When Emmanuel Macron landed at the airport in Jeddah, the second largest city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after Riyadh, the French president became the first significant Western leader to visit the monarchy since the murder of journalist Jamal Hashoghi.
The latter, I recall, was liquidated in a particularly brutal manner in 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Some intelligence agencies, mostly American and Turkish, believe the operation came with the knowledge of Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the Arab monarchy. He himself denies having any idea in advance of the planned assassination attempt against Hashogi.
Since then, Russian President Vladimir Putin and US counterpart Donald Trump have played a key role in rehabilitating Mohammed bin Salman in international relations. The Kremlin leader even visited Saudi Arabia in 2019. However, the Saudi heir to the throne’s meetings with Western leaders were limited by the G20’s common ones.
In that case, what is Emanuel Macron doing in Saudi Arabia? What is the goal of the French president with his two-day tour of the kingdom, the UAE and Qatar?
In view of the forthcoming elections for the head of state of France, the current incumbent of the Elysee Palace wants to demonstrate the scope of Paris’ diplomacy and its properties as oriented towards achieving concrete results.
The deteriorating relations between Lebanon and Saudi Arabia – along with statements by a Beirut executive on Riyadh’s role in the conflict in Yemen, which in turn provoked the Arab monarchy to recall its ambassador from Beirut and expel the Lebanese from Riyadh – provided a good opportunity for manifestation of French foreign policy. In Jeddah, Macron managed to act as a mediator in the conversation between Najib Mikati, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, and Mohammed bin Salman.
If relations between Riyadh and Beirut are to be sustained at all, it is difficult to imagine that there is another European country, other than France, that can contribute to such a development. This is due to historical reasons (French colonialism towards Lebanon), economic reasons (Paris is the main initiator and host of the international community’s efforts in financial assistance to Lebanon) and current political ones (France is the main European country that forms the European Union’s foreign policy towards Lebanon and the permanent crisis there).
According to a government source from the French government, who shared his impressions with the FT, Saudi Arabia has agreed to such a rehabilitation of the dialogue with Lebanon, if in return Mohamed bin Salman receives a visit from the French president. If this information is reliable, then the next question that needs to be answered is why Macron is ready to do such an image service to the Saudi heir to the throne.
In fact, Paris and Riyadh have similar interests in Lebanon. But with two reservations. One is that France’s approach is more realistic than that of the Arab monarchy, as Paris realizes that the influence of Shiite formations in the cedar country – Hezbollah and Amal – cannot be isolated, but at most limited. . The other is that if Saudi Arabia would rather see Lebanon replace one clientelistic network with another, France is pushing for reforms and tying international aid to them.
However, the crises that have become characteristic of Saudi Arabia and Lebanon in their bilateral relations are not in the interests of Paris, which saw not only Riyadh but also Abu Dhabi as a natural counterweight to Iran’s influence in Lebanon. Such a counterweight the two Arab capitals could play in two directions. One is that Beirut is in dire need of foreign financing (the country’s national debt was just over 150% of last year’s GDP). The other is the support that Saudi Arabia and the UAE – especially after the rift between Mohammed bin Salman and former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri – have given to the Christian formation Lebanese Forces, led by Samir Jaja. And this, along with the good relations of the French with the Lebanese Sunnis and Druze, is a potential plot for cooperation against the Iranian-backed Shiite groups in the country in question.
In the spirit of active French policy, Macron was also the Western leader who played a key role in the Baghdad summit in Iraq a few months ago, to which almost all countries in the region sent representatives, albeit at different levels. The format of the so-called The New Levant (Egypt, Jordan, Iraq) aims to increase co-operation in the defense and hydrocarbon sectors of the three countries, which in turn should reduce Baghdad’s dependence on Tehran.
French diplomacy has a recognizable result in another neighboring area: the Eastern Mediterranean, where Paris is involved in “knitting” a military-political coalition built on cooperation between local states such as Egypt, Greece, the Republic of Cyprus, Israel, Israel and France. UAE outside the region.
And in view of the fluctuations in Turkish-French relations, Paris needs no further arguments to develop co-operation with Saudi Arabia, which, along with Ankara, is the other political and religious center in the Sunni world. Paris’s relations with Abu Dhabi have a logic that is far from exhaustive in the Middle East: in the aforementioned Eastern Mediterranean, in the Sahel, in North Africa, and in the Indo-Pacific, the two capitals are cooperating rapidly.
France’s foreign policy towards the Arab monarchies is further determined by a well-defined commercial interest.
For example, in the UAE, the French president struck a deal to sell 80 Rafal multi-role fighters and 12 Caracal military transport helicopters, which will cost the Emirates between 17 billion and 19 billion euros. Such an agreement comes at a time when Abu Dhabi had announced its desire to buy the US F-35 fighter jet. Such a coincidence in which the UAE prefers, at least at this stage, to be satisfied with the French fighter jet is probably the “sweet revenge” of Emanuel Macron against the United States, which managed to motivate Australia to cancel its agreement to buy submarines from France , concluding one with Washington and London.
In Saudi Arabia, the head of state of the Fifth Republic signed a contract for the supply of 26 civilian helicopters manufactured by the European brand Airbus (mainly involving Paris and Berlin), and provided an opportunity for a French company to manage the supply of drinking water to consumers in the capital. Riyadh and its surroundings.
Being a centrist defending the thesis of the strategic emancipation of France from Germany and that of the strategic autonomy of the EU from the United States, Emanuel Macron demonstrated the same handwriting during his two-day visit to the Arabian Peninsula. There he demonstrates again that his foreign policy is formed on the basis of specific interests and not on universal values.
– .
