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In a speech on 28 July during a visit to French Polynesia, French President Emmanuel Macron underlined the benefits of French protection in the region, within the framework of France’s Indo-Pacific strategy and with New Caledonia’s impending independence vote in mind. His protection message was directed to leaders of France’s territories in the Pacific and beyond, and indeed to Pacific island leaders generally. Macron invoked France’s nuclear-deterrence capability (based on testing conducted for decades in the Pacific over regional opprobrium) as a plus for France and French Polynesia, and implicitly for the wider region.

France bases its Indo-Pacific strategy on its sovereign presence in the two oceans through its territories, so the timing and location of Macron’s presentation are not surprising. His visit came just months before France’s pre-eminent Pacific possession votes on independence, on 12 December 2021. New Caledonia’s final vote in a three-vote process will be decisive. The previous two referendums, while favouring staying French, saw a steady, indigenous-based, increase in support for independence from 43.3% in 2018 to 47.6% in 2020.

Macron had chosen to announce France’s Indo-Pacific strategy when he visited Noumea to open the referendum process in May 2018, and stressed the importance of a French New Caledonia within that strategy. His Papeete speech followed the public release of a French paper outlining the consequences of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes for New Caledonia’s future and proposing extensive negotiation with France regardless of the referendum outcome. Independence parties, while accepting some partnership with France in the event of independence, have been non-committal on the detail.

In Papeete, Macron sharpened his message to New Caledonians. He addressed them early in his remarks. Stressing that the choice is for them to make, he repeated his 2018 comment that ‘France would be less beautiful without New Caledonia’. By the end of his speech, he left little doubt that a vote for independence risked forgoing the power and protection that France offered. As such, it was a message to New Caledonia and French Polynesia, where there’s also an independence movement.

Macron referred to slow implementation of his own pledges to resolve claims for compensation by victims suffering health effects from France’s nuclear testing in the Hao and Mururoa atolls. Reaffirming his intention to have more cases brought to justice, he referred at length to this recent history, which is sensitive and painful not just for French Polynesians but broadly in the region. It was Pacific Islands Forum countries that led an ultimately successful campaign of international condemnation of French nuclear testing from the 1960s. France ceased testing in 1996.

Macron acknowledged that France had chosen to carry out its nuclear testing in French Polynesia (after testing sites in Algeria were lost in 1962 following a long independence war) because the sites, ‘lost in the middle of the Pacific’, meant fewer consequences than if they had been conducted in metropolitan France. Denying that scientists and military personnel had lied (‘the military had bathed in the same water’), he acknowledged the imperfect assessment of risks, based on imperfect knowledge. He pledged to release all files—except those that ‘could put our deterrence at risk’.

Macron warned of the perils of small Pacific islands losing the protection that a nuclear power like France could offer, in a region where ‘confrontation between two major world powers was playing out’ and where states were subject to wars and pressure for influence that would grow. To be French in this context was an opportunity, he noted, because France had an Indo-Pacific strategy, one of freedom and sustainable, ‘blue’ economic and digital development, preserving biodiversity and the sovereignty of everyone in the Pacific. France had allies in this strategy and had built unique partnerships with each: Australia (an ‘essential partner’), New Zealand, India and Japan.

But, Macron said, ‘I say very clearly, in the time to come, woe betide the small, woe betide the isolated, woe betide those who will undergo influence and attacks from hegemonic powers who will come to seek their fish, their technology, their economic resources. I say clearly: Here is Polynesia. But here, it is France. And you will be protected.’

He noted what was happening in the region, ‘in Vanuatu’ and elsewhere, and said that in the face of ‘siren voices’ promising exotic projects and investment, ‘Let us attach ourselves to the mast, and hold on.’ France would be there to protect French Polynesia and its sovereignty.

Whereas Pacific countries now see France as a constructive regional partner, they have also fully supported self-determination in France’s Pacific territories. None has so far commented on the speech. As for Australia, while it sees France as a valued strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific, it has not taken a position on the outcome of New Caledonia’s referendum process and will respect the result of the vote.

On 8 April, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he will close France’s elite postgraduate school for training public leaders, the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA). Macron, himself an énarque (as graduates are known), says he wants to encourage equal opportunity and national excellence, and respond better to the challenges of Covid-19. But eliminating ENA will likely represent only a negligible step toward this goal.

Ironically, ENA was established in 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle to break up the French elite and overturn a system of patronage and spoils that had produced a corrupt and inefficient public administration. Admission to the school was thus subject to competitive examination, with those winning places offered a salary for their studies.

Similarly, the United Kingdom’s Northcote–Trevelyan reforms a century earlier—which drew on Sir Charles Trevelyan’s experience rooting out corruption in Britain’s Indian civil service, as well as on the example of imperial China—sought to introduce recruitment by open, competitive examination and make promotion merit-based. Subsequently, countries from the United States, Japan and China to Ghana and Nigeria have sought to embed meritocracy in their public administration, many by using examinations.

The problem today is that the examination system no longer serves to identify talent and equalise opportunity, but instead has fuelled a growing market in expensive private preparatory education that benefits wealthier students. So, while 29% of ENA students in the 1950s came from working-class backgrounds, by 2003, it was only 9%.

Likewise, standardised US college-entry tests, originally intended to help top universities diversify their applicant pool beyond rich students from exclusive prep schools, are now seen as ‘a proxy for privilege’. This year, a revolution took place when Covid-19 disruptions meant that university admissions departments had to make test results optional. This led to a huge increase in applications to top schools and to more diverse freshman classes. The University of California, Los Angeles, for example, reported a 48% increase in African American applicants, a 33% increase in Hispanic applicants and a 16% increase in Native American applicants.

In the UK, pupils from private fee-paying schools had until recently been seven times more likely to gain a place at Oxford or Cambridge than those from non-selective state schools. Oxford now uses contextual data that considers students’ individual backgrounds to understand their achievements, which is increasing undergraduate diversity.

Then there is the problem of elite universities themselves relying heavily on examinations to test, drill and rank their students, as ENA famously does (Macron came fifth in his cohort). A more effective approach would focus on the interpersonal skills vital for good public service, such as learning to mobilise, support and encourage others, and discerning people’s abilities. A diverse public service will be a stronger one only if those in charge know how to make diversity a strength.

ENA was a solution to two major challenges. In 1945, France needed to attract the best possible talent into its public administration to rebuild after World War II. Equally, the government needed to comprehend and represent a wide range of citizens, rich and poor, and prove that it could serve them better than communism could.

Today, many governments face a similar task. To build back rapidly from the pandemic (as China is already doing), they must step in after decades of standing back. And they must rebuild public trust in the face of a powerful populist backlash against ‘elitist’ government.

Professional schools’ admissions should therefore reflect what the public sector needs rather than what is administratively convenient. This might mean relying less on test scores and more on alternative measures of ability, which take time, experienced judgement and adequate resources to develop and implement. Educating public leaders will also require public-sector organisations to invest in supporting their employees’ studies, and extensive fundraising so that a diverse range of students can attend.

Keeping these leaders in public service is another challenge. When asked why énarques are increasingly choosing the private sector over public administration, one recent student said that French government ministries were employing big consultancy firms to make strategic decisions that ENA graduates once made.

The French government has signed at least 575 contracts with private consultancies since October 2018, for services ranging from developing economic recovery plans to charting a zero-carbon transition to helping combat Covid-19: McKinsey & Company, not the health ministry, seems to be leading the country’s vaccine rollout. Likewise, the UK’s Covid-19 test-and-trace system was set up almost entirely by consultants and outsourcing firms. The UK government has even turned to consultants to advise it on how to reduce its reliance on consultants.

If governments give the exciting policy work to outside firms, some of the best civil servants will leave. By contrast, smart public agencies, like those in Singapore, give strategically important assignments to their best employees to retain them and develop their skills.

And when politicians and their advisers denigrate ‘bureaucrats’ or ‘the blob’ (as a former UK government adviser described the British civil service), they may well be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the narrative is that the public sector is useless, what hope is there that it will attract or keep outstanding people?

Britain’s successful Covid-19 vaccine rollout has highlighted the benefits of keeping government in the driver’s seat, bolstered by private-sector leaders willing to help pro bono. This arrangement combines the best of the public sector (including factors like people’s trust in the institutions that are vaccinating them) with the advantages of a venture-capital approach to assessing risk and allocating resources.

Three weeks after Macron’s announcement, it’s now clear that he is not abolishing ENA but rather reducing its annual intake (from 80 students to 40) and renaming it. But the challenge for France is to build a public administration ambitious enough to attract people of purpose and talent, but also open enough to recruit from a much wider cross-section of society. Tinkering with ENA will not achieve this.

On 6 June 2020, without fanfare, the chief of the French army, General Thierry Burkhard, released his 10-year strategic vision for the Armée de Terre.

The lack of pomp surrounding the launch of Burkhard’s vision, appropriate to France’s Covid-19 situation, doesn’t diminish its significance. The French chief’s approach clearly conveys prescience, purpose, uncomplicated principles and another point of convergence in the growing partnership between the Armée de Terre and the Australian Army.

Before examining the content and characteristics of Burkhard’s plan, it’s worth reviewing its backdrop.

There is broad acknowledgement that the Armée de Terre is undergoing its most consequential change since its 1996 ‘professionalisation’. Triggered in part by the strategic shock of France’s 2015 terrorist attacks, this transformation encompasses force structure and design, force generation, funded modernisation and human resources.

At the same time, the Australian and French armies are pursuing an enhanced bilateral partnership founded on shared missions, agreements, objectives, philosophies, values, programs, opportunities, challenges and geography.

Reflecting its substantial territorial holdings in the Indo-Pacific, its perspective of the near region’s potential and its longstanding leadership ambition, France is actively reinforcing its regional presence, posture and pursuit of both common and unilateral objectives. This reinforcement is manifesting in cooperation between the Armée de Terre’s highly capable elements in New Caledonia and the Australian Army’s combat formations and training centres.

Prescience is a key feature of the Burkhard manifesto. Consistent with Australia’s recent defence strategic update and the army chief’s command statement, the general paints a bleak picture of the coming decade. He acknowledges mounting pressure on the European project and the international status quo, increasing employment of emerging technologies for coercive and disruptive means, the acceleration of ‘grey zone’ activities, and escalating internal tensions.

In addition, consistent with the French army’s prognosis on future land warfare, Burkhard infers the end of three prevailing premises: Western military superiority, the trend of limited wars, and efficiency as the cornerstone of political–military thinking. In this context, ‘efficiency’ means deploying the best-tailored forces, drawn from compact techno-professional armies, to achieve a disproportionate political, operational and reputational impact—with the bare minimum of boots on the ground.

Finally, Burkhard portends high-intensity, multidomain, state-on-state conflict, testing France’s resilience in a manner unseen since World War II, triggered well within traditional warning times.

In response, he presents the Armée de Terre as central to France’s enduring security, stability and prosperity. Burkhard communicates a resolute purpose for the army. He seeks to strengthen its ability to operate, lead, fight and win—no matter the threat or contingency. His goal is for a reinforced land force whose legions are characterised by superior warfighting mass and technology that can rapidly deploy, readily integrate, adapt and persist across all domains. Remarkably, he identifies the Armée de Terre as a strategic capability in its own right—a deterrent role (and prestige) traditionally reserved for France’s nuclear maritime and air forces.

Burkhard articulates four actionable and uncomplicated principles to strengthen the Armée de Terre’s preparedness. Recognising that the French soldier is at the heart of its capability, the first principle is to optimise the potential and professionalism of the army’s people. Second, the army will master the new capabilities and technologies offered by its unprecedented modernisation, ‘changing the way it operates and fights’. A transformation in the level, frequency and intensity of multidomain warfighting and partnership-oriented training is probably the most avant-garde aspect of Burkhard’s vision. It’s the key he will use to unlock his ambition for a land force characterised by superior mass and technology. The French chief identifies this endeavour as his most important to ensure the army’s future readiness. Finally, he seeks to reduce the Armée de Terre’s ‘bureaucratic tempo’, thereby gaining time and improving internal agility, flexibility and responsiveness.

Supporting Burkhard’s approach is an action plan involving 12 projects. These incorporate human resources, modernisation, innovation, doctrine, training, sustainment, reserve force and process reforms.

It may surprise some that in most aspects, and certainly the ones that matter most, Burkhard’s vision for the Armée de Terre is nearly indistinguishable from his Australian counterpart’s intent statements. There’s also an affinity between the French chief’s prescience, purpose and plan and that conveyed by Australia’s recent defence strategic update and force structure plan—particularly the elements referring to strategic context and land power response. This convergence bodes well for two armies committed to working together in pursuit of compatible interests in Australia’s increasingly contested region and beyond.

During this time of national catastrophe in Australia, messages of solidarity have been pouring in from friends all over the world. For me, many have come from French friends in Europe and the Pacific.

My response includes the hope that this disaster may reinvigorate Australia both to continue to fulfil its international environmental commitments and to work with its friends to urge all jurisdictions to meet the global challenges of climate change, particularly those with a major impact, such as China, the US, the EU and India.

China, India and France (through its territories) are all, like Australia, located in what’s now called the ‘Indo-Pacific’. I have argued that Australia’s idea of the Indo-Pacific is a murky one. The concept better serves the interests of subscribers with global leadership pretensions, such as India and France, than our own. This is because, while Australia plays the handling of China within the Indo-Pacific concept with ambiguity, others overtly push the idea of clubbing together to ‘balance’ China. None of them has China as its number one trading partner as we do. And, while our regional cooperation with South Pacific neighbours hasn’t been perfect, arguably France, India and the US all have less successful records in their own immediate regional neighbourhoods. India, for example, engaged in war with its neighbour, China, in the 1960s.

France came on board the Indo-Pacific concept with an announcement by visiting President Emmanuel Macron at Garden Island in May 2018, which at the time puzzled many observers who had never considered his idea of a strategic arc from Paris through New Delhi to Canberra. His main game became clearer to those new to French Pacific policy when he went on to use the concept in New Caledonia as a way to nudge voters who were soon to vote for or against remaining French.

While Australia dances around the idea of who is part of the Indo-Pacific, and whether or not China is included, Macron was up front. Remain with France, he told New Caledonians, and you will have a strong capability to resist the encroaching influence of a hegemonic China at your doorstep. New Caledonians voted 57% to stay with France (however, the remaining 43% comprised virtually the entire population of indigenous Kanaks, making the next two possible votes on independence before 2022 a matter of ongoing interest).

Macron’s decision to make his announcement in the South Pacific was no accident. From the 1990s, when French senior officials routinely denied any strategic motivators for determinedly retaining France’s string of overseas possessions, particularly in the Pacific, a series of French public analyses has highlighted the value of those possessions in extending France’s influence (what it calls rayonnement) and in engaging it in parts of the world that are becoming more significant as great-power balances change and new resources are in ever-growing demand.

France has exerted considerable effort in the past 20 years to restore a positive image in the Pacific, where it was seen as a pariah in the 1970s and 1980s for its nuclear testing there and for rejecting demands for independence. It has worked with Australia and New Zealand in disaster management and fisheries intelligence-sharing in the FRANZ arrangement, conducts regular defence exercises with them and other island armies, and participates in the Pacific Islands Forum and the South Pacific Commission. It has also not shirked from using its approach on climate change, which is more similar to that of the island governments than to Australia’s, to shore up its regional position, providing helpful support (albeit small-scale relative to Australian assistance even in this contentious space).

While Australia, like regional governments, values the constructive role of France and, probably more than most, sees strategic benefit in France’s positive engagement, including in the ‘Indo-Pacific’, Canberra doesn’t set its regional activities so overtly against China as does France.

The eyes of the world have somewhat uncustomarily turned towards Australia as millions of hectares burn. Along with sympathy, overseas demonstrations cast blame directly at alleged Australian government policy insufficiency.

The Australian government should direct its diplomats overseas, as they express appreciation for the sympathy of overseas governments, to defend and reaffirm the national record in fulfilling commitments, and to seize this opportunity to urge all governments to address global environmental concerns practically.

Here, the Indo-Pacific dynamic takes on a new potential role. Surely Australia can work with France—a prominent champion in combating environmental threats—to urge major emissions contributors (India, the US, and, yes, China) to make an Indo-Pacific environmental effort. Apart from having a real impact on emissions, this could lend a more inclusive, cooperative and enduring purpose to the Indo-Pacific concept than has been evident to date.

French President Emmanuel Macron is one of those leaders who wants to bend the arc of history. Having upended French politics, he has secured positions for his preferred candidates at the head of the European Commission and the European Central Bank, and is now trying to improve Europe’s relationship with Russia.

French officials are comparing Macron’s Russia strategy to US President Richard Nixon’s opening up to China in 1972. But Macron’s diplomatic overture is more like Nixon in reverse. Rather than wooing China in order to contain the Soviets, Macron wants to ‘ease and clarify [Europe’s] relations with Russia’ in order to prevent Russia from cosying up to China. In so doing, he hopes to secure Europe’s control over its own future.

Macron launched his bid for a new security architecture in a typically grandiose fashion, mirroring the urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s project to redesign Paris in the 19th century. His first move was to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Fort de Brégançon near Toulon before the August G7 summit in Biarritz. But the French ministers charged with implementing the plan have since turned it on its head.

Now, rather than starting with a top-down agenda, they are trying to build European security from the bottom up, while pursuing improved relations with Russia one brick at a time. The French roadmap focuses on five key areas: disarmament, security dialogue, crisis management, values and common projects.

In late August, Macron delivered a speech outlining his vision of a system of ‘concentric circles’ comprising varying degrees of European and Eurasian integration. Such an arrangement would have to secure NATO and EU member states’ borders, allow for a more productive relationship with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union and offer ways to manage regional conflicts, not least the one in Ukraine.

The timing of the initiative makes sense. Like Macron himself, Ukraine’s recently elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, created a political party out of nothing and came to power on the promise of sweeping away a discredited ancien régime. More to the point, Zelensky has made resolving Ukraine’s security situation a top priority.

Macron believes that Russia’s gravitation towards China is at least partly the result of Western mismanagement. He is not naive about the Kremlin’s territorial aggression and election interference. But any country in a position to pose such threats to Europe, he believes, must be engaged face to face. As one French official explained to me, ‘What is true of Iran and North Korea is also true for Russia. We won’t be able to influence it and lead it to more responsible behaviour if we just hide behind a wall of sanctions.’

Adding further urgency to Macron’s efforts is US President Donald Trump, who has confirmed France’s Gaullist suspicions about America’s unreliability as a guarantor of European security. As the US escalates its conflict with China, it inevitably will pay less attention to Europe and the surrounding neighbourhood (the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa). Worse, the French fear that Trump might pursue a grand bargain with Russia, leaving the European Union hemmed in between the US and China.

Macron’s biggest concern is Europe itself. The EU will never become a global player in the 21st century if it continues to be divided and boxed in by other powers. In Macron’s view, recasting Europe’s relationship with Russia is the first step towards securing European sovereignty. ‘If you don’t have a seat at the great power table’, one French official tells me, ‘it’s because you’re on the menu’. To be sure, the French understand other Europeans’ support for the sanctions imposed on Russia following its annexation of Crimea and incursion into Eastern Ukraine; but they fear the flimsiness of Europe’s broader security policy.

Ideally, the EU should pursue a two-pronged approach to Russia, combining sanctions and NATO’s deterrence with engagement. The French complaint is that there are no meaningful channels for such engagement, and that sanctions don’t address the overall threat that Russia poses. ‘What would happen to European unity’, French officials wonder, ‘if Moscow made a move on Ukraine or Syria and some member states decided to block sanctions renewal?’ Most likely, it would spell the end of the EU’s Russia policy.

Still, Macron’s initiative raises many questions. Whether Putin has any interest in resolving the Ukraine conflict remains to be seen. And even if Europe is capable of detaching Russia from China, it’s unclear whether the Trump administration would stand by and let the European initiative play out.

But the biggest questions are on the European front. Many Central and Eastern European countries worry that they will be second-class citizens in Macron’s framework of ‘concentric circles’. Others fear that Macron will sell out Ukraine by forcing it to settle the conflict on Russia’s terms. And it doesn’t help that Macron launched his initiative without first consulting other Europeans, many of whom are already anxious about America’s waning commitment to EU security.

French officials pointed out that Nixon didn’t consult US allies before embarking on his mission to China. But Nixon’s credibility as a security hawk was unquestioned, whereas France is regarded suspiciously by some in Central and Eastern Europe, who fear that their interests, too, might be sacrificed in a neo-Gaullist attempt to claim a spot on the world stage.

If Macron is to succeed, he will have to prove that he’s committed to the sovereignty and security not just of Central and Eastern Europe, but also of ex-Soviet countries such as Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. He will also have to pursue deeper collaboration with the Nordic and Baltic states, as well as with the relevant EU institutions and its new high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Josep Borrell. Above all, Macron’s initiative must create a credible platform for a common approach to security. If it is seen as favouring some countries over others, it and its author will end up on the menu, rather than in the history books.