Macron touts ‘positive new’ Asia-Europe alliance amid US-China rivalry

SINGAPORE - French President Emmanuel Macron urged Asia and Europe to work together in a new coalition based on common principles to push back against the inevitability of being caught between global superpowers.

Singling out the China-US rivalry as the biggest risk confronting the world, the French leader said he wants to be able to cooperate with the US at the same time as compete with but not confront China – while adopting a “demanding approach” that puts France’s interests first.

In expanding on the French doctrines of “strategic autonomy” and “freedom of sovereignty” to a gathering of global leaders at a pre-eminent security forum in the Asia-Pacific, President Macron sketched out a plausible “third way” for Europe and the rest of Asia amid significant shifts in the world order and a world beset by multiple crises. 

“The time for non-alignment has undoubtedly passed, but the time for coalitions of action has come and requires that countries capable of acting together give themselves every means to do so,” Mr Macron said in his keynote address at

the 22nd Shangri-La Dialogue

on May 30. 

“Let’s build a positive new alliance between Europe and Asia, based on our common norms, on our common principles.

“Our shared responsibility is to ensure with others that our countries are not collateral victims of the imbalances linked to the choices made by the superpowers,” the leader of Europe’s second-largest economy added.

Mr Macron called upon Asian countries, particularly India, and members of the

Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership

to work together.

“Let’s work in an open way, the genuine way,” he said. “But let’s work very closely on defence, security and all the building blocks of our value chains.”

The administration of US President Donald Trump has upended longstanding US commitments to the post-Cold War order and

imposed trade tariffs

on even its closest allies since returning to office at the turn of 2025. 

Washington has also ratcheted up its hawkish efforts to contain China that have left the rest of the world reeling in the wake of its actions and China’s responses, fearing a full-fledged trade war that would crimp economic growth globally. 

For its part, China has been

engaged in dangerous skirmishes

with Philippine coast guard and navy vessels in waters in the South China Sea where it has overlapping claims with the Philippines.

“We have a challenge of revisionist countries that want to impose under the name of spheres of influence – in reality, spheres of coercion; countries that want to control areas from the fringe of Europe to the archipelagos in the South China Sea, at the exclusion of regional partners, oblivious to international law,” Mr Macron said, without making overt references to China or Russia.

Mr Macron pointed out that France is an Indo-Pacific nation as seven of its offshore territories sit in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, with a million French citizens living in this region.

In 2018, his government released an Indo-Pacific security strategy. He said that the strategy would be updated in the coming weeks.

In the past 12 months, the Russians have engaged

the support of North Korean troops

in their invasion of Ukraine, now well into its fourth year – sparking fears of a broader conflagration of the war. 

“But what’s happening with North Korea being present alongside Russia on the European side is a big question for all of us,” Mr Macron said. 

On the whole, China and North Korea are ideologically aligned, while Beijing and Moscow have referred to themselves as “friends of steel”.

“And this is why, if China doesn’t want Nato being involved in South-east Asia or in Asia, they should prevent, clearly, DPRK from being engaged on European soil,” the French leader added, referring to the abbreviation of the official name for North Korea. 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was a peacetime military alliance established in 1949 to provide collective security against the threat of expansionism posed by the former Soviet Union. 

While Russia has often cited the growth of Nato to include several former Soviet states as a reason for its invasion of Ukraine, Beijing has viewed recent talk about a possible Nato office in Tokyo as a threat and part of an attempt to encircle it.    

At the same time,

the Russian invasion of Ukraine

has sparked fears that China could well do the same with Taiwan, a self-governing territory that Beijing claims as its own to be reunified by force if necessary.

“So what is at stake in Ukraine is our common credibility to be sure that we are still able to preserve territorial integrity and sovereignty of people,” Mr Macron said.

The French President also flagged the “big risk of nuclear proliferation”, acknowledging the critical levers the US has with the Iranians at a time when tensions are fraught in the Middle East.

With Russia a nuclear power and North Korea also developing its nuclear arsenal with the assistance of China, Mr Macron warns that any type of nuclear proliferation in Iran will trigger “all sorts of justification proliferate elsewhere with the domino effect”. 

“How are regional countries threatened by the DPRK supposed to act. What can reasonably be on the mind when they owe their people, before anything else, their security in Europe and in Asia?” said Mr Macron.

“How can mid-sized countries, faced with aggressive nations, ensure that they won’t have to surrender or live in fear. But sure enough, our challenges are not only similar, they are getting increasingly intertwined,” he added. 

Mr Macron’s keynote address marked the end of a week-long swing through South-east Asia, where he shored up bilateral relationships with Vietnam and Indonesia before he arrived in Singapore on May 29.

In Singapore, Mr Macron and Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong inked on May 30 the Republic’s first comprehensive strategic partnership with a European nation.

In his keynote address at the security forum organised by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, the French President said this new Asia-Europe alliance he is proposing “feels like” Singapore’s DNA. He also left the door open for China and the US to join this coalition.

“We must show consistency where others practise a double game.

“And this is exactly my call tonight: Let’s build new coalitions of open trade, open dialogue to derisk our models, stabilise environments and new coalitions to stabilise an open and rules-based order,” he said.