The White House is reportedly “annoyed” with French President Emmanuel Macron’s attempts at trying to go around Washington and strike a peace deal in Ukraine with the aid of Communist China.
Earlier this month, it was reported that on the heels of his visit with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, President Macron had tasked his top diplomats to begin work with CCP counterparts on a potential resolution to the war in Ukraine, which has wrought widespread devastation and death since the Russian invasion last February.
In an attempt to curry favour with the communist leadership in Beijing, Mr Macron signalled that the European Union should avoid “following” the United States into a potential war with China should the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launch an invasion of the independent and democratic nation of Taiwan — which the CCP claims rights over despite having never governed the island.
On Thursday of last week, President Joe Biden and Macron spoke over the phone to discuss the French leader’s trip to Guangdong and for Paris to reportedly try to assuage concerns in Washington of a cracking coalition against China, with Macron also raising eyebrows over comments about the EU needing to shift away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency — the dissolution of which being a chief aim of both China and Russia.
Yet, apparently, the call did little to ease doubts within the Biden administration, with a Bloomberg report claiming that the White House is “annoyed” with Macron for “freelancing” sensitive diplomatic issues without consulting other allies, including Washington, which has so far shied away from the idea of negotiations in favour of attempting to best Russia on the battlefeild through supplying state of the art American weapons to the Ukrainians.
The White House sources cited by Bloomberg, speaking on condition of anonymity, went on to note that Macron has a history of failed attempts at negotiating peace between Kyiv and Moscow and that his new strategy of trying to engage Beijing is likely to fail as well given the growing closeness between leaders in the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai.
China’s credibility as a potential mediator in the conflict suffered a major blow over the weekend following comments made by the CCP’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, who questioned the status of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania arguing that there was no international agreement guaranteeing their sovereignty after they broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991.
The comments came amid a discussion about the Crimean Peninsula, which was annexed in 2014 from Ukraine by Russia, both of whom claim rights to the geopolitically important area on the Black Sea. Should the Chinese envoy have acknowledged that it was wrong for Moscow to have taken Crimea, it would have undermined Beijing’s claims to Taiwan, which given that the island has never been under control by the Mainland are more tenuous than Russia’s claim to Crimea.
Nevertheless, the statements questioning the sovereignty of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — all of whom are currently members of the American-led NATO military alliance as well as the European Union — have raised questions about China’s willingness to support additional military excursions into Europe by Vladimir Putin and therefore have further undermined confidence in China’s stated intentions to play peacemaker in Ukraine.
“We’ve been always saying that we do not trust China as a mediator, as a possible mediator, it has chosen a side, it has sided with Russia,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said on Monday.
While China’s foreign ministry walked back the statement from Ambassador Lu on Monday, saying that the CCP respects the sovereignty of the post-Soviet States, there are growing calls for France to expel the Chinese diplomat from Paris, a move that would likely end any hopes Macron had in convincing Xi to join his efforts in crafting a peace deal.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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