Chinese officers “to prepare for real combat after conducting three days of military rehearsal in preparation for a blockade and bombardment of Taiwan”.
Even if Europe were indifferent to Taiwan’s fate, the island’s role as the largest producer of computer chips means that it (and the rest of the global economy) would still be caught up in the economic crossfire from any Chinese attack, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph. It is likely that both Tapei and Washington would rather destroy Taiwan’s chip-manufacturing plants than let the “Opec of silicon chips” fall into Chinese hands. An invasion could then lead to “the technological equivalent of a sudden stop in global oil supply from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia all at the same time”. Chip-dependent Europe would find itself stripped bare with no strategic agency whatsoever”.