The AUKUS deal was an illogical strategic submission of Australia as it will bankrupt the country by buying U.S. nuclear submarines. They are only nominally for Australia's security but will stay at least informally under U.S. command.
A major point of the deal was that it screwed France which had a big contract with Australia to build conventional submarines for it. The French Foreign Minister said it was "a stab in the back". France wasn't even informed of the deal but learned of it from the press.
That the U.S. would screw France, a big European NATO ally, for its own political and economic purpose is not necessarily unprecedented, but to do it as publicly and open as the AUKUS deal did should have been a big wake-up call.
Unfortunately the French President Macron and his government went back to sleep and gave the U.S. the opportunity to screw France again.
It did so with AFRICOM, the U.S. instrument to undermine African countries through military 'cooperation'.
France has big interest in Africa where some of its former colonies, Françafrique, are bound to it by using a currency, the CFA Franc, that is solely under French government control.
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The U.S. used its training of African officer to subtly find and train people it could work with. An astonishing number of these officer were later involved in coups which often turned out to be anti-French and pro-American:
[S]ince 2008 U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups, and succeeded in at least eight in five West African countries alone: Three times in Burkina Faso; three times in Mali; and once each in Guinea, Mauritania, and the Gambia.
U.S. training and support to the region flows through the State Department and Africa Command, an arm of the Department of Defense, in charge of military operations across the continent.
Since the above was written Niger has followed:
Brig. Gen Moussa Barmou, the American-trained commander of the Nigerien special operations forces, beamed as he embraced a senior U.S. general visiting the country’s $100 million, Washington-funded drone base in June.
Six weeks later, Barmou helped oust Niger’s democratically elected president.
For U.S. military officers and diplomats, it’s become an all-too-familiar — and deeply frustrating — story.
Niger is one of several West African countries where U.S. military-trained officers have seized control since 2021, including Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali. Some coup leaders have had close relationships with their American trainers, whose mentorship included lessons on safeguarding democracy and human rights along with military tactics.
Ohh – please spare me the 'safeguarding democracy' crocodile tears. They are really over the top. The U.S. has a big military base in Niger and that, and the influence it brings with it, is all that counts.
After the coup the French military contingent in Niger and its ambassador were told to leave while the big U.S. drone base is likely to stay.
Is that a bad outcome for the U.S. or the result of a plan?
The U.S. has strategic interests in Africa and, as the former RAND and CIA analyst and senior fellow of the Atlantic Council Michael Shurkin writes, it wants France to move out:
I have cheered French efforts to help the countries of the Sahel — most notably Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — to defend themselves against jihadist insurgencies affiliated with Al Qa’eda or the Islamic State.
And yet, the only reasonable conclusion to draw now is that France should close its bases and go.
The problem, as has been made clear by recent events in Niger, is that whatever France does, good or bad, provokes an allergic reaction from populations long conditioned to be suspicious of French motives and assume the worst.
Whether this anti-French sentiment is fair or not is entirely beside the point. Ties with France have now become a kiss of death for African governments — a phenomenon demonstrated by the fate of Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum.
Oh well. Who has created Al Qa’eda and the Islamic State? Who has moved them from west-Asia into Africa?
Yes, France has kept some of its colonial bad habits and influences and some people really do hate it for that. But who's propaganda has pushed them into that direction?
The plan is obvious. France has to be pushed out so the U.S. can walk in:
Meanwhile, the threat of Russia filling the vacuum is overstated and should not justify [France's] further involvement. Indeed, part of of Russia’s appeal is that many Africans see it as a sort of anti-France. And the less France lives “rent-free” in the popular imagination, the less Russia’s symbolic appeal will become.
Another part of Russia’s draw is that some African governments, Mali among them, are frustrated by France’s reticence to assist them in a strategy that all too often involves targeting certain ethnic communities — above all Fulanis but also Arabs and Tuaregs. And if that’s what they want help for, then France and other Western powers are right to refuse.
The fact that the U.S. and other European partners like Germany don’t provoke the same reaction does provide them an opening, a way to help fill the vacuum to keep Russia out and help African states defend themselves. But that will require them to care, and to exercise a greater degree of creativity than they have shown thus far.
It will also mean that France will have to trust them in its former Empire. This was a stumbling block as late as the 1990s, but at this point, Paris is ready.
And, really, it has no choice.
Poor France. It is told to leave and let the U.S. take over its former colonies. It has no choice.
It took a long time for the French to wake up to that plan. But it is finally sinking in. The leading French geopolitical magazine, Conflits, discusses the Shurkin piece and asks:
Pourquoi l’Amérique veut-elle chasser la France d’Afrique ?
Why does America want to drive France out of Africa?
It concludes correctly:
Americans want to sacrifice the French presence to replace and sustain them.
Since France rejected the U.S. invasion of Iraq the U.S. has done its best to deny France any independent international role. The magazine discusses various global places and plans where and how France can reasonably prevent that. It concludes (edited machine translation):
What is at stake is not simply the presence of France in the Sahel or in Africa. It is maintaining it as a global sovereign power or its reduction to a power in Europe. By extension, is its natural relation to be one of the major U.S. dependent democracies, which form a rigid frame, imperial, behind the United States, or will it be able to form a loose alliance in a multilateral framework, a much better position to defend its interests and values?
Without a doubt, America and the Europeans, they need a voice to remind them of the dangers of the respective hubris or of their weakness. Undoubtedly, the world has a need for medium stand-alone powers and for France to find a new balance, helping emerging nations, supporting them without stifling the fragile states and avoiding the logic of direct confrontations between the blocks.
I agree. An independent multilateral France with global influence will be good for balancing the world.
But to reach and stay in that place France needs to counter further U.S. plans to push it out from where the U.S. wants to be.
Will France finally learn how to do that?
