Global Courant
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PARIS (AP) — The French president is heading to the South Pacific to make France’s voice heard in a region that is shaping up as a major geopolitical battleground for China and the US.
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President Emmanuel Macron’s trip to Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and New Caledonia comes as French troops participate in massive US-led military exercises in the region. With French troops, civilians and resources scattered across its Pacific territories, France is looking to protect its own interests and project its power alongside like-minded democracies concerned about China’s growing assertiveness.
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Beginning Monday in the French archipelago of New Caledonia, Macron is seeking to restore confidence after voters rejected a series of independence referendums that exposed deep-seated frustrations among indigenous Kanaks and inequalities with the mainland and divisions over the management of the region’s rich nickel reserves. A new status for the territory and its institutions is being negotiated.
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After Vanuatu, Macron’s latest and most strategically important stop on Thursday is in Papua New Guinea, which has seen growing Chinese influence and signed a new security cooperation pact with the US in May. The most populous Pacific island is also negotiating a security treaty with Australia.
Macron’s office says he plans to visit a French patrol vessel in the area and offer infrastructure projects and a partnership to save forests and mangroves while securing jobs in Papua New Guinea, where France’s TotalEnergies is leading a liquefied natural gas project.
Macron’s office insists the trip is not to push an “anti-China policy” but to encourage regional powers to diversify their partnerships beyond Beijing and Washington. He felt the trip was necessary because of “new, more intense threats” to security, institutions and the environment in the region, according to an official in Macron’s office who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
According to his advisers, coastal erosion and other climate change impacts are at the top of the agenda at every stop on Macron’s journey, in a region full of islands that see periodic tsunamis and threaten to disappear in rising seas.
France has had an unbroken presence in the region since the 19th century, thanks to its colonial history and continued control over territories with 1.5 million citizens and some 7,000 troops in the Indo-Pacific.
