- Tuesday, February 25, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
FRENCH president Emmanuel Macron on Saturday (30) revealed his plan to beef up ties with India and Indonesia, sources in the French presidency said, after Paris experienced a bitter experience of getting locked out of a defence pact between the US, the UK and Australia.
According to a report by AFP, France has sought solace in leading Asian powers for deeper strategic ties in the Pacific region after losing a major submarine deal with Australia, which joined the AUKUS (Australia, UK, US) alliance to counter China.
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Macron met his Indonesian counterpart Joko Widodo and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the just-concluded G20 summit in Rome, Italy, to focus on the growing economic clout of the strategic region and the US-China rivalry.
“There was a common willingness to go further with the Indo-Pacific strategy,” the French camp said after talks with Modi. A follow-up meeting was also set to take place next week to work out a joint agenda.
According to the French presidency, France and India, which first defined an Indo-Pacific strategy in 2018, found “a great convergence … on the guiding principles of our actions in the Indo-Pacific: trust, independence and unity”.
Macron met the leadership of another Asian nation – South Korea – and with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in, the former “agreed to work together to make the Indo-Pacific an area of stability and prosperity”, AFP added.
Paris considers itself a power in the Pacific owing to its possessions such as French Polynesia and New Caledonia and aims to wield a greater influence in the region, particularly through the Southeast Asian region, many parts of which it had ruled in the colonial era.
Macron’s talks with Widodo came ahead of French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian’s visit to Jakarta. Indonesia took over the G20 presidency after Italy while France will assume the European Union presidency in 2022.
