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French president takes China rhetoric off the table in low-key meeting with US Secretary of State Pompeo
- Macron is among world leaders to congratulate Joe Biden on winning US election but meets key Trump administration member on post-election tour
- Global security and terrorism among subjects discussed as Macron faces radical Islamists in his own country
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French President Emmanuel Macron has brushed aside the need to follow the United States’ approach to China, leaving the visiting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo focusing largely on counterterrorism during their meeting on Monday.
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Macron addressed China in a wide-ranging interview in a French publication shortly before the key member of US President Donald Trump’s administration visited France.
Macron told Le Grand Continent that Europe and the US “have a different world view” adding: “It is therefore not tenable that our international policy should be dependent on [the US] or be trailing behind it. And what I am saying is even truer for China.”
Referring to the Belt and Road Initiative, which the US has derided as a neocolonial project of China’s, Macron said: “You are right to say that the merit of the New Silk Roads is that it is a very powerful geopolitical concept. That is a fact. And it is also a testimony of the vitality of a nation and its fortitude.”
France is the only European stop on Pompeo’s seven-nation tour taken soon after the US election. Macron and other world leaders have congratulated Democrat Joe Biden on his presidential victory, a result that Trump has been contesting.
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