France is increasing its military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, sending warships through the South China Sea and planning air exercises to help counter China’s military build-up in disputed waters.
The French assault ship Dixmude and a frigate late last month sailed through the disputed Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島) and around a group of reefs that China has turned into islets to push back against Beijing’s claim to own most of the South China Sea.
“Our patrol involved passing close to these islets to obtain intelligence with all the sensors it is possible to use in international waters,” the Dixmude’s commanding officer, Jean Porcher, told reporters in a video interview.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jonas Parello-Plesner, a researcher from the US-based Hudson Institute think tank who was onboard, said that “several Chinese frigates and corvettes” tailed the French vessels.
Porcher said the ship maintained “cordial” radio contact with Chinese military vessels, “which were present in the area until we left.”
So far the US has taken the lead in confronting China over its territorial claims in the South China Sea, which are contested by several neighbors, including Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam.
However, France, which along with the UK is the only European nation to regularly send its navy into the region, has also waded into the dispute, sending its ships into the area three to five times a year.
In August, the French Air Force is to stage its biggest-ever exercises in Southeast Asia as part of a strategy to mark France’s presence in a region that is home to 1.5 million French citizens in the nation’s overseas territories.
Three Rafale fighter jets, one A400M troop transporter and a C135 refueling tanker are to fly from Australia to India, with several stop-offs along the way.
The sea and air operations follow a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron last month to Australia, where he spoke of the need to protect the Indo-Pacific region from “hegemony” — a veiled reference to Beijing’s growing might.
A “strong Indo-Pacific axis” was needed to ensure respect for freedom of navigation and aviation in the region, he told Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Macron appears to be “realistically assessing the growing Chinese challenge,” Parello-Plesner said.
“This is a welcome change from his predecessors, who were enthralled by the business and investment opportunities in China,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
France had already began to push back against China’s expansionism before Macron took power.
Since 2014, the navy has sailed regularly through the South China Sea as part of its stated bid to uphold a rules-based maritime order.
In 2016, then-French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (now minister for Europe and foreign affairs) called on other European navies to develop a regular and visible presence in the South China Sea.
Besides protecting navigation, France has cited the need to defend the interests of its citizens scattered across five French territories in the Pacific, including New Caledonia and French Polynesia.
Valerie Niquet, an expert on the Asia-Pacific region at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said France’s growing assertiveness showed the US was no longer the only Western power “getting involved in the area.”
“Faced with China the US obviously plays the main deterrent role, but it’s not pointless or trivial for a power like France, a permanent member of the [UN] Security Council, to take a firm, principled position and carry out concrete actions,” she said, predicting that it would “marginalize China’s position a little bit more.”
Analysts point to another factor for the growing activism: The need to show buyers of French arms that Paris has their back.
In 2016, India agreed buy 36 Rafale fighter jets and Australia signed a deal for 12 French submarines.
“That is also doubtlessly pushing France to be a lot firmer on subjects that, up until recently, were broached with great care,” Niquet said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.