The European Union gave France a verbal caress on Monday in the midst of a crisis with the United States. Displaced to New York, where the United Nations General Assembly begins on Tuesday, the main leaders of Brussels asked Washington for explanations and denounced their “lack of loyalty” after the military alliance sealed last week with Australia and the United Kingdom. United to stop China in the Indo-Pacific and that excludes the EU. The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, even questioned the will of the US president, Joe Biden, to heal the wounds caused in transatlantic ties by his predecessor, Donald Trump.
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“America is back,” said Biden and his Administration after winning the elections, when a halo of optimism swept through the Western world and augured a return to multilateralism. “I want all of Europe to know that the United States is there,” he also said in Brussels, during his visit in June. But all of this came before the chaotic departure of troops from Afghanistan and the recent pact, dubbed AUKUS, which has angered France because it breaks a multimillion-dollar contract to sell submarines to Australia, which will instead buy nuclear-powered submersibles. to the United States and the United Kingdom.
On that “America is back” Charles Michel has expressed his doubts this Monday from New York. “This was the historic message sent by this new administration and now we have questions. What does it mean that America is back? America in the United States or elsewhere? We don’t know, ”Michel said, according to the agencies. With Trump, he added, “at least it was really clear – from the tone, the content, the language – that the EU was not in his opinion a useful partner, a useful ally.” Michel assured that in this case “a clear lack of transparency and loyalty” has been lacking, and asked to reinforce the “capacity for action” of the community bloc.
This call for a greater geopolitical presence of the EU in a world doomed to bipolarity between China and the United States follows in the wake of the State of the Union speech delivered last week by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “What we need is the European Defense Union,” said the German in her speech. “Europe can – and clearly must – be able and willing to do more for itself.”
On Monday Von der Leyen measured the fire and power of his words of support (to Paris) and protest (against Washington) in an interview with CNN. “There are many open questions that have to be answered,” he said before the questions of the renowned presenter Christiane Amanpour. “One of our Member States has been treated in a way that is not acceptable, so we want to know what happened and why, and clarify this first before continuing as if nothing had happened.”
Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, also on a trip to New York, met face-to-face on Monday afternoon with the Australian Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, to whom he conveyed his concern “for the lack of prior consultations “on the breaking of the contract with France and the signing of the new AUKUS alliance and regretted” that this association excludes European partners, “according to a statement issued by the head of European diplomacy. “The current challenges to stability in the region require greater cooperation and coordination among like-minded partners,” the note adds. Both leaders pledged to “work to overcome the challenges created by recent events.”
Borrell also participated in an informal meeting of the EU’s foreign ministers, which is usually held annually on the margins of the UN General Assembly. And although no European leader went as far as the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who has accused the United States and Australia of stabbing his country in the back these days, the head of diplomacy did. He assured that the leaders of the community bloc have “expressed a clear solidarity with France,” according to the agencies.
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