PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron will travel to Southeast Asia to pitch France and Europe as reliable partners with "no strings attached" as the US and China use more aggressive ways to gain influence in the region , officials said. Macron is set to arrive in Hanoi on Sunday (May 25), the first trip to Vietnam by a French president in nearly a decade, move on to Indonesia and finish up in Singapore, where he will speak at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia's top defence conference.