The French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has given a very frank interview to the New York Times. It is principally about tensions between Paris and Washington post-Aukus, but it also shows why Anglo-French relations are, sadly, only going to get worse.
The UK accepts, as Australia does, that balancing China is going to require US leadership. France thinks its interests are very different. Le Maire tells the paper that, ‘The United States wants to confront China. The European Union wants to engage China’. He thinks the key challenge for the EU now is to become ‘independent from the United States, able to defend its own interests, whether economic or strategic interests.’ (Safe to say, the Baltic states — to name just three — wouldn’t regard this as the EU’s big challenge. They still emphatically prefer a US security guarantee to a European one).
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