France’s partners have not yet fully recovered from Emmanuel Macron’s latest faux pas when it is revealed that the French President has agreed in a secret agreement to work out a peace plan for Ukraine together with the People’s Republic and its ruler Xi Jinping.
At the same time, the Chinese ambassador in Paris announced that the states of the former USSR, including Ukraine, are actually not really states recognized by international law. It strikes like lightning.
The disturbing statements of Xi’s ambassador in Paris
Because this makes it clear that Beijing is completely realigning its Ukraine policy on the one hand and that it can obviously rely on France’s support on the other. Beijing has always claimed to stand up for the sovereignty of nation states as enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Since Kiev is a member there, Beijing recognized Ukraine as a state and concluded a far-reaching economic agreement with the nation in 2013, China’s critics rightly pointed out this dichotomy. Xi Jinping is now resolving this by declaring that Ukraine is actually not a nation state at all.
That’s exactly what Xi’s bosom friend Putin has been saying ever since he began preparing for war on Ukraine. In his worldview there is a holy Russia, which includes Ukraine. Putin has children kidnapped from Ukraine in order to “Russify” them, he has art treasures stolen from Ukraine in order to rob the country of its own culture. And Macron would like to put this person, who is wanted for war crimes on an international arrest warrant, at a table with President Zelenskyj.
If Macron’s statement on Taiwan was a serious accident, this development is a total loss for French diplomacy and France’s position in the free world. From Paris it can be heard that the Foreign Ministry is shocked by Macron’s actions. He is under massive pressure domestically because of his pension reform and wants to show the French through foreign policy successes that with him at the top they have a strong man who speaks to China’s president on an equal footing.
Macron takes over the Kremlin’s way of speaking – also because he wants to take revenge
But no one can buy anything from that, least of all the Ukrainians who were attacked, closely followed by the people of Taiwan, for whom an attack has now become more likely thanks to Macron’s statement, which must have sounded to Beijing as if the West was divided .
Does Xi have anything against Macron? Nothing except access to the second largest economic power in the world. France is doing it like Brazil and India: These two states are also currying favor with Xi on Ukraine, are calling for peace talks and are thus implicitly adopting, France now explicitly, the Kremlin’s way of speaking, which has become Xi Jinping’s.
The fact that France still wants to take revenge for the AUKUS deal between the USA, Great Britain and Australia should also play a role. Under this agreement, submarines were discarded from Paris in favor of supposedly better, newer models. The Élysée Palace was foaming at the time, as the French armaments industry was losing billions. Shortly thereafter, US President Joe Biden received the angry Emmanuel Macron. But that doesn’t seem to have satisfied him.
Macron gets the recognition from Xi that was always denied him with Merkel and Scholz
Ensuring the goodwill of France, and thus a nuclear power also stationed in the western Pacific, is a good move for Xi. He now has two pieces of evidence that he succeeded. The rift in European foreign policy and the quarrel with the US NATO partner have become obvious and, as such, will probably not be patched up any time soon.
Beijing has recently found it difficult to keep its partners in line, especially in Eastern Europe. To date, it has been Xi Jinping’s strategy to have a say in Brussels and Strasbourg about the eastern flank, such as Greece. But now he has a powerful partner in France, unlike Germany, a nuclear power with global military ties.
Macron is getting the kind of recognition from Xi Jinping that Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz have always denied him. They thought, and still do, that the Frenchman’s aspirations were unrealistic. But Xi has big, global plans for his empire. In it he may speak an imperial language with which the French President would like to identify.
