Published: April 10 2011 22:22 | Last updated: April 10 2011 22:22
For the first time in more than 50 years, France is simultaneously involved in three military conflicts – Afghanistan, Ivory Coast and Libya. At the same time, the popularity of Nicolas Sarkozy, France's centre-right president, is languishing at record lows and he faces an immense challenge in winning re-election next year. Some of Mr Sarkozy's political opponents dismiss his newfound enthusiasm for armed interventions as a ploy to cover himself in glory and retain the presidency until 2017. But this interpretation is overly cynical.
The Afghan war started long before Mr Sarkozy's arrival in the Elysée Palace in 2007. Similarly, France's involvement in the civil war in Ivory Coast, a former French colony, dates to 2002. True, Mr Sarkozy has stepped up the role, ordering military strikes on forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo, the outgoing president. This stretches to the limit the sense of UN Security Council resolution 1975, which authorises UN forces to use all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack.
But France has such extensive interests in Francophone west Africa, and such a long-standing military presence in Ivory Coast, that any president would most likely have acted as Mr Sarkozy did. To have stood back would have damaged France's credibility in west Africa and would conceiv-ably have opened the door to wider US, Chinese or Brazilian influence.
By contrast, the war to rid Libya of Muammer Gaddafi is very much Mr Sarkozy's. Libya is not a French-speaking former colony, and the war's outcome will have little bearing on the epochal Arab political awakening. In a world where foreign policy is shaped partly by television pictures and mobile phone images, Mr Sarkozy undoubtedly feared his re-election prospects would have suffered a blow if France and its allies had let pro-Gaddafi forces carry out a bloodbath in rebel-held Benghazi.
But the intervention was also motivated by concern that French influence in north Africa would shrink after revelations about cosy contacts between French government ministers and the former autocrats of Egypt and Tunisia. Moreover, the Libyan mission permits France to display its sense of responsibility as a permanent Security Council member and to live up to its self-image as a standard-bearer of universal values. Mr Sarkozy's impulsiveness can lead to difficulties with France's allies and the success of the Libyan operation is not assured. But the new French activism is certainly an improvement on what preceded it.
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