“The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No,” Macron said.
“The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he added.
The French president’s comments unleashed a flurry of reactions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called them “embarrassing” and “disgraceful,” while Norbert Röttgen, a German Christian Democrat MP and former head of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, tweeted that Macron had “managed to turn his China trip into a PR coup for [Chinese President Xi Jinping] and a foreign policy disaster for Europe.”
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