End of the Empire is a twice-monthly feature on all news relating to the transition from the unipolar world of the US Empire to a multipolar world.

APRIL 10th, 2023. Speaking to Politico, French President Emmanuel Macron, who has recently found somewhat of a calling as a voice of Europe independent from NATO, said that Europe must achieve “strategic autonomy” from the US-China tensions over Taiwan.

“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.

“Europeans cannot resolve the crisis in Ukraine; how can we credibly say on Taiwan, ‘watch out, if you do something wrong we will be there’? If you really want to increase tensions that’s the way to do it,” he added.

After President Xi Jinping released a 12-article outline for a lasting ceasefire in Ukraine, Macron broke with the other heads of Europe and flew to Beijing to discuss it, a development that Ukrainian president Zelenskyy welcomed.

On March 26th China’s top foreign policy official Wang Yi shared a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic adviser Emmanuel Bonne.

“France is ready to make joint efforts with China to facilitate the cessation of hostilities and seek a peaceful solution,” Bonne is supposed to have said.

Extraterritoriality

Macron’s administration took a hard turn towards a new idea of “strategic autonomy” which he referenced several times in the Politico interview and elsewhere after Biden unveiled the Inflation Reduction Act, which outraged many European nations who saw the US abusing its role as the issuer of the world’s reserve currency to apply mercantile subsidies to key American industries.

He explained that his home continent should not rely on the “extraterritoriality” of the US dollar, and decrease dependence on it.

“If the tensions between the two superpowers heat up… we won’t have the time nor the resources to finance our strategic autonomy and we will become vassals,” he said.

Politico wrote this happened to be a key policy of the Russian and Chinese governments, but is also to be found in the plans for a dozen other influential countries outside of Europe.