As al Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb expanded its reach after 2007, France was largely focused elsewhere in the world, pulled in multiple directions between dwindling resources for defense and security and waning public support for French operations in Afghanistan. The key French national security document of the period, the 2008 White Paper on Defense and Security, depicted an “Arc of Instability” stretching from the Atlantic, across Africa, through the Middle East and into South Asia as a primary geographical zone of trouble. It deemed a major terrorist attack in France or Europe as the single biggest threat the nation faced, especially if a terrorist group managed to get its hands on a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon of some kind. Yet, in keeping with the 2006 White Paper on Counter-Terrorism, produced by the Ministry of Interior, the 2008 paper pointed toward a counterterrorism strategy that focused primarily on national police, detection, and domestic response. Specialized military units were to intervene outside France “when needed,” yet such operations fell under the least important of four possible overseas operations (“special,” “medium,” “significant,” and “major”).

Between 2008 and 2012, the French thus eschewed large-scale military intervention to counter the jihadists in the Sahel, relying instead on indirect negotiations with the jihadists and small-scale, special-operations raids undertaken jointly with West African partners. For years, indeed, up until the intervention itself, the mantra in France, as in the United States, was that Africans themselves had to take the lead against the terrorist groups. Additional French “boots on the ground” were out of the question. French leaders were looking to shrink the French military footprint in Africa, not expand it.

THE IRAQ WAR AND FRENCH VIEWS ON MILITARY INTERVENTION

History, after all, taught that there were good reasons not to rush into a military intervention. The most significant foreign policy development in transatlantic relations after the 9/11 attacks was French-led European opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. French opposition had been as adamant as it was vociferous.