Macron hosts Pompeo after congratulating Biden

PARIS (AP):

French President Emmanuel Macron held a closed-door, low-key meeting on Monday with US President Donald Trump’s top diplomat, a delicate tiptoe around the ticklish fact that France has already recognised President-elect Joe Biden as the US election winner.

The zero fanfare welcome for US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a Trump loyalist, at the presidential Elysée Palace was in itself indicative of how Macron’s government is already looking ahead to the Biden era.

No press conferences were held, depriving journalists of an opportunity to ask Macron’s office, his Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, or Pompeo about whether they discussed their conflicting interpretations of the US election result. Unusually, Le Drian met Pompeo at the Palace rather than at his own office. Macron’s office described Pompeo’s stop as a “courtesy” visit.

Pompeo tweeted a photo of himself wearing a Stars and Stripes face mask in the meeting with “my good friend” Le Drian and said they had an “important discussion”.

“There is no challenge we cannot conquer when the US-France transatlantic relationship is strong,” he tweeted.

A US State Department statement said Pompeo discussed a range of topics with Le Drian, including the NATO alliance, stabilisation efforts for Libya and Africa’s Sahel region, promoting reform and combating extremism in Lebanon, and what the statement described as “our strong alliance in countering the Chinese Communist Party’s malign activity in Europe”. The nature of the alleged activity wasn’t detailed. They also discussed human-rights abuses in China’s western region of Xinjiang.

Still, it wasn’t clear why Pompeo came so far in the midst of the pandemic and for so long, on a three-day stop in Paris, which is largely locked down because of a surge of coronavirus cases, for such a low-visibility outcome.