France decided to increase its influence in the defense sector by establishing cooperation with countries in the Asia-Pacific region (APR). In this way, NATO is promoting its interests in the countries of Southeast Asia, and this will only lead to increased tension in an already troubled region, experts told Izvestia.
At the moment, France has already stationed 7 thousand soldiers in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Experts note that Paris has recently become more and more active in declaring its ambitions in the Asia-Pacific region. By increasing ties in the Asia-Pacific region, France is, in fact, implementing NATO’s strategy to expand its area of responsibility to East, Southeast and Northeast Asia.
“If you look closely at the agreement adopted in Madrid in May 2022, then we are talking about Asia. Five new bases are now being prepared in the Philippines, and they are being created for the deployment of alliance forces,” noted Dmitry Mosyakov, head of the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Increasing ties in the region on the part of Paris can be considered a kind of sign of support for American efforts to globally reorient the West from the North Atlantic space to where the main development is taking place, where the most serious capital and transnational corporations are concentrated, that is, to Asia. At the same time, all these actions in the Asia-Pacific region, to varying degrees and under different pretexts, come down to one thing – containing the PRC.
“At a minimum, we are talking about increasing pressure on China. For him, this is, naturally, another disappointment, because China’s greatest hopes are associated with Germany as a technologically sovereign power and precisely with France as a politically sovereign power. And when suddenly the French rush into the Pacific region, China will have to think once again about what to do so as not to find itself in such a wide ring of blockade from the West,” said Deputy Director of IMEMO RAS and head of the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies, sinologist Alexander Lomanov.
At the same time, there is no fundamental conflict between China and France, emphasized Zhu Jianli, a leading researcher at the Institute of World History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Read more in the exclusive material from Izvestia:
NATOLeon plans: how and why France is increasing its influence in Asia
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