France wants to bolster efforts to fight terrorism in West Africa through a United Nations-backed force. The U.S. doesn’t want to get stuck with the bill, reports Bloomberg.
France circulated a draft UN resolution on June 6 authorizing the deployment of a five-country African military force that would “use all necessary means” to combat terrorist organizations in the Sahel, a semiarid region stretching along the southern end of the Sahara from the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea that has become a haven for groups linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
Usually France, the U.S. and the U.K. team up to persuade Russia and China -- the other members of the veto-wielding Security Council -- to support their initiatives, but this time it’s two historic allies struggling to agree. The French goal conflicts with a key Trump administration objective: scaling back UN deployments as part of a broader effort to rein in spending. The U.S. pays about 28 percent of the UN’s $7.9 billion peacekeeping budget.
“The dispute appears to be mostly about money,” said Richard Atwood, the New York director of the International Crisis Group. “The U.S. is worried that a Security Council resolution might open the door to funding at a time when cutting back their UN funding is a priority.”
President Emmanuel Macron’s government wants to cement gains made by the deployment of French forces to Mali in 2013 to drive out fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups, which had seized key cities in the country’s north, while eventually being able to draw down the approximately 4,000 French troops that remain.
French-U.S. tensions are nothing new in diplomacy, but Macron and President Donald Trump have found little common ground on issues such as climate change and the role of the European Union. They even appeared to engage in brinkmanship, of sorts, over a tight handshake in May.
But a public rebuff by the U.S. of the French call for the peacekeeping force would be a new low.
“A U.S. veto would be a major blow to France,” said Martin Quencez, a senior program officer in the Paris office of the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. “A U.S. refusal based purely on stinginess would be very serious and means this won’t be the last standoff.”
The U.S. doesn’t think a formal UN authorization is needed to create the force and believes the French proposal is too broad, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because negotiations are continuing. Washington’s contribution to UN peacekeeping is more than the combined payments by China, Japan and Germany, the next three largest contributors.