Macron rejects ‘confrontation’ as he relaunches Asia strategy

Macron rejects ‘confrontation’ as he relaunches Asia strategy

“We don’t believe in hegemony, we don’t believe in confrontation, we believe in stability,” Macron said.

Macron said a coordinated response was needed to tackle the overlapping crises facing the international community — from climate change to economic turmoil triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Our Indo-Pacific strategy is how to provide dynamic balance in this environment,” he said.

“How to provide precisely a sort of stability and equilibrium which could not be the hegemony of one of those, could not be the confrontation of the two major powers.”

The Indo-Pacific Strategy doesn’t sound as innocent as Macron makes it out to be:

The new US Indo-Pacific Strategy document released in February has two interesting components, one overt and one covert. The document overtly declares the US is an “Indo-Pacific power.” Covertly, its aim is to “tighten the noose around China.” Arguably, minus the military might, China’s nearly a decade-long “Belt and Road Initiative” cannot be perceived as a grand national strategy aimed at controlling Eurasia or the Asia Pacific or any region for that matter. Yet the BRI is mythologized into such a geostrategic game-changer that it has rattled the US and its allies in the Asia Pacific. The BRI, at best, is nothing more than a mere geopolitical overland and maritime “chessboard” based on trade and investment.

BRI and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ Strategy: Geopolitical vs. Geostrategic

Sergey Lavrov: “Staged incidents as the Western approach to doing politics”

Today, the Russian Armed Forces, together with the self-defence units of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, are delivering on the objectives of the special military operation with great resolve to put an end to the outrageous discrimination and genocide of the Russian people and eliminate direct threats to the security of the Russian Federation that the United States and its satellites have been creating on Ukrainian territory for years. While losing on the battlefield, the Ukrainian regime and its Western patrons have descended to staging bloody incidents to demonise our country in the eyes of the international community. We have already seen Bucha, Mariupol, Kramatorsk, and Kremenchug. The Russian Defence Ministry has been regularly issuing warnings, with facts in hand, about upcoming staged incidents and fakes.

Sergey Lavrov: “Staged incidents as the Western approach to doing politics”