Same place, different atmosphere: received as a friend in June in Paris, the American Secretary of State Antony Blinken, renowned Francophile, is back on Tuesday but the welcome is more distant after the unprecedented crisis between France and the United States . Arrived Monday evening for two days of meetings at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the head of diplomacy of the world’s leading power is due to meet his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian in the early morning and then be received by an adviser to President Emmanuel Macron.
Objective: “to identify the stages” to “allow a restoration of confidence”, one explains on the French side, while warning that “the exit from the crisis will take time and will require action”. Washington, which publicly made amends after the Australian submarine crisis, says nothing else. It must be said that with the announcement of the AUKUS partnership between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, Joe Biden indirectly caused the cancellation of a $ 56 billion armaments contract between Canberra and Paris.
It took a phone call between Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, after a week of intense tension, to initiate a certain appeasement. The tenant of the White House admitted that the United States could have better communicated with its long-time ally. And the two heads of state have launched a “process of in-depth consultations”.
Antony Blinken’s visit to Paris should thus mark a stage in this process before a Macron-Biden tête-à-tête at the end of October in Europe. But the reunion promises to be rather cold. Blinken is not expected to meet with Macron and there will not even be a joint press conference with Jean-Yves Le Drian. We are far from the “welcome home” launched last June by Le Drian to a perfectly French-speaking Blinken, who lived in the French capital all his adolescence and considers France as his “second homeland”.
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