Foreign Affairs

France Refuses Sending Troops To Support NATO, Then Boasts About Sending Ships To Confront China

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French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called for European navies to maintain a “regular and visible” presence in the South China Sea during a Sunday conference in Singapore.

“If we want to contain the risk of conflict, we must defend this right and defend it ourselves,” Le Drian said to the European attendees of the conference.

France’s forceful comments on the South China Sea come as a surprise as France continues to draw down its military spending and focus its remaining efforts on Counterterrorism. The announcement comes on the heels of France’s rejection of a NATO request to send a battalion of troops to the Baltic states to counter Russian aggression, citing those same budget constraints.

Le Drian elaborated, “If the law of the sea is not respected today in the China seas, it will be threatened tomorrow in the Arctic, in the Mediterranean, or elsewhere.”

France’s call for independent patrols of the South China Sea are a welcome sign to the U.S., who has largely confronted China unilaterally.

“More EU involvement in the South China Sea is something the United States has hoped to see for quite a while now,” Mira Rapp-Hooper, an expert at the Center for New American Security, told Foreign Policy.

The U.S.  and China have been in a long dispute over freedom of navigation in the disputed territorial waters. While the U.S. maintains a carrier strike group in the South China Sea to actively challenge China, the European Union’s position so far has been to call for peaceful resolution of disputes.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) notes that 5.3 trillion dollars of trade move annually through the South China Sea of which 25% is bound for the United States. CFR warned “conflict of any scale in the South China Sea would hamper the claimants from benefiting from the South China’s Sea’s proven and potential riches.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called on Beijing not to declare an aerial defense zone in the South China Sea saying such an action would be a “provocative and destabilizing act.” A Chinese military spokesman responded that China does not “fear” any conflict in the region.

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