On the US and China, Macron says the quiet part out loud

Three years after describing NATO as "brain dead," Emmanuel Macron is once again playing transatlantic irritant. After a trip to China that was heavy on business contracts and light on geopolitical wins, the French president has annoyed allies from the Baltic to the Beltway by saying Europeans should stand apart from the US on China and Taiwan or risk becoming "vassals."

This is not the first De Gaulle-style flourish from a French leader looking to steer Europe down a less Atlanticist path. What makes this different is the timing: The Ukraine war has entered its second gruelling year, the US is heading into new elections and Europe's post-Cold War dependence on Washington has never been more obvious. 

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki crowed that the US was the "foundation" of Europe's security. US Republican Senator Marco Rubio asked if Macron was speaking for Europe, throwing in a few free hits for good measure by mocking French counter-terror campaigns in the Sahel and threatening a US pivot from the Ukraine war to focus on China. 

Macron can be his own worst enemy sometimes — Ukrainians last year coined the verb "to Macron" as "worrying about a situation without doing anything." But in saying the quiet part out loud, he's raised an issue here that the US — and the rest of Europe — shouldn't ignore.

First, France isn't looking to wind back the clock to the days when China was seen as a benign partner. Nobody — and certainly not Paris, despite Macron's love-bombing of Chinese President Xi Jinping — in Europe sees "business as usual" with the country after Covid 19 and the war in Ukraine. 

The old dreams of engagement through trade have gone, replaced by continent-wide anxieties over technology transfers, anti-competitive practices and bullying of states like Lithuania over Taiwan. Chinese direct investment into Europe has slumped. A decade-old proposal for a China-EU "comprehensive agreement on investment" is effectively dead. China expert Philippe Le Corre says relations are "dire."

Where France and Germany seem to play a different tune to the US is on the speed and scope of retrenchment from the EU's top trading partner. With total trade of $87.3 billion, France's commercial relationship with China is on a different scale than Germany's $248.3 billion or US's $715.7 billion; what Berlin wants to protect as an economic priority, Paris wants to preserve as geopolitical influence. 

National champions like LVMH Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy SE and Airbus SE are seen as key to narrowing France's trade deficit and also maintaining global clout; France's presence in the Indo-Pacific has also helped it project power alongside allies in the South China Sea, where it sent a nuclear submarine in 2021.

That's why a US-led radical decoupling with China is something France and Germany are trying to resist. Memories of the Donald Trump era, when sanctions were dangled over European firms, haven't entirely disappeared. In the book "Backfire," former French Treasury official Agathe Demarais imagines how a direct US run-in with China would likely force European companies to stand by Washington and ditch Beijing: "In such a situation," she writes, "many European businesses might not be able to survive." European Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen, who travelled with Macron, made clear that strengthening the European economy and teaming up with allies around the world would help avoid it. 

Yet even here, Paris risks losing the argument with its wartime allies. French "strategic autonomy" is increasingly viewed with suspicion after failed attempts to engage Vladimir Putin onto a less bellicose path. Whereas the EU's East-West split on China once saw the East offer inroads for China investment that the West viewed nervously, the Ukraine war has changed things, with the East now more hawkish and supportive of US positions.

Yes, we've seen French fears of "vassalisation" before — Macron used the word in dealing with Trump — and we've also seen plenty of transatlantic run-ins from De Gaulle quitting NATO's integrated command to Jacques Chirac rejecting the 2003 Iraq War. But dismissing Macron's fears as hurt pride ignores the reality: Europe's economy is being left behind by the US and China and the ongoing dominance of US tech, military spending and geopolitical leadership. 

This kind of thing is exactly what keeps Europe comfortable in the role of geopolitical side-car, or free-rider. It doesn't encourage the kind of burden-sharing Republicans like Rubio want, with the US contributing more military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine than all EU member states combined.

The transatlantic relationship needs more balance. Treating the EU like an irrelevance, whether by cutting France out of AUKUS or ignoring concerns over green spending, isn't going to help. An April 4  paper from the European Council on Foreign Relations offers a few ideas: Europe could propose a "geo-economic NATO" on topics like securing 5G networks or sensitive technology; it could find more avenues of UK cooperation; and it could reopen dialogue on Europeanizing Paris's nuclear deterrent. 

Meanwhile, the US should understand that it sometimes adopts policies that feel less like the Cold War — in which Western Europe was built up as a store-front for democracy — and more like marching orders with the ominous threat of sanctions. 

War has pushed the West closer together but the seams are visible. "We still can't define our relationship with the United States," Andrew Small's book "No Limits" cites one EU official as saying. Macron is a flawed messenger, but it's a message worth heeding.

Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the European Union and France. He worked previously at Reuters and Forbes.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.