With the arrival in office of the new American President Joe Biden, which heralds a new beginning in the United States’ foreign policy, what changes do you expect to see in the European Union’s relations with the US?
I don’t expect much to change in terms of our actual relationship and trade with the US. Those who have devoted so much energy to defending Biden’s election will have a hard time explaining what benefits the EU and the European nations will derive from it. The US’s foreign policy decisions are made to suit their domestic policy. It has always put its national interest first and resorted to protectionism when its businesses or privileges are at risk. I think we will always have to fight against the extraterritoriality of US law, the monopolies of GAFAM, and the unilateral constraints imposed on our companies. And I fear that President Biden will break away from an idea developed by Donald Trump that I found quite positive, namely that the United States should stop behaving like an empire and start behaving like a nation again.

What do you think of the European Union’s foreign policy? Is it doing too much or too little?
I’m concerned to be witnessing the retreat of the European Union in most major international debates. What does the EU have to say about Turkish aggression, the expansion of the Silk Routes, the chaos that has settled over the Near and Middle East, and the rising tensions in many African countries?

Apart from appealing to great principles and proclaiming good intentions, they are doing nothing, or next to nothing. The EU seems content to simply do business with the whole world, thereby forsaking all its political aspirations. This is a serious mistake compared to the United States, China, and Russia, who have closely bound their trade policies to power politics. In actual fact, for the rest of the world, the EU exists mainly thanks to France. World diplomacy, presence on all the oceans, seat on the Security Council, its capacity for military projection, its nuclear weapons… France’s presence in the world is unparalleled in Europe since Britain left the EU.

But it is often alone, in the Sahel for example, where Islamism threatens to destabilize countries that are key to future geopolitical and migration issues. Worse than being alone, France is smaller, narrower, and more entrenched in the EU than it would be without it. And where is the EU, what is the EU doing, and what is the EU contributing when it comes to France’s presence on the global stage, its external interventions in the Sahel, its fight against Islamic terrorism, the extraterritoriality of American law and that of China in the future, for the observance of the principle of non-interference, and the lifting of unilateral sanctions imposed on us, for the protection of its maritime domain?

How can we not be concerned when the European Court of Justice claims to apply to the French army the 2003 directive on corporate labour law? Try explaining to the men and women who are fighting in the Sahel and elsewhere to protect the whole of Europe from the Islamist threat that they must comply with the reduction in working hours and the recovery of overtime!