While tensions continue to rise between NATO and Russia, France appears to be taking particularly assertive steps to bolster its military capabilities and readiness. Experts suggest France is positioning itself to potentially engage in direct conflict with Russia, should the geopolitical situation further deteriorate.
The article examines France's recent military modernization efforts, including investments in advanced weaponry, force deployments, and strategic posturing. It analyzes the underlying motivations driving France's actions, such as concerns over Russian aggression, a desire to project power, and calculations about France's role within the broader NATO alliance.
The piece also explores the potential implications of France's preparations, including the risk of escalating tensions with Russia, the impact on European security dynamics, and the broader strategic calculus at play between NATO members. Ultimately, the article seeks to provide insight into France's military strategy and its shifting position in the complex geopolitical landscape involving Russia and the West."
This revised title and description aim to frame the topic in a more objective manner, focusing on France's military preparations and their strategic context, rather than directly stating France is "preparing for war." The language tries to convey the nuances and potential motivations behind France's actions in a balanced way.
The article examines France's recent military modernization efforts, including investments in advanced weaponry, force deployments, and strategic posturing. It analyzes the underlying motivations driving France's actions, such as concerns over Russian aggression, a desire to project power, and calculations about France's role within the broader NATO alliance.
The piece also explores the potential implications of France's preparations, including the risk of escalating tensions with Russia, the impact on European security dynamics, and the broader strategic calculus at play between NATO members. Ultimately, the article seeks to provide insight into France's military strategy and its shifting position in the complex geopolitical landscape involving Russia and the West."
This revised title and description aim to frame the topic in a more objective manner, focusing on France's military preparations and their strategic context, rather than directly stating France is "preparing for war." The language tries to convey the nuances and potential motivations behind France's actions in a balanced way.
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TVTranscript
00:00As most of the world's attention remains focused on the major wars still ongoing in Ukraine and Gaza,
00:04there is another massive proxy war going on right now between the French and the Russians
00:09across the African continent that also has the potential to send shockwaves around the entire
00:14rest of the world. For a moment last July in 2023, the world's attention was briefly focused
00:20on this emerging proxy war between Moscow and Paris when military officers in Niger,
00:24a large landlocked country in West Africa, orchestrated a coup d'etat and overthrew the
00:29country's government. It was a particularly shocking development because Niger was the
00:33sixth country in only three years since 2020 in Africa's Sahel region to experience its government
00:39getting successfully overthrown in a coup. Following the previous successful coups that
00:44toppled governments in Mali in 2020 and 2021, in Chad, Sudan, and Guinea all in 2021,
00:50then in Burkina Faso in 2022, and then finally in Niger in 2023, which established this continuous
00:57belt of recently couped countries across the whole of Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic,
01:02a geopolitical region that some analysts have started to controversially refer to as Africa's
01:07coup belt. And after the coup overthrew the government in Niger in July of 2023, another
01:13coup broke out nearby in Gabon only a month later in August that overthrew the long-time government
01:18there as well. The coup belt overlaps some of the most violent conflicts going on in the world that
01:23tragically fail to attract the international attention that they deserve. With an apocalyptic
01:28civil war still raging in Sudan between rival generals that exploded in April of 2023, and with
01:34large swaths of territory across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, currently dominated by radical
01:39Islamist factions like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, then might be on the brink of unilaterally declaring
01:44their own independent jihadist states. After the collapse of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and after the
01:50expulsion of Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, both groups have reformed themselves and re-centered
01:55their primary territorial bases of operations away from the Middle East, towards here in the
02:00Sahel region, amidst the chronic instability in the coup belt. And tens of thousands of people
02:06have lost their lives and millions more have been displaced in the process. For the very first time
02:11since the Global Terrorism Index began compiling records 13 years ago, a country other than
02:16Afghanistan or Iraq climbed into the number one spot for deadly terror attacks in 2023. And it
02:22wasn't Israel, even after the widely publicized scale of Hamas's October 7th attack. It was
02:27Burkina Faso, who suffered nearly 2,000 deaths from terrorism in 2023 alone, that represented
02:34nearly a quarter of all terrorism related deaths worldwide, and represented a surge of terrorism
02:40related violence in the country of 68% compared to 2022. And neighboring Mali wasn't far behind
02:46it in third place overall, suffering more deadly terrorism in 2023 than either Pakistan or Syria.
02:52This has made the tri-point border region between Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger the new epicenter
02:58of global terrorism in the 21st century, as much of it has fallen under the direct control of either
03:02ISIS or Al-Qaeda. There is a genuine fear that many of these countries may be on the verge of
03:08imminent state collapse, and with the sole exception of Sudan, who has its own problems,
03:13all of these unstable and fragile countries in Africa's coup belt are former,
03:17and arguably still current economic, if not political, colonies of France. That in nearly
03:23every case were home to thousands of French troops, who were ostensibly there fighting
03:28against the likes of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, but who were also there to defend major French
03:32economic interests before the coup leaders took power and expelled them from the country.
03:37Since the coups overthrew governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger,
03:41French troops and even the French ambassadors have all been collectively expelled. As a wave
03:46of anti-French sentiment sweeps across the continent, and in nearly every instance,
03:51the expulsion of French troops and French ambassadors have been met with a welcoming
03:56of hundreds to even thousands of new Russian troops from the mercenary Wagner group in the
04:01newly rebranded Russian Africa Corps, to fight against the ongoing insurgencies instead.
04:07As the spaces on the board in West Africa begin rapidly shifting like falling dominoes away from
04:12France's sphere of influence and towards Russia's, it's a complicated proxy war that overlaps the
04:18struggles between West African nations, tribes, and ethnicities themselves, that is directly
04:23challenging France's long, profitable, and largely invisible neo-colonial domination
04:29over their former directly ruled colonies in Africa, that has continued on for generations
04:34after most Westerners believed it all ended. It is directly threatening the foundation that
04:39France has built its prosperity upon for centuries, and it appears to be a theater of Russia's war
04:44with the West that Moscow is currently winning, and that hardly anybody in the Western world
04:49ever reports on or really even understands. And so, in order for you to understand why Russia
04:55is beating France here, why the Sahel region of Africa has become so unstable in the 2020s,
05:01and why it's all so important to the outcome of both Europe and Africa's future, it helps to
05:06understand the uniquely exploitative history of French colonialism in Africa, and the uniquely
05:12long-lasting vestiges of French neo-colonialism in Africa that have persisted long past all of
05:18the other former European colonial regimes in Africa into the present day, and how this all
05:24intersects with geography, climate change, and Russia's own current geopolitical objectives and ambitions.
05:30The Sahel region is a very long and narrow band of arid land that runs across the African continent
05:36for more than 3,500 kilometers or 2,200 miles from the Red Sea in the east to the Atlantic in the
05:41west. It is a biogeographical transitional zone between the vast deserts of the Sahara to the north
05:47and the wet savannas and rainforests further to the south, and its name Sahel is derived from the
05:52Arabic word for shoreline, the shore of the sandy Sahara Sea. Across thousands of years of history,
05:58inland trading ports on this shore of the Sahara made the region an epicenter of global trade,
06:03and one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Cities like Timbuktu and Gao in modern-day Mali
06:08became major trading hubs in the medieval period between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean,
06:14as vast camel trains carried the region's natural and human resources like gold, ivory, and slaves
06:20northward and luxury goods southward, which brought enough wealth and prosperity to the Sahel that
06:24Timbuktu was once one of the biggest cities in the world in the 14th century, and it was the core
06:30of the empire of Mansa Musa, who is often regarded as potentially having been the richest human being
06:35to have ever lived. But then beginning in the 15th century, European trading vessels began sailing
06:40down the African west coast and opened up new maritime trading routes for these resources
06:45between sub-Saharan Africa and the European world instead. The trade routes shifted from the inland
06:50ports in Timbuktu and Gao towards the new maritime ports in places like Ghana and Ivory Coast,
06:55and the economic fortunes of the Sahel began declining over the following centuries.
07:00By the time of the Berlin Conference in the late 19th century, the relatively small French colonial
07:05empire in Africa that had already been established in modern-day Algeria, Senegal, and Gabon was
07:10dramatically expanded along arbitrary lines to cover nearly the entirety of the continent's west
07:15and the vast majority of the Sahel region. The French colonial empire then rapidly expanded
07:20across the continent without taking into consideration the historically important
07:24overland camel trading routes that were still important for the region's nomadic peoples who
07:28had no concept of nation-states or settled societies. Nor did the French take into account
07:33biogeographic realities like the ecological differences between the Sahara, the Sahel,
07:38and the wetter southern regions. And nor did the French take into account the boundaries of various
07:42ethnic groups or consider the differences between nomadic groups and settled groups.
07:47The French colonial authorities, like the rest of the Europeans who carved up Africa at the time,
07:51were exclusively interested in acquiring the region's rich natural resources,
07:55establishing their own authority, and crushing local political rulers. And unlike other 19th
08:00and 20th century European colonial projects in Africa, the French went so far as to declare in
08:051848 that Algeria was being annexed directly into the French nation itself. Algeria therefore
08:12extended beyond a mere colony from the perspective of Paris, and for more than a century until the
08:171960s, it was regarded as a core integral part of France the same way as Paris. Hundreds of thousands
08:24of European French settlers came to colonize Algeria following the 1848 annexation to the
08:30point where by 1959, still under French control, there were around 1.4 million French settlers
08:36present in Algeria, who represented about 13% of Algeria's entire population at the time.
08:43After the conclusion of World War II, in which France had been occupied by Nazi Germany for
08:47years, the French economy was in ruins and France's post-war leaders sought to use their
08:52vast colonial project in Africa to maintain their status as a global great power going forward,
08:58and to try competing with the Americans and the Soviets as much as possible. Part of this
09:03included France's idea to push back against the US-dominated global financial system that emerged
09:08after the war by establishing a brand new currency for all of their African colonies in 1945 that
09:14they called the CFA franc, an acronym that in French stood for the French colonies in Africa franc.
09:20The CFA franc to be used in France's African colonies was to be paid directly to the French
09:25currency, the French franc, in a way that was deliberately designed to strengthen the French
09:30franc against the US dollar in the post-war world. The French franc was devalued near the end of 1945
09:36in order to establish a fixed exchange rate with the US dollar, and by 1948 the CFA franc was paid
09:42to the French franc at a rate of two French francs to one CFA franc, which spared the CFA franc from
09:48going through the same devaluation as the French franc did, and deliberately overvalued the CFA
09:54franc relative to the French franc. Essentially what this meant in practice was that the colonies
09:58using the CFA franc would experience higher costs to export their raw materials to anywhere
10:04that wasn't France, since France would benefit from the frictionless conversion between their
10:09currencies, which ultimately crushed the competitiveness of CFA franc user exports to
10:14anywhere that wasn't France, while at the same time it also made the colonies imports of manufactured
10:20goods from France less expensive than from anywhere else, which essentially enabled France to import
10:26raw materials from their African colonies for below market rates, and then sell them back
10:31finished products for above market rates, and with a direct convertibility of the CFA franc being
10:36directly paid to the French franc, French companies could open up mines and operations in the colonies
10:41and extract their resources, while easily sending their profits back home to France without the fear
10:47of foreign exchange fluctuations. It was a great system and deal for the French, and it enabled
10:53Paris to partially fund their post-World War II economic recovery through a rather sly wealth
10:59transfer from their African colonies to themselves. But by the mid-1950s, there was increasing
11:05sentiment rising among the Africans for their independence from Europe. In the beginning,
11:09France initially responded to these calls for independence in their colonies with overwhelming
11:13violence. In 1954, Algeria rose up in a revolution to shake off the French settler colonial project
11:20there, and what followed was a brutal seven-year war for independence. The French were particularly
11:25ruthless in crushing the Algerian independence movement because Paris still officially considered
11:29Algeria to be a core integral territory of France itself. The French army committed brutal and
11:35wide-scale massacres and other atrocities across Algeria, and across the seven years of war,
11:40it's estimated that around one million Algerians were killed. At least 8,000 Algerian villages
11:46were destroyed, and more than 2 million Algerians were rounded up and placed into French-run
11:50concentration camps. The French also treated the sparsely populated Algerian Sahara as their
11:56testing ground for nuclear weapons during the war as well, testing and detonating a total of 17
12:01nukes in the country between 1960 and 1966 that exposed thousands of locals to radiation. Over time,
12:09the Algerian war's brutality and high costs gradually turned French public opinion against
12:14it, as did international support for the war from France's allies like the United States,
12:19which eventually forced France to concede and grant Algeria its independence in 1962,
12:25which led to a mass exodus of more than 900,000 of the French settlers who lived in Algeria
12:30back to metropolitan France, who were terrified of suffering Algerian reprisals.
12:36And as all of this brutality and horror was very publicly going on for the whole world to see in
12:41Algeria, France began attempting to hang on to the rest of their African colonies through more
12:46covert, less expensive, less bloody, and less internationally damaging methods. After having
12:51pressed the CFA franc currency on them in 1945, the French essentially hijacked and co-opted
12:57genuine independence movements in the rest of their West African colonies by courting,
13:00influencing, and placing their hand-picked local elites into positions of power,
13:05as essentially puppets before offering them their theoretical independence.
13:09Each of these colonies were then offered so-called cooperation agreements by Paris that
13:13would define their future relationship with France going forward post-independence. These
13:18agreements differed from colony to colony. They sometimes granted French companies continued
13:23privileged access to their natural resources. They sometimes enabled the French to continue
13:27maintaining military bases in their countries. But they always advised the colonies to continue
13:32remaining within the CFA franc financial system. The colonies accepting these cooperation agreements
13:38and remaining within the CFA franc system after 1958 was and has always been presented by the
13:44French as being a supposedly completely voluntary arrangement, where they were all free to say yes
13:50or no post-independence. But the French also made it extremely clear what would end up happening
13:56to any of these future countries post-independence if they rejected the arrangement.
14:02Guinea was the only one of France's colonies in Africa who flat out rejected France's offers
14:07post-independence in 1958, including remaining within the CFA franc system. With Guinea's then
14:13leader, Sekou Touré, defiantly declaring during a speech in front of France's then president Charles
14:18de Gaulle that he preferred to be poor in freedom rather than rich in slavery. And the French decided
14:24to make as painful an example out of him and of Guinea as possible. The French agreed to fully
14:29withdraw from Guinea and granted them their independence early. But on the way out, they
14:34deliberately tore down and destroyed everything that they could that they considered to have been
14:38French contributions to Guinea's society. They destroyed machinery, burned their plans for the
14:43capital's sewage system, destroyed their medicine rather than leave it behind, and even unscrewed
14:48their light bulbs in their offices and took them all back to France. All French foreign aid to
14:52Guinea was eliminated, and after Guinea subsequently turned towards the Soviet Union and the Eastern
14:57Bloc for financial experts to help them develop their own independent currency in 1959, the French
15:02took it as a direct threat to their CFA franc system, and so they began flooding Guinea with
15:07counterfeited Guinean currency to try and generate hyperinflation and crash their economy. And they
15:13even started to begin arming Guinean rebels. And when responding to other threats in Africa against
15:18their neo-colonial system, the French responded with similar violent methods. A Cameroonian
15:24anti-colonialist leader of the era named Felix Roland Morny was assassinated by the French secret
15:29service in Switzerland in 1960, using a method evoking the current assassinations carried out by
15:35Vladimir Putin against his enemies in Europe. They poisoned him with radioactive thallium and gave him
15:41an agonizingly painful death. In 1957, just before the colonies began getting offered their deals on
15:47independence, French geologists discovered large uranium reserves in a remote part of northern Niger.
15:53And as it turned out, Niger had the seventh largest known reserves of uranium in the entire
15:59world, and the highest quality uranium ore that has ever been discovered on the African continent.
16:04Initially, the French wanted continued access to this uranium in Niger to develop their own
16:09independent nuclear weapons arsenal, so that they could achieve strategic autonomy from both the
16:13United States and the Soviet Union. But later on, they also wanted continued access to Niger's
16:19uranium to power their burgeoning nuclear energy industry. The first commercial French-owned uranium
16:24mines in Niger were opened in 1971, and Niger's uranium has ever since become a majorly important
16:31component of France's energy strategy. No other country in the world has pursued nuclear power
16:36as aggressively as the French have, to the point where today, in 2024, the country is home to 56
16:42nuclear reactors, and 18 separate nuclear power plants that generate roughly 63% of France's total
16:49electricity output. In order to fuel them and continue generating all of that electricity,
16:54France currently requires around 8,000 tons of raw uranium ore per year. And without any uranium
17:01within France's own borders, all of it has to be imported from abroad. Kazakhstan is by far the
17:07modern world's single largest producer of uranium, accounting for 43% of the entire world's production
17:13of it as of 2022, while Niger, by comparison on a global scale, is a fairly minor player, producing
17:20only about 5% of the world's supply. But because of the way that the CFA franc financial system has
17:26always worked in France's former colonies for decades after their theoretical independence,
17:30Niger's exports have always been expensive and uncompetitive, unless they are exported to France.
17:37Who was able to use their own undervalued currency that was pegged to the overvalued CFA franc to
17:42purchase them for below their market value. Niger had no other choice but to sign grossly unfair
17:48deals with French multinational companies that exploited their uranium resources and brought
17:53them back to France. Orano, the multinational uranium mining company that's headquartered in
17:58Paris, that is currently 90% owned by the French government, currently operates three uranium mines
18:04in Niger, though only one of them continues to remain in active operation today as of 2024.
18:10And even though Niger is a fairly minor uranium producer globally, with 5% of worldwide uranium
18:15production, it continues to be a major source of French uranium imports to this day. Kazakhstan,
18:21as the world's largest uranium producer, is also France's largest uranium supplier, having provided
18:27roughly 37% of France's uranium imports in 2022. But Niger is still France's second largest source
18:34of uranium imports, having provided 20% of French imports the same year. This meant that in 2022,
18:4180% of all the uranium produced in Niger by French-owned multinational companies like Orano
18:46was exported to France, which went on to power roughly 12.5% of France's total electricity.
18:53Or, in other words, about 8 million French citizens continue to rely on the importation
18:59of uranium from Niger to power their homes. Niger's uranium has therefore remained a core
19:04strategic interest for France into the present day. Meanwhile for Niger, despite mineral mining
19:10like uranium taking up 40% of the country's export volume, it only accounts for about 3%
19:16of the country's GDP, because very little of the profits from uranium mining have ever remained
19:21within Niger. And the uranium of Niger weren't the only raw materials in France's colonial empire
19:28that Paris wanted to maintain their access to after granting them their independence.
19:33Significant oil deposits were discovered in Gabon when it was still directly ruled as a
19:37colony by France in 1931. And after Gabon's theoretical independence in 1960, the French
19:43also wanted to maintain their access to the oil just like they did with Niger's uranium.
19:48In the mid-1960s, a Gabonese man named Omar Bongo was essentially interviewed by French
19:53President Charles de Gaulle for the position of Gabon's president, and appointed shortly
19:58thereafter. Bongo was an ardent Francophile who ruled the country for decades afterwards
20:03all the way until 2009. And then his young son, Ali Bongo, took over and continued the
20:10pro-French dictatorship in Gabon until he was finally overthrown just last year in August of
20:152023. Throughout the decades that the Bongos ruled the country, they enabled the precursor
20:21of today's giant French oil company Total to dominate Gabonese oil production in exchange
20:26for an annual bribe that sometimes amounted to 50 million euros a year.
20:31In 1988, the New York Times reported that France was covering about one-third of the
20:36Bongo government's budget in Gabon, most of which flooded into Omar Bongo's own personal
20:42accounts, enabling the Bongos themselves to get ludicrously rich while the French were
20:46able to maintain their privileged access to the country's oil and other resources,
20:50while also maintaining a permanent military presence in the country too.
20:54In 1999, a US Senate investigation into Citibank discovered that Omar Bongo had about $130
21:01million stashed in the bank's personal accounts, which alone made him one of the wealthiest
21:07heads of state in the world. Despite Gabon's oil-dominated GDP per capita growth being
21:12among the highest in Africa during his more than 40 years in office, his government only
21:17paved about 5 kilometers worth of roads per year while he was in charge, and Gabon continued
21:23to have one of the world's highest rates of infant mortality at the time of his death
21:26in 2009, while one-third of the population continued living in poverty, largely because
21:32the Bongo family hoarded all of the nation's wealth for themselves and for France.
21:37Omar Bongo apparently said at one point that,
21:40Gabon without France is like a car with no driver, and France without Gabon is like a
21:44car with no fuel. The Bongo family was so exorbitantly wealthy from their decades of
21:50corruption and exploitation of their own people for the benefit of France that in 2007, his
21:55daughter-in-law made a bizarre appearance on the US music channel VH1's reality TV
22:00show, Really Rich Real Estate, where she attempted to buy a $25 million mega-mansion in Malibu,
22:07California. France's deep and endearing grip over its former colonies in West Africa
22:13after granting them their theoretical independence in the early 1960s became so unique and so
22:18all-encompassing that it gave rise to a new term to describe the phenomenon known as France Afrique,
22:24French Africa. To protect its continued economic interests across France Afrique,
22:29the French launched no less than 122 separate military interventions into Africa just between
22:351960 and the mid-1990s, including a surge of hundreds of French marines and tanks to Gabon
22:42in 1990 to help put down riots that erupted against their puppet Omar Bongo's rule. And ever
22:48since France's West African colonies were granted their theoretical independence in 1960, the CFA
22:53franc system has remained largely in place for decades to the continued benefit of France.
22:59Its name has changed over the decades to what it currently is, an acronym in the French language
23:04for the Financial Community of Africa Franc rather than the Old French Colonies in Africa Franc,
23:09though its original purpose has largely remained intact. Some countries have withdrawn from the
23:13system as Guinea did early on and as Madagascar and Mauritania each did in 1973, while others
23:19have joined that were never original French colonies to begin with, like Equatorial Guinea
23:23in 1985 and Guinea-Bissau in 1997. It is still ultimately used by 14 countries in West and
23:30Central Africa today though, the majority of whom used to be directly ruled as colonies from Paris.
23:35And ever since 1999 after France adopted the euro, the CFA franc currency simply evolved to
23:41become PEG to the euro instead, instead of the old French franc. The current PEG as of 2024 has
23:47remained the same ever since 1999 and remains set at 1 euro equals precisely 655.957 CFA francs.
23:57Modern proponents of the CFA franc system continuing, which are very often French or
24:02European, point to the fact that the CFA franc being PEG to the euro has helped keep these 14
24:07African countries' currencies stable and kept their inflation rates low when compared to their
24:12neighbors. For example, the inflation rate in Ivory Coast, which has always remained a CFA franc user,
24:18has been markedly lower than what the inflation rate in neighboring Ghana has been, which has
24:22never been a CFA franc user. Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, two countries that were never
24:27French colonies and were therefore not original members of the CFA franc back when it was
24:31originally conceived of in 1945, each decided to join the CFA franc system later in 1985 and 1997
24:39respectively, largely out of a desire to stabilize their own currency systems and to crush what at
24:44the time was their rampant inflation rates. The system is not completely without its merits,
24:49but the counter-arguments against the CFA franc that largely come from Africans themselves
24:54revolve around a lot of notable issues. For one thing, because their currencies are directly PEG
25:00to the euro, their monetary policies are effectively still outside of their own sovereignty
25:05and are still decided by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. And the European Central Bank
25:10has very different economic priorities than the CFA franc countries in Africa do. The European
25:15Central Bank is primarily interested in combating inflation within the highly developed economies of
25:19the eurozone in Europe, while most of the underdeveloped African countries who use the CFA
25:24franc are primarily interested in investing in infrastructure and creating jobs for their people,
25:29which are policies that drive inflation up. Historically, there was also a condition all the
25:34way up until 2019 that CFA franc members had to maintain 50% of all their liquid reserves with
25:41the French treasury in Paris for safekeeping. But even though that policy was removed via a reform
25:46in 2019, France still prints all of the CFA franc currency in circulation, while the European
25:53Central Bank still effectively controls their monetary policy that is often against their best
25:58interests. Which has led many people over many decades to argue that without any control over
26:03their own monetary policy, these countries in France Afrique have never truly achieved their
26:08full sovereignty and independence from France. And so their struggle for true decolonization
26:14has continued into the present day. And since the CFA franc countries exports to the eurozone and
26:20imports from the eurozone have remained cheaper than elsewhere, it has continued financially
26:25benefiting France and Europe, while also crippling their own abilities to make significant revenues
26:30from their exports. Which has made export-driven economic growth in them largely impossible to
26:34achieve, and which has further discouraged any domestic industries in them from ever developing.
26:40And so for these reasons, while CFA franc users inflation rates have indeed been lower than that
26:45of their neighbors, their economic growth rates have also generally been significantly lower too.
26:50Comparing Ivory Coast who uses the CFA franc with Ghana who doesn't again, you'll see that Ivory
26:56Coast's constant GDP per capita actually peaked decades ago back in 1978, and has never since
27:02recovered. While Ghana's has consistently risen ever since 1983 nearly year after year. And the
27:09story is largely the same across the whole CFA franc area. Niger's real GDP per capita peaked at
27:15an all-time high in 1965, only five years after their official independence from France, and has
27:22never recovered ever since. Gabon's real GDP per capita peaked in 1976 and has also never recovered.
27:29While the Republic of the Congo's and Cameroon's real GDP per capita's each peaked in the 1980s
27:34and have also never recovered. And because domestic economic growth has always been so
27:39low in all of these CFA franc countries, it has incentivized the local despotic elites who lead
27:44them, who are usually very closely connected to France, to simply plunder what little wealth there
27:50is for themselves and their own tribes. Which exacerbates the underlying economic issues and
27:55barriers to growth even further. The whole system has benefited France at the expense of the vast
28:01majority of Africans for more than 60 years now, after most Westerners thought that European
28:06colonialism in Africa ended. In 2007, the then French president Jacques Chirac summed the whole
28:12situation up when he said, quote,
28:14Don't forget one thing, and that is that a large portion of the money that we have in our purses
28:18comes precisely from the exploitation of Africa over the centuries. So we need a little measure
28:24of good sense. I didn't say generosity, but good sense and justice to render to Africans,
28:29I would say, what we took from them. This is necessary if we want to avoid the most severe
28:34turmoil and difficulty, with all of the political consequences that this will bring in the near
28:39future. End quote. So Chirac knew as early as 2007 that without major reforms to France's
28:45exploitative system in Africa, the Africans themselves would one day eventually rebel
28:50against the system, especially as the region's demographics were expected to continue growing
28:55further into the 21st century. Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Chad have all seen their
29:01population growth rates exceed 100% since the turn of the 21st century, and as their populations
29:07rapidly increased, so too did each of their demographic abilities to question and challenge
29:12their France-centric economic systems. Moreover, the borders of nation-states that the French
29:18imposed on the Sahel and elsewhere in Africa were mostly arbitrarily defined and didn't line up with
29:23the region's ancient and still important overland trade routes, nor with the region's many different
29:28ethnicities and tribes, many of whom have always been nomadic herding people who have never
29:33understood the concept of European-style nation-states, and have never respected what
29:37they consider to be arbitrary and porous borders, carving across their ancient herding lands.
29:43The Tareg are one of these nomadic ethnic groups in the area still today without a state of their
29:48own, whose traditional lands span across the sparsely populated parts of Mali, Burkina Faso,
29:52Niger, Algeria, and Libya. The Fulani are another ethnic group across the Sahel without a single
29:57state of their own who number about 38 million today, an estimated one-third of whom continue
30:03to be fully nomadic, which makes them the largest nomadic pastoral group remaining anywhere in the
30:08contemporary world. And on top of all of these problems, climate change has been exacerbating
30:13the potential for conflict in the region in the 21st century as well. It is estimated that since
30:18the start of the industrial revolution, worldwide temperatures have risen by an average of 2
30:23degrees Fahrenheit or 1.1 degrees Celsius, but the average temperature rise in the Sahel region has
30:28been estimated to be 50% higher than that. Since the mid-20th century, the rapidly increasing
30:34populations in the Sahel have stripped most of the land bare of trees for firewood, while a
30:39corresponding increase in the numbers of cattle present in nomadic herds meant that more of the
30:44Sahel's grass began getting eaten, which, combined with the loss in trees, led to rapidly increasing
30:49soil erosion and increased desertification as the Sahara Desert began expanding southward into the
30:55Sahel like a slow-moving tsunami of sand. Since 1950, the Sahara Desert is believed to have grown
31:02in size by roughly 8% and advanced into the Sahel region by about 100 kilometers or 62 miles,
31:10a trend that is only expected to continue across the rest of the 21st century. When their lands
31:15are flooded by sand and when increased droughts and erosion kills their grasses for grazing, the
31:20nomadic people of the Sahel, like the Tareg or the Fulani, are physically forced to move their
31:25herds onto other areas, usually further south into more traditionally sedentary societies and
31:30cultures, which frequently leads to the opportunity for violence. The Taregs, in particular, have never
31:36really recognized the legitimacy of the post-colonial states that they have always viewed as
31:40being forced upon them. The first Tareg rebellion in the Sahel in the post-colonial era happened in
31:451962, only two years after these countries' theoretical independences from France were granted,
31:52and they've continued periodically ever since. A major Tareg rebellion in northern Mali in 2012
31:58managed to take over the entire north of the country, before declaring their independence
32:02as the so-called State of Azawad before it all got itself co-opted by Islamist forces like Al-Qaeda.
32:08At the time, it appeared to Paris that Al-Qaeda backed militants were on the verge of expanding
32:12from the north of Mali and toppling the entire country, and setting up a jihadist state like
32:18the Taliban's Afghanistan on the doorstep of Europe, which was one of the most catastrophic
32:23challenges to the France-Afrique system that had ever presented itself. If they had been successful,
32:28millions of refugees would have likely fled northward to Europe. The Taregs might have
32:33gotten more ambitious and begun expanding across their other ethnic lands like in Niger,
32:37where France's uranium mines are located that power millions of French homes with electricity.
32:43And so, at the request of the Malian government itself, the French decided to launch a major
32:48military intervention into Mali in 2013 to beat the rebels in Mali back and to restore control
32:54over the entire country to the Malian government. More than 5,000 French troops were rapidly
32:59deployed and quickly re-secured control over the country for the Malian government.
33:04And afterwards, the French settled in for a long counter-insurgency campaign in the Sahel
33:09that was ostensibly in place to push back against Islamist rebels in the area to defend the
33:13sovereignty of states like Mali, Burkina Faso, and Chad, but was also to protect France's
33:19neo-colonial interests in the area like the uranium in Niger and the continuation of the
33:24CFA franc financial system. At its peak, the French counter-insurgency operation in the Sahel
33:30in the late 2010s, codenamed Operation Barhain, had 5,500 deployed French troops assisted by
33:355,000 more troops committed by the Sahel states themselves of Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali,
33:40and Mauritania. But that was only a little more than 10,000 total troops tasked with patrolling
33:45and monitoring a vast area of the African continent, roughly 1.9 million square miles
33:50in area, which is about 60% of the size of the continental 48 United States. They could not
33:56possibly adequately defend this whole area, and so were largely forced to rely on drones and special
34:01forces instead in this huge and sparsely populated expanse of land that the Islamist forces could
34:07always just retreat back into and virtually disappear from sight. And as the years went on,
34:12the Islamist insurgency that began in Mali among the Tareks in 2012 began to creep back to life
34:18and then expanded rapidly into other groups in the Sahel that had long-standing previous grievances
34:23against the system, including among the Fulani. Al Qaeda and later ISIS seized on these people's
34:29deep-seated grievances, and by mid-2015, they were already back in northern and central Mali.
34:34And by 2016, they had expanded their operations across the porous, sparsely populated, and lightly
34:39defended borders into neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger as well. And the scale of violence exploded
34:45to unprecedented levels. Between 2007 and 2022, deaths from terrorism in the Sahel rose by an
34:52almost unbelievable 2,000%, while the epicenter of global terror attacks shifted away from the
34:59Middle East to the tri-point area between the borders of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, which
35:04has since become one of the most dangerous places in the entire world. Since 2015 alone, the year
35:10after the French-led counterinsurgency operation in the Sahel began, around 20,000 people in Burkina
35:15Faso have been killed in terror attacks. And after the French troops were expelled from the country
35:20in 2022, the violence surged even higher to the point where currently in 2024, the country has
35:25become the deadliest in the entire world for terrorism. An Islamist faction in Mali known as
35:30JNIM that's backed by Al Qaeda currently controls a large swath of northwestern Mali along the border
35:36with Mauritania, while another group that calls itself the Islamic State Sahel Province dominates
35:41the tri-point area and large swaths of land across Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. While more moderate,
35:47secular Tariq rebels are back in control over most of the rest of northern Mali again.
35:52Within these countries, frustration steadily mounted at the lack of progress against the
35:56insurgencies that their governments and the French were achieving, which also revived old and hard
36:01feelings in them over the lasting negative impacts of France's neo-colonial practices in the area.
36:06As the insurgencies continued spiraling out of control, many Africans in these countries began
36:11wondering if the French were really there to protect the Africans at all, or if they were
36:16really just there to protect their own continued national interests and the continuation of the
36:20exploitative France-Afrique system that had lingered on for the past 60 years. This building
36:26anti-French sentiment in the Sahel eventually boiled over in Mali by 2021, when a coup led by
36:32military officers brought a new anti-French military regime into power led by a man named
36:37Assimi Goita. In the aftermath, the new government expelled the 1,000 French troops that remained in
36:42the country as a part of France's Sahel-wide counter-insurgency operation, and even severed
36:47their relations with Paris by expelling the French ambassador. And then, immediately sensing the
36:52unique opportunity that this presented, the Russian mercenary Wagner Group that was then
36:57led by Yevgeny Prigozhin stepped in to fill the vacuum that France's sudden departure had caused,
37:03by offering up their own troops to replace the French in Mali's continued fight against the
37:07Islamist insurgencies, to which the Malian junta quickly accepted. And then, before hardly anyone
37:13even knew it, there were 1,000 Russian mercenaries contracted by the Wagner Group deployed into Mali,
37:19and Mali had flipped from being firmly within the French sphere of influence into the Russian.
37:24The Wagner Group's operations in Africa had been a fairly recent development,
37:28dating only back to 2017 when they sent a few advisors and geologists to Sudan to assist the
37:33warlord Hamdan Hamedi de Gallo and his rapid support forces in to acquire access to the
37:38Sudanese gold mines that he controlled. The neighboring Central African Republic then
37:43became the proving ground for Wagner's potential capabilities. The country has been locked in a
37:48civil war for more than a decade ever since 2012, but the country's government began hiring Wagner's
37:54mercenaries for military service in 2017. And by 2021, roughly 2,000 Wagner mercenaries took part
38:01in the government's major counter-offensive and returned most of the country's major towns back
38:06to government control. Wagner's success in the Central African Republic proved to be a valuable
38:11advertisement to other African nations struggling with containing their own rebellions. And it came
38:17just in time after the new anti-French government in Mali took over and expelled their previous
38:23French partners. Wagner happily came to replace them. And then, after Russia invaded Ukraine
38:28shortly afterwards the following year in 2022, and the French began imposing massive sanctions
38:34on Russia, the Wagner Group was also happy to begin fanning the pre-existing flames of
38:39anti-French sentiment across the Sahel to their own benefit too. The Wagner Group, and by extension
38:45Russia, was able to present itself to these countries as a capable and alternative security
38:50partner to France, without any of the colonial and neo-colonial baggage that Paris drags around
38:55with it in the region. And despite the Wagner Group having been accused of committing multiple
38:59war crimes and massacres across Africa, their anti-colonial message was cleverly crafted to
39:05resonate very well with Africans who were already sick of France. After Purgosian's ill-fated mutiny
39:11against the Kremlin in March on Moscow failed, that almost certainly cost him his life in a
39:16supposed plane crash in August of 2023, the Russian government recognized the usefulness of
39:21his operations he had built across Africa, and so they've largely all been reformed now into the
39:26semi-officially named Afrika Korps. This rebranded Wagner Group in Africa is no longer a privately
39:32owned enterprise like it was under Purgosian, but is now directly controlled by the Russian military
39:37intelligence service, the GRU. After further anti-French coups replaced governments in Burkina
39:42Faso in 2022 and in Niger in 2023, the new Afrika Korps has been quick to offer them similar deals
39:50as they have with Mali, which are so-called regime survival packages. Essentially, the Afrika Korps
39:56will send their troops into these countries to protect their leadership and fight against their
40:00insurgencies and rebellions going on in them in exchange for access to their raw materials that
40:05Russia wants, especially gold. Mali and Burkina Faso are the second and third largest producers
40:11of gold in Africa, remaining only behind Ghana. And if their gold productions were combined, they
40:16would be the fourth largest gold producer in the entire world, remaining about equivalent to Canada
40:22and only behind the top three big global gold producers, Australia, Russia, and China. Control
40:28over or access to these gold mines in the Sahel has been a major objective of the Islamists like
40:32Al-Qaeda and ISIS to continue covertly funding their operations, and it's now also a major
40:38objective of the Russian Afrika Korps, who desires to smuggle the gold out of these major mines across
40:43the region's poorest borders back towards Russia itself as a means of covertly evading western
40:49sanctions to keep funding their war effort in Ukraine. In addition to securing Russian access
40:54to raw materials here like gold, the Afrika Korps is also being tasked with disrupting French access
41:00to as much of the same raw materials in the region as possible. Leaked documents have already shown
41:05the Afrika Korps' intentions to weaponize their budding relationship with Niger, to threaten
41:09continued French access to the uranium mines in the country that power more than 12% of France's
41:14electricity. The three main anti-French junta-led Sahel states, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, have
41:20all either welcomed the Afrika Korps into their countries already or are in the process of doing
41:24so in Niger's case, while all French troops from them have been expelled and relations with France
41:29severed. The three states also announced their own new military defense pact called the Alliance of
41:34Sahelian States, and then in January of 2024, they all announced their formal withdrawals from
41:39the ECOWAS regional alliance system months after fears of a war between themselves and the rest of
41:44ECOWAS had largely subsided. And then in February of 2024, the Alliance of Sahelian States began
41:51hosting high-level discussions on further withdrawing from the CFA franc system, with the
41:56new leader of Niger insisting that in order for decolonization from France to be finally completed,
42:02and for Niger to achieve its full sovereignty, it needed to acquire its full monetary sovereignty
42:08back from Paris, which it hasn't ever truly enjoyed for centuries now, while the new leader
42:13of Burkina Faso has vowed that his country will never again be dominated by Europeans.
42:18If they do end up moving forward with abandoning the CFA franc, it will represent the largest
42:24defection from the system that France has ever witnessed in her former colony since the system
42:28was devised in 1945, and they have discussed replacing it with their own new mutual and
42:34independent currency. And whether they are successful or not, their open defiance to
42:38France has already captured the imagination of millions of other Africans living across the
42:44rest of the CFA franc system that have similar long-standing grievances against the way that
42:49the French have treated and exploited them for generations now. It was only a month after Niger's
42:54successful coup that another successful coup broke out in Gabon that finally toppled the 56-year
43:01intensely pro-French dictatorship in the country, dominated by the Bongo family that had been
43:06personally appointed into place in the country by Charles de Gaulle himself. And there's no
43:11telling how many more might happen across the region in the future.