by Guido Keller –
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov let it be known at the press conference that “France will hardly be able to play the role of mediator, since it is aligned with one of the warring parties, namely Ukraine, both directly and indirectly”.
Moscow’s reaction comes after French President Emmanuel Macron, returning from a visit to China where he met his colleague Xi Jinping, stated that “The European Union must not get involved in crises that are not ours”, because “the countries Europeans are not vassals of the United States“. He then insisted that “We must have our strategic autonomy, we do not want to depend on others for crucial issues. If we do not have autonomy of choice in matters of energy, defence, artificial intelligence because the necessary structures are lacking, we are out of history”.
For the French president “we can have points of convergence with the United States, but we must have our European strategy. We are not in the logic of bloc against bloc, whether it is Ukraine or China, but we must aim to eliminate the risks without depending on the outside. It is a paradox: we want our European strategic autonomy, but we follow the American one”. “I would like to emphasize another point: we must not continue to depend on the extraterritoriality of the dollar.”
Macron’s words come as tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait, where Chinese forces are conducting “Joint sword-sharpening maneuvers” exercises with live ammunition, in response to the Taiwanese leader’s considered “provocative” visit Tsai-Ing-wen in New York, where he received the “Global Leadership Award”, and at his meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCharty at the Reagan Library in Los Angeles.
The tension in the area is very high, and today the USS Milius missile launcher arrived, which amidst the wrath of Beijing crossed the waters of the South China Sea. In the same stretch of sea there is the aircraft carrier Uss Nimitz, with its own naval group.
On the Chinese side, the intention to annex Taiwan also by military means continues to be reiterated, as Chinese President Xi did on the other hand at the People’s Congress last October: the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China consider each other secessionist since 1949, but even though Taiwan has virtually no international recognition (except by a handful of micro-states), it is militarily protected by the United States, which continues to sell arms to Tsai’s government.
Macron therefore seems to want to free himself from US policy on Taiwan at a seriously critical moment for Europe due to the Ukrainian crisis, which began with the proposal of NATO, where the US is in charge, to dangerously engulf a state that shares a 1,576 km border with the Russia.
No less weighty for the US is the statement on dependence on the dollar: the real consequence of the Ukrainian crisis is the birth of a multipolar world, with Russia looking for its business no longer towards Europe, but towards China . Both countries are part of the BRICS, an economic alliance that has not yet taken off, but which alone affects half of the world‘s population. And Beijing is already pushing for the renminbi to replace the dollar, a scenario that the EU with its euro should not underestimate.