One of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's top goals for next month’s Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima is to create a united front on issues like China and Ukraine. But finding a unified approach to dealing with Beijing’s assertiveness might have just become harder.
Kishida now faces a greater challenge following stunning remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron that the European Union should follow neither the U.S. nor China's position on Taiwan — a stance that experts say may weaken U.S.-led deterrence efforts against Beijing.
In his remarks published Sunday in Politico and the French newspaper Les Echos, Macron said that “the great risk” Europe is currently facing is that it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours,” preventing it from building what he called “strategic autonomy.”