Europe is falling apart on the world stage

There is rather more than meets the eye to Emmanuel Macron’s inept visit to Beijing last week. The immediate fallout – Xi’s flat refusal to change tack on Ukraine, and Macron’s subsequent insistence that France was not beholden to the US or for that matter over-concerned with what China might do in Taiwan – looks like a stinging national rebuff to France and a face-saving retreat by Paris to curry favour with China. And so it is. But it goes further. There is a strong EU dimension to this whole debacle: what it really shows is the increasing weakness and disunity of Europe when it tries its hand at power projection on the world stage.

The important point is that the negotiations with Xi were not a purely French affair, but also very much an EU operation. Macron did not go to Beijing alone: he was accompanied by Ursula von der Leyen, who fairly explicitly added Europe’s weight to the unsuccessful request to Xi to abandon his covert support for Russia. Furthermore,