Macron Stuns China With Rare, Blunt National Security Warning

Back Off or NATO Moves East

Macron. Macron. Macron.

His arc, since February 27, 2024—when he stirred the Biden-Scholz heartache by saying he would not rule out sending European troops to defend Ukraine—has been breathtakingly stunning. It was the kind of moment that realigns fault lines, not just headlines. Why he remained in hiding mode in the first year of the war—and what snapped him out—I genuinely couldn’t tell you. And I’ve tried.

French presidents are enigmatic like that. Sometimes it's legacy, sometimes it's ego, sometimes it's the ghost of de Gaulle whispering through the walls of the Élysée.

But what’s the point in going that far back? What matters is this: Macron snapped out eight months before the U.S. presidential election. Since then, at every possible fork—military, diplomatic, symbolic—he has stepped in.

Either him or the British prime minister—unofficial Western co-captains.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

I find no reasons to complain, whatsoever.

Not having former Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a huge, immense problem for the allies. The man wasn’t just a diplomat—he was the strategic glue. Every time things threatened to fall apart in the transatlantic response to Ukraine, Blinken showed up with quiet force, clean signals, and just enough strategic ambiguity to keep China at bay. He was the adult in the room without ever saying so.

When the new administration took over in the United States, I kept warily scanning the lineup to see who might fill the oversized shoes Blinken left behind. So far? Nobody. It’s still too early to make a clear-cut assessment of Marco Rubio. But just the structural design of the MAGA administration—its contempt for multilateralism, its chaos-as-a-feature mindset—makes Rubio’s job not just difficult, but borderline impossible. He’s boxed in. He cannot rebuild Blinken’s strategic position in the alliance, especially the part that subtly but firmly warned China to keep its nose out of the war.

The one man I thought might—might—be able to take on that arduous task was German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. It won’t be anyone from the Trump administration. It can’t be someone from the UK either—not because of lack of talent, but because the UK already has a complicated history with China. And on top of that, you need someone who can hold together Europe’s fragile-but-real alignment on China, while also stopping the U.S. from drifting too far off axis. So it has to be someone from Europe. Someone with stature and political mass. A figure visible enough to be taken seriously in Beijing, yet one rung below a head of state—less threatening, more maneuverable. Pistorius fit that bill. He had credibility. He had momentum. He had war-time clarity.

But Macron just said: Don’t bother. I’ll do it myself.