Emmanuel Macron “refuses to enter into the logic of blocs” and asks Europe not to follow the US or China on the Taiwan issue, in an interview with the newspaper Les Echos.

“The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans should follow” on the issue of Taiwan “and adapt to the American pace or the Chinese overreaction”, states the French president in the interview published today and given on Friday during of his visit to China and prior to the start of Chinese military drills encircling Taiwan.

“Our priority is not to adapt to the agenda of others in all regions of the world,” he says. “Why should we tune in to the pace chosen by others? At the given moment we must ask ourselves the question of our own interest, knowing that we do not want to enter into the logic of blocs”.

The French president discussed the issue of Taiwan with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and, as the French Presidency announced, “the discussion was dense and frank”, while Emmanuel Macron drew attention to the accumulation of tensions in the region, “which could lead to a serious accident.”

In his interview, the president of France argues that Europe must fight for strategic autonomy and warns of the intensification of the conflict between the two poles represented by the United States and China and of the risk that “there is no longer either time or the means to finance this strategic autonomy’. “We will become vassals, while we can be the third pole if we have a few years to build it,” he says.

“The paradox would be, at the moment when we are putting in place the elements of a real European strategic autonomy, to try to follow American policy out of some panic reflex”, warns Emmanuel Macron who expresses satisfaction that he “won the ideological battle” in the European Union: for five years, we have been saying that European sovereignty does not exist.”

France’s president urges strengthening European defense and speeding up the battle for nuclear and renewable energy in Europe.