I suppose when you're France and Germany, and you have stagnant economies and large arms-manufacturing industries, and your best customer gets himself regime-changed and is passing the time in an undisclosed location, then you would be anxious to find new customers for your products.
Which explains why the EU is lifting the arms embargo on China, despite (or perhaps because of?) a heated U.S. response. America has no desire to see the Chinese military get any better than it is already; neither do Japan or Taiwan.
On the other hand, the Chinese weapons industry has been getting much better on its own in the past few years, and in any event China has been buying significant weaponry from Israel. Israeli firms may well lose market share to the French and Germans, which is unfortunate, but I wonder whether the weapons embargo has not been counterproductive, from an American standpoint. Without it, perhaps the Chinese would have had less incentive to develop their own military technology. But I don't know enough to say yes or no.
From a purely diplomatic standpoint, France seems intent on aligning the E.U. with China, which would necessarily put them against the United States in some fashion. This would particularly be true if the Taiwan issue heated up enough to lead to a major crisis. I don't know what the French are thinking, but their foreign policy has been remarkably shortsighted for a long time now. What exactly are they trying to acccomplish by permanently angering the world's greatest power?
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