[The European Conservative] The Shield and the Olive Branch

When it comes to the EU’s China policy, the seeming dissonance between Macron’s appeasement and von der Leyen’s hawkishness is in fact a well-rehearsed symbiosis.

Emmanuel Macron’s half-censored interview with POLITICO aboard the plane back from his state visit to Beijing was a bombshell of geopolitical gossip just when the world needed it most. As China conducted bombing raids over Taiwan and encircled the island with its navy, the French president seemed to signal that some — if not all — of Europe’s leaders will remain equidistant in the escalating Sino-American dispute over Taiwan’s status, admittedly in pursuit of some version of “strategic autonomy.” One cue to make sense of the interview harkens back some 70 years, not to World War II itself but to the oft-resurgent historiographic quarrels over France’s exact role vis-à-vis the Nazi machine in 1939–1945. Granted, the Nazi parallel ill-befits Xi Jinping’s China in most ways, but the positioning dynamics across the West prompted by China’s rise are not altogether dissimilar. While it could hardly occupy any portion of French territory even if it wished to (and with the Holocaust still dwarfing China’s policy of massively interning its Uyghur minority for now), Europe is similarly torn between appeasement and confrontation in ways that evoke just such a parallel.

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