French President Emmanuel Macron favors “shifting the center of European gravity towards China,” according to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
“I do not quite understand the concept of strategic autonomy if it means de facto shooting into our own knee,” Morawiecki said Thursday. “European autonomy sounds fancy, doesn’t it? But it means shifting the center of European gravity towards China and severing the ties with [the] U.S.”
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Morawiecki did not identify Macron by name, but the reference to the French leader’s signature “strategic autonomy” concept made the rebuke unmistakable. And it punctuated a wider denunciation of traditional powers of Western Europe, which he characterized as feckless in the face of threats from Russia and China.
“They want a quick ceasefire — armistice in Ukraine — almost at any price. Maybe not all of them, but there are politicians in Western Europe who think so … ’Ceasefire at any at any price. The sooner the better, as quickly as possible, Ukraine. Why are you fighting so bravely?’” Morawiecki said at the Atlantic Council. “They want also [to ensure] that the selling of high-margin products to China continues. The wake-up call with regard to China is very, very soft — very weak in Europe across the European Union.”
The criticism underscored the difficulty that Macron faces in persuading Central and Eastern European countries to embrace his vision for the European Union. Macron traveled to Beijing last week, in conjunction with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for a series of meetings that U.S. and many European officials hoped would showcase Western unity in the midst of the war in Ukraine and Chinese saber-rattling around Taiwan. While Macron and von der Leyen reportedly delivered those messages behind closed doors, the French leader declared his unease about being “just America’s followers” in a potential crisis with Taiwan.
“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,” Macron told journalists in his traveling party. “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.”
That rhetoric, delivered as it was from China during a moment of high geopolitical tension, startled many trans-Atlantic observers and sent French officials scrambling to explain that Macron’s initiatives would reinforce the alliance rather than fray it. “Of course, we stand with the U.S., and let’s avoid any misunderstanding,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told Fox News’s Bret Baier on Wednesday evening. “When you have Europe investing more in defense, it means more spending from the European citizen for their own defense and less spending for the U.S. taxpayers. So, this is good news for the U.S. to have a stronger Europe and a more independent Europe.”
Still, Macron’s comments drew an implicit contradiction from Germany. “We are currently seeing how important it is to have partners around the world who share our values at our side when we face our own security threats,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Thursday at the beginning of her own trip to China. “That is why it is so important for us because we are vulnerable as Germany and as the European Union that we cannot be indifferent to the tensions in the Taiwan Strait.”
Their divergent tones point to a debate within European capitals about the strategic cultures of the leading European Union and NATO member states — their appetites for confrontation, and their assessment of how to manage risk, with Russia and China. Baerbock has emerged as one of Berlin’s most voluble advocates of military aid for Ukraine over the last year. Yet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s relative hesitance to send tanks and other heavy weaponry to Ukraine has exposed Germany to continuous criticism from its Central-Eastern neighbors.
“You cannot protect Ukraine today and tomorrow be saying Taiwan is not your business, and you need to support Ukraine if you want Taiwan to stay as it is,” Morawiecki said. “If Ukraine gets conquered, the next day China may attack — can attack — Taiwan. I see lots of connectivity, lots of interdependencies between the situation in Ukraine and the situation in China, in Taiwan and China.”
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Polish officials have taken a central role in the connections between U.S. allies in Europe and Indo-Pacific democracies, perhaps most notably through the inking of major arms deals with South Korea. And though Warsaw is embroiled in disputes with the European Union over key parts of the Polish judiciary, which EU officials have said “no longer meets the requirements of an independent and impartial tribunal previously established by law,” Morawiecki offered his own party as “the key” to coordinating U.S. and EU foreign policy.
“There are people who say that the Western economy and the Western world must give way to the Asian power, and China in particular,” he said. “The West has not yet said its last word. I believe so, at least. We have to rebuild the world order, renew NATO, and restore peace. And the new Europe’s Central and Eastern Europe can be a driving force in global competition and in defending our freedom together with the United States.”
