A street in Noumea, New Caledonia devastated by riots. AP
That was a means for many linking Kyiv’s plight with what might be in store for Taipei. Another put it more bluntly: “It’s the Americans who have all their alliances in Asia. France will be there, but only in the South Pacific. The EU has no credibility when it says that it can react to a Taiwan crisis.”
In the next breath, a French analyst made a plea for strategic remembrance; may it not be forgotten that Paris continues to help maintain the Mirages it sold to Taiwan in the 1990s, and that it also provided frigates to the Taiwanese navy around the same time.
The message? “France is the only EU country to directly contribute to the defence of Taiwan, but France will not give security guarantees to Taipei. We have no alliances with East Asia; we are only there because of the history.”
France, like Australia, has a Reciprocal Access Arrangement with Japan, allowing the freer movement of military personnel and material. It maintains a steady pattern of military exercises with Indo-Pacific countries, signed a defence agreement with Papua New Guinea in 2022, and is looking towards a similar arrangement with South Korea.
In the words of one interlocutor: “We are increasing all these instruments to be more operational – but that is to defend our territories in the Pacific. There is no NATO in East Asia – this is obvious! And you just can’t be credible when you say you are going to do everything”.
All of this may be so, but the cold, hard truth for Paris remains: should the EU need to stand up to Putin in the Baltics, however unlikely that proposition may be, France and its European partners would still need the United States.
James Curran travelled to Paris as a guest of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Source link : https://www.afr.com/world/europe/france-grapples-with-cold-hard-truths-of-its-place-in-the-world-20240522-p5jfpv
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Publish date : 2024-05-22 05:19:00
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