Julien Barnes-Dacey
While U.S. President Joe Biden seems determined to reduce the U.S. footprint in the Middle East, finally embracing Washington’s long-discussed pivot to Asia, French President Emmanuel Macron is headed in the opposite direction. In recent years, Macron has made repeated trips to Lebanon, Iraq and the Gulf states, and launched a series of diplomatic initiatives in a bid to address regional crises. It is hard to think of any Western leader who has been even half as engaged as Macron across the range of high-priority issues confronting the Middle East.
Macron’s recent visit to the Gulf, during which he concluded France’s largest-ever arms deal with the United Arab Emirates and also met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a figure still shunned by most Western leaders, reflects the French president’s ambition to be a central player in the regional mix. For Macron, the wider Middle East is a critical theater for French interests, but it also appears to represent a venue to assertively project France’s global standing. For both goals, the pathway is often seen as lying through partnership with crucial Gulf actors, particularly the UAE, which is now France’s key “strategic” regional ally.
Against the backdrop of a decreasing U.S. focus on the region—and a sense of general European apathy to developments in the Middle East—Macron’s engagement is an important marker of commitment. His willingness to take on complex issues in a bid to temper regional tensions bucks the trend of international disengagement amid intensifying challenges. But this French engagement also comes with inherent contradictions—and a heavy focus on Macron’s personal ability to break through entrenched deadlocks, which has clearly also constrained the effectiveness of Paris’ approach.
France’s immediate interest in the Middle East lies in the need to stabilize Europe’s southern neighborhood, given the deeply disruptive impact of regional conflicts on Europe over the past decade. Under former U.S. President Donald Trump, French efforts focused on salvaging the Iran nuclear deal and preventing conflict between Washington and its Middle East partners on one side, and Tehran on the other. This energetic effort has continued into Biden’s tenure, with France’s co-sponsorship of the Baghdad Conference in Iraq in August, which involved considerable personal engagement by Macron to bring together officials from the Gulf Arab states and Iran.
Macron’s recent meeting with the Saudi crown prince—breaking with much of the West’s diplomatic isolation of MBS, as he is known—sought to secure the kingdom’s reengagement with Lebanon, a country where Macron has focused particular effort following last year’s port explosion and continued economic collapse, and with which Saudi Arabia recently cut ties. Paris sees Saudi engagement as critical to preventing Lebanon from falling fully into the abyss. In exchange for the meeting, the Saudi crown prince renewed telephone contact with the Lebanese prime minister for the first time since the diplomatic dispute between the two countries broke out.
These efforts reflect Macron’s repeated willingness to take the initiative to try to break through impasses and get things done, as well as an assessment that France needs to be proactive diplomatically and engage key powerbrokers to make real progress on priority issues. Just as Macron saw a need to meet MBS, he has maintained regular contact with Iran and is alleged to have met Mohammed Raad, the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, during a visit to Beirut last year. In a similar vein, in 2017 he spearheaded high-level Western engagement with Gen. Khalifa Haftar in Libya, another figure that many of France’s partners previously kept at arm’s length.
As part of these efforts, Macron appears to want to fill the leadership vacuum in the wider Middle East, real or imagined, as the U.S. downsizes its regional engagement, believing that France can step up as a necessary external mediator. But Paris also appears to see an opportunity to exploit regional unease with Washington’s repositioning to tighten its own relations with regional players. At the heart of this vision is France’s relationship with the UAE. Over recent years Paris and Abu Dhabi have increasingly coalesced behind a shared regional vision, with the notable exception of Syria, where France continues to maintain a firm line and privately—if not publicly, given an unwillingness to call the UAE out—opposes Abu Dhabi’s reengagement with President Bashar al-Assad. Elsewhere, the two countries appear largely focused on a strongman vision of regional stability as the best means to counter terrorism and stanch migration outflows, while sharing an intense aversion to political Islam.
On this front it is notable that while Macron is often focused on mobilizing the European Union to contribute to solving international problems, with the exception of efforts to salvage the Iran nuclear deal, there is far less effort to spearhead a collective European response in the Middle East. This may be in part because Macron believes, perhaps justifiably, that other European states won’t step up. But it also seems to reflect a sense in Paris that the Middle East is an arena for France to project its global stature as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, rather than its role as a leading EU member state, as well as a prioritization of its strategic ties with Abu Dhabi over its European partners.
This dynamic has been clearest in Libya, where France and the UAE long supported Haftar’s bid for power, viewing him as the best-placed figure to stabilize the country. This culminated in Haftar’s ill-fated 2019 military campaign to seize Tripoli, which further escalated the country’s longstanding conflict. By contrast, key French EU allies such as Germany have worked to support a more inclusive political settlement in Libya. (Haftar’s inability to impose a military settlement eventually pushed external actors, including France and the UAE, to back a new, if fragile political track toward elections.)
The French-UAE partnership has also extended to a shared hostility to Turkey. French-led efforts to build a counterweight to Ankara in the Eastern Mediterranean have drawn Abu Dhabi into closer alignment with Greece and Cyprus, including joint military exercises among the four countries.
Of course, for France, ties with Abu Dhabi are about more than just political alignment. They include a clearly important economic dimension. Macron’s visit to Abu Dhabi, where France maintains a naval base, saw the two countries sign France’s largest-ever arms sale, an $19 billion deal for 80 Rafale fighter jets. This was a much-needed win for Paris after the recent collapse of its previous largest arms deal, a $66 billion contract for Australia to buy 12 French submarines that was torpedoed by the AUKUS pact linking Canberra, London and Washington. Reports that the UAE has now suspended its deal to purchase U.S. F-35 multirole fighter jets must also be particularly satisfying for France, given the AUKUS debacle.
This relationship with the UAE, however, also serves to highlight key tensions at the heart of France’s approach to the Middle East. Following the signing of the Rafale deal in Abu Dhabi, French Defense Minister Florence Parly announced that it “directly contributes to regional stability.” For many, though, the sale of more fighter jets to the Middle East, not least to a country that has actively supported conflicts in Libya and Yemen, is a questionable call. Today, there may be a sense that the UAE has turned a page, opening up diplomatic dialogues in recent months with both Iran and Turkey, and Paris undoubtedly sees its privileged access with Abu Dhabi as a means of shaping regional developments. But many have their doubts.
This question of effectiveness hangs over France’s wider regional efforts. While Macron should be applauded for the considerable energy he has committed to resolving crises across the Middle East, French diplomacy has repeatedly struggled to deliver. To take the example of Lebanon, Macron may have secured a phone call between MBS and Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, but it remains uncertain—and even doubtful—that this will translate into a more actively engaged Saudi role there. Meanwhile, France’s efforts to advance a Lebanese political and economic reform package, spearheaded by Macron’s repeated trips to Beirut, have gone nowhere.
If the aim is to ensure that France has a seat at the tables that matter, and that Paris maintains a privileged position with key regional states, French policy has been a success—and last week’s Gulf visit is a testament to this role. But Paris will need to do more, using Macron’s energetic outreach and potentially embracing a wider European approach to extract more meaningful concessions from regional actors, if it is going to secure its ultimate vision of a stable region.
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