French President Emmanuel Macron struck a serious note on Friday in his address to a Shangri-La security forum in Singapore, in which he hit on some of the biggest crises spanning the globe and appeared to issue an indirect warning to President Donald Trump and China.
“I will be clear, France is a friend and an ally of the United States,” Macron said. “And [France] is a friend, and we do cooperate – even if sometimes we disagree and compete – with China.”
“The main risk today is the division of two super-powers,” he warned.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron gives the keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue Summit in Singapore on May 30, 2025. (Photo by LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images)
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Macron’s speech was a warning to the U.S. and China that if they force nations to choose sides as tensions remain heightened following Trump’s triple-digit tariff threat, such a move would “kill the global order.”
“We will destroy methodically, all the institutions we created after the Second World War in order to preserve peace and to have cooperation on health, on climate, on human rights and so on,” he added.
“We are neither China nor the U.S., we don’t want to depend on any of them,” he said. “We want to cooperate. But we don’t want to be instructed on a daily basis what is allowed, what is not allowed and how our life will change because of the decision of a single person.”
But the French president didn’t limit his speech to trade concerns, and chided China for aiding Russia amid its illegal invasion of Ukraine, and its refusal to play a part in stopping North Korea from sending troops to fight in the war for Moscow.
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping hold an informal meeting at Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing on May 16, 2024. (Mikhail Kostiantyn Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images)
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“If China doesn’t want NATO being involved in Southeast Asia or in Asia, they should prevent DPRK to be engaged on European soil,” Macron said in reference to the formal name of North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Ultimately, he warned that every conflict that is plaguing European, American, Middle Eastern and Asian partnerships — including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — are interconnected and there is a “big risk” that the universal principles which connect these conflicts have been forgotten.
“If we consider that Russia could be allowed to take a part of the territory of Ukraine without any restriction, without any constraint, without any reaction of the global order…what could happen in Taiwan? What would you do the day something happened in [the] Philippines?” the French president asked.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (R) reacts as France’s President Emmanuel Macron gives the keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue Summit in Singapore on May 30, 2025. (by MOHD RASFAN/AFP via Getty Images)
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“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, no double standard,” Macron said in a counterargument to claims that the war in Ukraine is a European issue.
This extended to the war in Gaza, and Macron argued that giving Israel “a free pass” for its military operations in Gaza that have led to a humanitarian crisis could “kill our own credibility in the rest of the world.”
