France rejects the new colonialism and new imperialism – but also vassalage and defeatism. What we have achieved for France and in Europe is a step in the right direction. Greater strategic autonomy, less dependence on the US and China.”
The comments came as EU leaders – torn between the needs to defend international law and to keep the US onboard as a vital economic partner and defence ally in Ukraine and beyond – struggle to agree a coordinated response to Washington’s actions.
While neither president said so directly, both were widely presumed to be referring to last weekend’s US raid on Caracas and capture of the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, and to Trump’s repeatedly stated aim of taking control of Greenland.
The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said on Thursday that the bloc was weighing its response if US plans to acquire Greenland materialise. “The messages we hear are extremely concerning,” she said. “If this is a real threat ... then what would be our response?”
Nato ambassadors in Brussels also held a discussion about the Arctic territory, where they reportedly agreed the alliance should strengthen Arctic security. “No drama,” a senior Nato diplomat told Reuters. “Lots of agreement that Nato needs to accelerate its development of [a] stronger deterrence presence in the region.”
The presidents of France and Germany have sharply condemned US foreign policy under Donald Trump, saying respectively that Washington was “breaking free from international rules” and the world risked turning into a “robber’s den”.
In unusually strong and apparently uncoordinated remarks, Emmanuel Macron and Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned the postwar rules-based international order could soon disintegrate.
“The US is an established power, but one that is gradually turning away from some of its allies and breaking free from the international rules that it was until recently promoting,” Macron told France’s diplomatic corps at the Élysée Palace on Thursday.
“Multilateral institutions are functioning less and less effectively,” the French president said. “We are living in a world of great powers, with a real temptation to divide up the world.”
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, said the erosion of the world order had already reached an advanced stage.
Steinmeier, speaking on Wednesday night at a symposium in Berlin to mark his 70th birthday, said global democracy was at risk. The former German foreign minister said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a watershed, but subsequent US behaviour marked a second “epochal rupture”.
Nicolas Maduro is hardly the first leader to be taken out by the US.
Salvador Allende in Chile,
João Goulart in Brazil and
Manuel Noriega in Panama: their careers are vastly different but they all ended courtesy of Washington.
In 2005, one Harvard paper argued: “In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the US government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times.
That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century.”
ends
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