“The rift caused by the war and the irreversibility of Russia’s strategic choices make it necessary to foresee a confrontation with Moscow,” France’s General Secretariat for National Defense and Security (SGDSN) said in a Strategic Review published on Wednesday (Nov. 9 ). .
Macron with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in February – 13 days before Putin invaded Ukraine (Photo: Kremlin.ru)
The rolling conflict will take place “over a long period of time, in multiple regions and spaces,” he predicted. Russia’s motive was a bare-bones “imperialist” pursuit of “power seen as antithetical to what Russia defines as the ‘collective West,’” it said. Russia had already been trying to destabilize Europe for years through non-military means such as “diplomatic-political subversion” and “information warfare,” he added. But “without having disappeared, this strategy is now combined with the desire to engage in direct military confrontation, materialized in the war of aggression launched against Ukraine,” the French threat assessment said. “The Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Baltic region, the Balkans, the North Atlantic, but also Africa and the Middle East offer prospects for prolonged confrontation combined with risks of eventual escalation,” he also said. France usually publishes a Strategic Review every few years, but issued a brief one after 2021 due to the conflict in Ukraine. It was signed by French President Emmanuel Macron, who also warned of increased tension with Russia in a speech the same day. The war in Ukraine had shown that “the danger of a high-intensity war between states” had returned to Europe, Macron said at a military base in Toulon, France. He added, in the same breath, not to “accept with fatalism” the worst-case scenarios. The French president is the only NATO leader who regularly speaks by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin in search of a peace deal. Washington has also urged Kyiv to hold talks with Moscow amid fears that Putin may use a nuclear weapon on Ukraine if he continues to lose on the ground. But Macron’s casual personal approach to Putin was at odds with the aggressive conclusions of the SGDSN, a French state political security unit with around 1,000 staff at its headquarters at the historic Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, despite the president’s signature on preamble to the review. . The “irreversible” logic of the Strategic Review indicated that any peace deal with the Kremlin would be a temporary ceasefire, before further escalation. If Putin was able to get away with nuclear blackmail in Ukraine, he would likely do it again in other countries, he warned. “A successful coercive maneuver backed by nuclear weapons would set a dangerous precedent,” it said. The Ukraine war “demonstrates the need to maintain a strong and credible nuclear deterrent to prevent a major war” in the Euro-Atlantic region, France, the EU’s only nuclear power, also said. The SGDSN was not too proud to admit that “the United States has once again emerged as the main provider of European security through the scale of its assurance and military support to Ukraine.” Subscribe to EUobserver’s daily newsletter All stories we publish are posted at 7.30am. By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Macron wants to create an EU rapid reaction force that can fight local conflicts in Europe’s neighborhood without US support in the future.
Hard shrink power
But the French president officially announced the end of France’s largest military operation in Africa on Wednesday, under pressure from Russia. The anti-jihadist operation Barkhane in Mali, which had 5,500 French troops at its peak, has been scrapped in favor of a constellation of smaller forces in neighboring countries in the future, Macron said in Toulon while aboard a French warship. The jihadist threat to Europe remained formidable, SGDSN newspaper notes. “The terrorist threat remains strong in the Sahel-Saharan complex and is spreading towards the Gulf of Guinea,” it said. But Mali, Burkane’s main host, turned against France and the West after a coup in 2021 and contracted the Russian mercenary group Wagner to fight the rebels. Wagner’s presence in Africa has caused looting of economic resources, human rights atrocities and political instability, the French review said. He also referred to China as an aggressive competitor to Europe, but said China’s goal was to replace the US as the leading superpower in an insidious but more peaceful strategy than Russia’s brute aggression.
China
The French paper did not discuss the consequences of a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan before 2030 – the cut-off horizon for the review. However, he warned that both Russia and China pose a threat to the EU’s efforts to maintain peace in the Western Balkans. “In the short term, the Western Balkans will probably be a zone of fragility that these countries may seek to exploit to divide and weaken Europe,” France said. But China’s modus operandi in Africa was different from Wagner’s brutality, he noted. China was trying to get “a stranglehold on infrastructure, economy and debt [of African nations]creating risks [Chinese] our dependence [African] partners, but also of espionage and containment in our operational environment,” SGDSN said.
