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Sending NATO troops to Ukraine unlikely despite Macron's remarks
Are Western troops likely to end up on the ground in Ukraine?
If Western troops we mean NATO troops, I think it is very, very unlikely indeed. All this is a big flap in response to a question the French President, Emmanuel Macron, said it wasn't off the table, something needed to be thought about. The German chancellor almost immediately clapped Macron back. Didn't really need to do that. You already had the NATO secretary general, others saying more needs to be done to support the Ukrainians, more economic support, more military support, need to get the Americans to tee up for 2024. Most of NATO is all there. But of course, Macron, when he gets frustrated, he gets flustered. He likes to make a name. He likes to make headlines. Got a little trouble for that. It was a bit of an own goal. We've seen that before. But I don't think there's actually that much news being made.
How might Sweden's entry into NATO reshape defense policies and military partnerships in the region?
Well, let's keep in mind that unlike countries like Finland and Poland and the Baltics, which are front line NATO countries vis a vis Russia, Sweden is not. That's one of the reasons why their total defense spend was something like 1.2% of GDP. They will ramp that up significantly. They will reach 2% quickly and not that hard for them to do. They're small economy and very wealthy now that they are finally joining NATO. They also are very good in terms of military equipment. They have a significant defense industry and they export a lot of it. They work closely with NATO allies. So in that regard, they'll be quite significant. I think they matter. But, you know, again, it's a small country. It's really the symbolic fact that the NATO is expanding and continuing to expand because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Is Saudi Arabia poised to assist Zelensky in advancing his peace plan?
Well, the Saudis did host the most successful one of the most widely attended peace meetings for Ukraine so far. The Russians weren't there, but the Chinese were, as opposed to the meeting that just occurred in Switzerland a little over a month ago. They've also helped to facilitate transfers of POWs between the Russians and Ukrainians. That's very far from saying that we have diplomacy that's going to work, especially because Putin sees no reason. He thinks he's doing well right now and he can't wait to see what happens in the US elections in November. So I don't think there's much going on. But the Saudis certainly want to show that they want to be useful. And it's not just there. It's of course also in their own backyard. They get a lot of money, a lot of leadership. They are leading the GCC. It's a country everybody needs to pay attention to. Certainly very far from where they were a few years ago.
Paris 2024 Olympics chief: “We are ready”
Eight months ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, Tony Estanguet says Paris plans to offer “a fantastic moment of celebration.”
Estanguet serves as President of the Paris 2024 host committee and led the hard-fought battle to bring the Games back to the city for the first time in 100 years.
The three-time Olympic gold medalist, a canoeist, is one of the most decorated French athletes and the first to win gold in three different Olympiads. In 2022, he served as his nation’s flag-bearer at the Beijing Games.
“I lived (my) first life as an athlete and my life completely changed, thanks to the Olympics and sport,” Estanguet told GZERO’s Tony Maciulis.
On the sidelines of the recent Paris Peace Forum, Estanguet said Paris is ready to host an estimated 10 million spectators across 41 venues in and around the city. The city recently had a spate of bad publicity over bed bug infestation, a story Estanguet says is “ridiculous.” “People will criticize,” he said, but “we are ready to welcome the world.”
France is not, however, prepared to welcome the Russian flag. President Emmanuel Macron said in September that Russia has no place at the Games due to war crimes committed during its ongoing war in Ukraine. While the International Olympic Committee will ultimately decide, Macron wants Russian athletes to compete under the Russian Olympic Committee flag instead.
“Definitely there is impact on political side, but what is really important for me to protect and to preserve is the fact that the decisions are made from the sport movement,” Estanguet said.
The 2024 Summer Games begin on Friday, July 26.
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Climate crisis can't be hijacked by global competitions: Justin Vaisse
The war in Ukraine has so fundamentally redirected the course of world affairs that UN Secretary-General António Guterres says little else can be resolved globally before the fighting stops.
That doesn’t stop self-described “eternal optimist” Justin Vaisse from giving it his best shot. The historian took on a mandate from French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 to organize the Paris Peace Forum, a venue to mend the strained and broken aspects of the multilateral system.
GZERO’s Tony Maciulis caught up with him on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where they discussed his plans for the upcoming forum in November, plus his views on Ukraine and bridging ties with the Global South.
Watch more interviews from the UN General Assembly from Global Stage.
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Violent protests in France keep Macron at home
French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to cancel a state visit to Germany on Sunday – which would have been the first such event in 23 years – as riots continued across France. The now out-of-control situation was sparked by the June 27 killing of a young Arab man by a cop at a traffic stop in a Parisian suburb.
Several nights of riots and looting have led to thousands of arrests. But on Saturday night, just after the slain youth’s funeral, the violence intensified. The home of a suburban mayor south of Paris was targeted, and the mayor’s wife and children suffered injuries as they attempted to flee. Nationwide, tens of thousands of cops have been deployed to violent hotspots.
Macron is no stranger to mass protests, having faced the Yellow Vest protests over fuel taxes that paralyzed the country in 2018 and 2019. But there are several reasons why this latest explosion of public anger over racial injustice poses a deeper challenge for the president. First, it comes just months after nationwide demonstrations over a very unpopular pension reform that tanked Macron’s popularity.
What’s more, this current unrest – at the nexus of race, immigration, and law enforcement – provides the perfect fodder for the far-right, most notably Marine Le Pen of the National Rally (the second most popular party in the country), to cast the government as idle in the face of lawlessness and unchecked migration, two issues that really rile up the French electorate. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the far-left – led by Jean-Luc Melenchon – has railed hard against what they say is endemic racist policing.
We’ve said it before, but this unraveling again highlights the inherent difficulty of Macron’s attempt to intensely cling to the political center, bringing into renewed focus the adage that if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing … nobody.
French outrage over teenager shot dead by cops
On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron held a crisis meeting of his government after a second night of clashes between protesters and cops over the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old in Nanterre. The teenager, who was reportedly from a family of Algerian origin, was killed during a traffic stop on Tuesday morning. At least 150 people were arrested overnight as the protests spread from Paris to other cities, with vehicles set ablaze and tear gas fired.
The teenager’s death has struck a chord with part of the French public, who are increasingly frustrated by instances of alleged police brutality and racial profiling.
In the banlieues, low-income housing projects located outside cities, non-white residents have long complained about police harassment. A 2017 report by the French human rights ombudsman found that “young men perceived to be Black or Arab” were 20 times more likely to be stopped compared to the rest of the population. In 2021, three young men won the country's first racial discrimination lawsuit against cops over being targeted for ID checks in Paris when they were students. Police unions say such measures are necessary to prevent crime and deny any racial bias.
"J’ai mal à ma France" (“I hurt for my France”), tweeted Kylian Mbappé, born to a Cameroonian dad and an Algerian mom and who grew up in a banlieue before he became a soccer superstar for PSG and the French national team.
This could all become more than a headache for Macron. Right-wing and far-right politicians are already calling for him a declare a state of emergency to stop the riots, which they say the left is making worse by playing the race card. If the unrest continues, the president will face a delicate balancing act between justice for the victim and order on the streets, and it’ll hamper Macron’s ability to move on from the public rage against his controversial pension reforms earlier this year.Most of the world prefers not to choose
As the US-China rivalry deepens, many countries – including close US allies – have made it clear that they don’t want to be forced to choose between the world’s two largest economies. They are engaging in an increasingly delicate dance to try and maintain constructive relations with both.
This tricky balancing act has been particularly hard for European heavyweights, like Germany and France, that share values and many interests with Washington, but also benefit greatly from economic integration with China.
While France’s Emmanuel Macron has taken a more combative approach, saying recently that it would be “a trap for Europe” to get embroiled in crises “that aren’t ours,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz vigorously defended a recent trip to Beijing with a host of German business leaders, writing that “we don’t want to decouple from China.” (It’s no wonder that Berlin won't roll over on this issue considering that German exports to China have tripled since 2000.)
And what about countries in the Global South that are being wooed by both the US and China? Many countries across South America, Africa, and Central and South Asia benefit from loans and infrastructure investment under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative but also rely on the US for security guarantees and aid. Since Beijing expanded its Belt and Road Initiative to Latin America in 2017, the US has tried to warn that it is a Trojan Horse aimed at increasing China’s regional clout, but Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and others have still tried to play both sides.
For now, this approach seems to be working, but if tensions over Taiwan ratchet up, it could get harder for US allies to continue fence-sitting.
Macron’s Taiwan remarks are a big win for China
Emmanuel Macron is in the news again, and this time it’s not because he’s trying to get French people to work longer.
France’s president set off a firestorm last week after he said Europe should stay out of any conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan and called for Europe to lessen its dependence on the US … at the same time as he was in Beijing trying to increase Europe's dependence on China.
Much like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s trip to China a few months ago, the purpose of Macron’s three-day visit was two-fold: (1) to urge Chinese President Xi Jinping to help end the war in Ukraine and (2) to deepen commercial ties between Europe and China. Business as usual for a European leader these days.
Macron’s delegation included Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, as well as some 50 business leaders. Xi rolled out the red carpet for the French leader (not so for von der Leyen), complete with a state banquet, a military parade, and a mob of cheering students.
Everything was going swimmingly … until Macron opened his mouth.
“We don’t want to get involved in a bloc vs. bloc logic,” he stated to reporters from Les Echos and Politico aboard a flight between Beijing and Guangzhou. Rather than become a “vassal” of the US, he said, Europe should aim to become a “third superpower” independent of both Beijing and Washington, warning Europeans against getting “caught up in crises that are not ours” such as Taiwan.
Much like his repeated attempts to engage Vladimir Putin riled many in the US and Ukraine, these comments prompted sharp criticism on both sides of the Atlantic.
For starters, openly complaining about excessive dependence on the US and claiming cross-strait stability isn’t a core European interest when Europe relies so heavily on America to address crises like Ukraine, which concerns Europe much more than the US, is hypocritical. As India’s foreign minister said last year: "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems."
To be blunt, if it weren’t for US leadership, intelligence, and weapons, the Russians would be sipping tea in Lviv. Should Europe be powerful enough to stand up to Russia and compete with China on its own? Absolutely. But the “strategic autonomy” Macron has strived for since 2017 can’t simply be talked into existence. It must be earned in the physical world through costly policy changes Europe doesn’t seem able or willing to push through.
Moreover, saying that Europeans should avoid falling in with “the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction” on Taiwan presumes the US will be the aggressor while China will simply be reacting. In reality, a conflict over Taiwan would more likely be precipitated by Beijing’s more aggressive actions to change the island’s status quo by force, against the wishes of the Taiwanese people (who don’t seem to possess any agency in Macron’s worldview).
I can’t imagine any other G7 leader acting the way Macron did, especially in today’s geopolitical environment. The timing couldn’t have been worse, happening just as Beijing was launching military exercises off Taiwan in response to President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California just days earlier.
And for what? He handed Xi a PR win, failed to extract any concessions or promises on Ukraine, undermined intra-European and trans-Atlantic unity on China, gave fodder to American isolationists like Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley, and weakened Western deterrence of Chinese aggression against Taiwan. But at least we're not talking about his pension reform.
All this is not to say France, an important NATO ally, nuclear power, and permanent UN Security Council member, doesn’t have every right – and plenty of reasons – to express concerns about US leadership. The Biden administration’s handling of the AUKUS submarine snub was an embarrassment and did lasting damage to the bilateral relationship. Trump’s “America First” treatment of US allies no doubt scarred the Elysée Palace, too, sowing the initial seeds of mistrust and prompting Macron to seek out alternatives to a “brain dead” NATO.
But you’d think that Washington’s muscular response to the Russian invasion, which by Macron’s own admission was an “electroshock” for the trans-Atlantic alliance, would have assuaged his fears. Think again. Partly, that’s a logical response to the prospect of another Trump presidency. But in part it’s structural, born of a deep-seated ambivalence toward the US and ambition to be a geopolitical “balancing power” that has characterized French foreign policy since Charles de Gaulle. Plus ça change …
The point is that France should air its grievances – however legitimate – with the United States and fellow allies. Even if he said nothing new, Macron voicing them publicly while in China, given the asymmetry of the US-France relationship, the intensifying strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, and America’s outsized role in Ukraine’s defense, reflects poor judgment.
Whether it leads to a broader rift in the trans-Atlantic alliance is an open question, but two things are clear from this episode.
First, while there is near-total alignment between the US and its allies on the need to decouple economically from Russia, the same cannot be said about decoupling from China. As Beijing has long suspected, economic diplomacy can be a pretty effective way to buy off at least some of Washington’s friends.
Second, China is decisively leaning into the role of global peacemaker, and it is finding lots of takers. Coming on the back of the proposed 12-point framework for peace in Ukraine and the Beijing-brokered détente between the hitherto irreconcilable Iran and Saudi Arabia, the momentum of its diplomatic push is undeniable.
Xi’s got to be feeling pretty good about himself these days.
Backlash from Macron's China visit
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Happy Monday. It's Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off our week. And I want to talk a little bit about French President Emmanuel Macron, who is in the news again this week and not for demonstrations at home. Not for trying to change the pension age from 62 to 64, I mean that and the backlash has been dominating international coverage of the French president for weeks now. But this time around, it's what he's saying on the international stage.
Specifically, Macron has just completed a trip to China with Ursula von der Leyen and brought a whole bunch of business leaders with him. Nothing shocking about that. Olaf Scholz did the same a few months ago when he went to Beijing. Was talking about Xi Jinping playing more of a role on the Russia, Ukraine crisis. There, that is a bit different than what we've seen from other leaders. It was in the G-20 in Bali when Macron went off-piste and basically said, "Hey, we'd love to have Xi Jinping engaged directly in leading diplomacy, responding to the Russian invasion." The Americans were skeptical, a number of other Western leaders a little concerned that Macron had made those statements without talking to them about it but didn't really go anywhere.
This time around, it's both a call for Europe to be less dependent on the United States, at the same time that France is in Beijing trying to increase their dependence on China, saying that the EU should not be involved in conflicts where it is not a direct party and mentioning Taiwan specifically. While of course the United States is leading military support on Ukraine, much more important to the Europeans than it is to the US. And also pushing for much more bilateral China, French engagement of Russia, Ukraine, which isn't going anywhere, at least not right now.
The response to all of that has been a level of mistrust. I mean frankly this was, until Macron started talking about the trip, was going very well. He was treated extremely well by the Chinese Government. He was welcomed. It was very much a red carpet treatment. He had lots of Chinese students that were cheering for him, displaying a lot of enthusiasm. Some of which was ginned up by the Chinese Government, but some of which might well have just been spontaneous. And the coverage, the press coverage, the social media coverage was very positive.
Macron then decided that he was going to push a lot of criticism of the United States, and of course that, especially in China itself, given the nature of the US, China relationship was not responded well to at all. It is probably the worst bilateral relationship in the G-7. It's the one leader that Biden doesn't particularly trust. It is quite probably mutual. There's lots of reasons for it. I mean in part, of course, the French Government has always had a more independent view of its own leadership role, and concerns about US exceptionalism, US hypocrisy, and France wanting an out sized role given their permanent seat, for example, at the Security Council, as well as given their historical imperial roles internationally.
Also, at the beginning of the Biden administration, the AUKUS debacle where the French were displaced by the US and the UK for multi-billion-dollar submarine deals, and the French found out about it on CNN, and you may remember the French withdrew their ambassador at that point. This is the kind of flap that just really shouldn't have happened, and in part because France wasn't really trusted and because Kurt Campbell, who was sort of the Asia czar in the White House, in the National Security Council, didn't see fit to talk to the French about it, basically thought that they were irrelevant to the Asian theater. And Anthony Blinken, the secretary of state, who speaks French fluently and has a quite good relationship with his French interlocutors, wasn't really driving Asia policy and didn't assert himself as much as he probably should have. So an embarrassment for the US, France relationship. Biden apologized about it. Hoping that all of this was fixed, but not really.
Now, the fact that French President Macron had said that NATO was brain dead back before the Russian invasion in his talk of strategic autonomy, well, that of course is something that does stick in everyone's popular consciousness. But after the Russian invasion, of course NATO became much more relevant. And indeed, Macron said it was like an electroshock for NATO at the time. And so there was a hope that that level of coordination, the defense coordination, the economic coordination, remember the EU unanimously voted to allow Ukraine membership process, unanimously has supported 10 rounds of sanctions, soon to be 11, France playing a leadership role just like everyone else. So there really was a hope that Macron's personal aspirations and ambitions for broader leadership, as well as his irritation and peak at the United States was something that had been largely assuaged. What we're seeing right now is that really is not the case and is not the case in particular as US, China relations are getting a lot worse.
One other point that I would raise here is the fact that while there is and remains very strong alignment between the United States and pretty much all of its allies on Russia, on a full decoupling of Russia economically, and strong punishment of Russia on the international stage, not something that Global South agrees with at all. That when it comes to China, the United States increasingly sees China as a hostile national security threat that should extend to significant strategic economic interactions. On critical minerals for example, on semiconductors, for example, other places. That is not met with anywhere near the same level of agreement among US allies. Almost all US allies want strong security relations with the US, but also want strong economic relations with China. Especially as China's about to become the largest economy in the world. And in that regard, the Germans, the French, and others are closer to the US private sector orientation towards China, most of them, than they are to the US Government, Democrats or Republicans.
But despite that tension, it hasn't been put on public display the way we've seen from Macron over the last 48 hours. That's unfortunate and will surely lead to backlash. Whether it leads to a broader rift in the transatlantic relationship is an open question. Let's see how the Germans, how the Italians in particular respond to Macron on this issue.
That's it for me, I'll talk to you all real soon.