The Macron Doctrine

Five years ago, Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France. He stood for office on a platform of radical change and a departure from the status quo.

He promised to reinvent the French state, revitalise its economy, and change the country in social terms. In foreign policy, Macron’s stated policy was no less bold.

Russia’s African Empire

Last week, at roughly the time that photographs and stories began to filter out of liberated Bucha in Ukraine, the NGO Human Rights Watch published a report of similar massacres which took place contemporaneously in rural Mali. What linked the two was the identity of the perpetrators. In Ukraine and across Africa, these atrocities are committed by Russians.

Russia’s War on Non-Combatants

When Ukrainian forces retook Bucha, a neighbourhood in the Kyiv province, from the armed forces of Russia in early April, their cameras captured horrors. Civilians lying dead at the roadside. Mass graves. Dozens of those killed had their hands tied behind their backs.

The Bid to Stabilise Mali

British troops have begun operations in Mali as part of a United Nations mission to counter jihadist groups in the country. UK forces began arriving in February and have, with BBC cameras in tow, started their long-range patrols of the country’s sparse regions. The way the cameras captured it, those involved in these initial patrols seem confident, but also a little uneasy.

France, Mali and Military Coups

It was difficult to disagree with France’s intervention in Mali’s civil war in 2013, and hard to dispute its effects.  Various jihadist factions including al-Qaeda, after first allying with and then repudiating the separatist National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), had begun to capture great territory and impose barbaric rule on millions.

After an Election Victory, Emmanuel Macron’s Foreign Outlook Is Hardening

Emmanuel Macron has a difficult task ahead of him.

The new French president is stellar in many ways.