The Xi-Macron Romance – and Big Nukes Dreaming of the end of American preeminence. by Kenneth R. Timmerman
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-xi-macron-romance-and-big-nukes/
China’s president Xi wound up his five-day European tour just as an emperor should, with a red carpet welcome and full military honors in Budapest.
The Hungarians, known Euro-contrarians, welcomed Xi’s pledge to invest billions to build an EV plant in Hungary, and didn’t bat an eye when told it meant they now belonged to China’s imperialist Belt and Road Initiative.
Xi’s trip went better than expected. France’s president Emmanuel Macron, whom I call “Little Cookie” for reasons you will find fully explained in my new book on France, Raising Olives in Provence, backed away from his aggressive statements about China’s unacceptable economic takeover of Europe.
Instead of berating Xi, he took the Chinese dictator to a childhood haunt in the Pyrenees, thinking perhaps he was Donald Trump, who gave Xi the Mar-a-Lago treatment when the two first met in May 2017. He was left to beg Xi to reduce the huge trade imbalance between China and the EU ($314.72 billion in 2023), or else – or else, nothing.
Macron could make no credible threat of tariffs, because he doesn’t yet speak for the EU, although on most days he thinks he does.
Little Cookie and Xi could agree on one thing, however: Both would like to end American “hegemony,” and see both the EU and China play larger roles on the world stage.
Remember, Macron just recently provoked Putin by sending French combat troops to Ukraine – Foreign Legionnaires, my favorite! Putin claimed that Macron’s action put NATO in direct conflict with Russia and made a big show of testing his tactical nuclear weapons in response, even though Macron did not consult with NATO before his reckless decision.
Little Cookie is doing his best imitation of the traditional French stereotype of the bantam rooster. (Just an aside: did you notice in the pictures of him toasting white wine with Xi that he appeared almost as tall as the 6’2″ emperor? Macron stands at most 5’5″, and makes sure his handlers have soapboxes at the ready before he poses for pictures. For real.)
Macron is now proposing that France provide a “nuclear umbrella” to the European Union, independent of NATO.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the French nuclear triad, developed with extensive aid from both Israel and the United States, has lacked any strategic purpose. It is extremely costly and not terribly popular in France. But what a powerful toy in the hands of the boy president!
Macron has at least one taker: Manfred Weber, a European parliamentarian of the same center-right party as EU Commission president, Ursula van Der Leyden.
Weber told Bavarian TV this week that Macron’s proposal of an EU nuclear force was something “we must talk about,” and chided Socialist Chancellor Olaf Scholz for ignoring it.
Macron “is broadening the conception of France’s national security from a purely territorial concept into a European one,” Weber said. “He is ready to say: the security order of France is attacked when Lithuania is attacked.”
Think about that for a minute. Lithuania, France, and Germany all belong to NATO. Under Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty, an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. So how does having a European nuclear force separate from NATO “broaden” that concept of mutual defense?
What it does, however, is to decouple France and the EU from the United States. Do the Europeans really want that? Are the Europeans actually willing to foot the bill for the French nuclear triad, or what’s left of it? (The French retired the eighteen ground-based missiles from the Plateau d’Albion in 1999 and imploded the silos).
Something tells me they’re not.
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