Macron accuses US of ‘turning away’ from allies

PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that the United States was “breaking free from international rules” and “gradually turning away” from some of its allies.

Macron delivered his annual speech to French ambassadors at the Elysee Palace as European powers scrambling to come up with a coordinated response to US assertive foreign policy in the Western hemisphere following Washington’s capture of Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro and Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland.

“The United States is an established power, but one that is gradually turning away from some of its allies and breaking free from international rules that it was still promoting recently,” Macron told ambassadors at the Elysee Palace.

“Multilateral institutions are functioning less and less effectively,” Macron added. “We are living in a world of great powers with a real temptation to divide up the world.”

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Macron said Europe must protect its interests and urged the “consolidation” of European regulation of the tech sector.

He stressed the importance of safeguarding academic independence and hailed “the possibility of having a controlled information space where opinions can be exchanged completely freely, but where choices are not made by the algorithms of a few.”

Brussels has adopted a powerful legal arsenal aimed at reining in tech giants – namely through its Digital Markets Act (DMA) which covers competition and the Digital Services Act (DSA) on content moderation.

Washington has denounced the tech rules as an attempt to “coerce” American social media platforms into censoring viewpoints they oppose.

“The DSA and DMA are two regulations that must be defended,” Macron said.