French President Emmanuel Macron is in Beijing this week, assisting America’s greatest geopolitical adversary. It’s more proof that although he’s a darling of the Western media, Macron’s liberal internationalism is paper-thin.
To be fair to Macron, his efforts to further integrate the European Union, his support for a global effort to reduce carbon emissions, and his robust support for NATO (although French defense spending, as with most of Europe, remains too low) do reflect liberal internationalism in action. But that’s where the nominal positives end and where the bad begins.
Let’s start with China.
Capping off his Beijing adventure, Macron sipped fine wines with Chinese President Xi Jinping and agreed to $15 billion in new trade deals. Chinese state media loved it. The Global Times editorialized with glee about a new age of Sino-French cooperation beyond America. But from the perspective of liberal order, Macron’s is a deal with the devil. Xi, after all, is determined to fundamentally reshape international order away from the American umbrella of free trade and the rule of law. Instead, Xi wants to impose an order of feudal mercantilism on the world: one in which foreign nations bow to Beijing’s diktats in return for trade scraps (such as the one Macron just signed). The French president said he has China’s support on climate change action, but that’s a lie sustained by deceptive Chinese statistics.
To be clear, this is not multilateralism. It’s an homage to authoritarianism. Xi’s order is the forensic antithesis of the liberal internationalism that Macron pretends to adore.
Sadly, Macron’s betrayal of liberal internationalism reaches beyond China.
On Russia, Macron is offering a new openness to rapprochement, including with regards to European Union sanctions on Vladimir Putin. This, even though Russia recently spread a high-concentrated nerve agent around rural British towns, and while Russia retains its Ukrainian occupation. Such deference to Putin puts Macron in the same camp as the Italian far-right he claims to detest. And as proven by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s words in his summer phone call with Trump, Macron is also a key obstacle to Ukraine’s ability to more effectively negotiate with Russia.
Ultimately, when it comes to liberal internationalism at least, Macron talks a far better game than he walks.
