Originally Posted by
Video Mixdown
It’s pretty clear that Macron was talking about a European Military organisation under the leadership of France, not the EU and not NATO. You could argue that splitting most of continental Europe away from NATO, effectively destroying it, would be warmly welcomed in Moscow and Beijing.
Under current circumstances this ain't gonn'a happen. Maybe 10 - 20 Years ago in Germany a much closer tie to France militarily would have been conceivable. Currently (and since a few years) there is rather a trend away from this even in Germany, the rest of EU anyway never having considered to attach themselves militarily to closely to France.
The relationship to the US is always a bit of an up and down. It depends to quite some extent how well the top politicians are personally getting along with the POTUS. With someone like Trump or to a much lesser extent George.W (in contrast to his dad where relationships were quite good) a strong tendency to cut ties with thee US was noticeable, whereas to some extent under Obama and definitely now Biden the relationships improved significantly (cue the military procurements in Germany -more from US: F-35, Chinook, P-8, potentially AH-1 or Apache, less together with France - MAWS killed, Tiger upgrade killed, no own developed HTH). With the aggression now seen from Russia I don't expect similar loosening of the ties in the near future unless Trump gets elected again and goes to bed with Putin. That would surely be something like a Deal- breaker.
Re getting involved in a quarrel with China over Taiwan one has to admit that the European Forces are not well equipped for a Peer level Fight Overseas. They had and to some extent still have significant Land Forces for National and NATO Defence. They have Equipment for Overseas asymmetric conflicts but they severly lack any Overseas Heavy Fighting Equipment (except from relatively powerful but short ranged Air Assets).