The Strategic Studies Institute recently published A Hard Look at Hard Power: Assessing the Defense Capabilities of Key U.S. Allies and Security Partners. Edited by Gary J. Schmitt, codirector of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at AEI, and featuring contributions from him, AEI scholar Michael Mazza, and others, it fills critical gaps in information “about the actual hard power resources of America’s allies.”
As threats like terrorism and humanitarian crises rise in Africa, France is encouraging European countries to pool their military resources to combat them. Without the guarantee of a stronger American security presence, this French ambition will become crucial to the region’s safety.
But the cost of these interventions combined with the apparent lack of success in missions as in the case of Afghanistan have resulted in France’s decision to scale back its strategic sights and more strictly define “priority zones” for its military interventions. These priority zones are the European periphery, the Mediterranean Basin, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and Northern Africa from the Sahel to the equatorial countries.
The Sahel corresponds to the zone of vital interest that France should, it believes, be able to defend. As a result of France’s historical presence, Africa is home to one of the largest groups of French expatriates: more than 210,000 French citizens live there. Additionally, special defense agreements with Gabon, Senegal, Djibouti, and Chad give France a higher degree of legitimacy and an operational advantage when it comes to intervening in the region.
French soldiers from Operation Barkhane and Malian soldiers speak to a village chief some 30km (18.6 miles) north of Timbuktu November 6, 2014. REUTERS/Joe Penney.
Moreover, major security challenges exist just outside the gates of Europe, with the rise in terrorism and criminal activities resulting from instability in the wake of the Arab Spring and the need to secure major resource and supply routes from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Indeed, America’s planned pivot to Asia and its reluctance to intervene further in the Middle East was duly noted in the 2013 white paper:
The evolving strategic context may place our country in a position in which we are obliged to take the initiative in operations, or to assume, more often than in the past, a significant part of the responsibilities involved in conducting military operations.
Given this strategic context, it is no surprise that France is attempting once again to jumpstart the European common defense effort. After the principle of differentiation within French forces and the concept of strategic autonomy, the white paper’s third pillar of French defense policy is greater reliance on the pooling and sharing of defense capabilities by European powers. The decrease of European defense capabilities combined with the budgetary crisis is seen as an opportunity to promote greater cooperation among countries in defense of European vital interests.
As the white paper puts it, France aims for greater pooling of capabilities on the European level to “replace forced dependency with organized inter-dependency.” To obtain this goal, however, Europe’s capitals will need to establish a deeper consensus on the most important security issues they might face and a greater willingness to address them by joint action.
Download A Hard Look at Hard Power: Assessing the Defense Capabilities of Key U.S. Allies and Security Partners here.
This post was written by Ash Malhotra, an AEIdeas intern, and edited by Sarah Gustafson, Editorial Assistant at the AEIdeas blog.
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