PARIS: France\u2019s President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday he was still waiting for Africa\u2019s Sahel states to thank Paris for stopping them falling into the hands of militants and he dismissed suggestions his country had been forced out of the region.<\/p>\n
Speaking to French ambassadors at an annual conference on foreign policy for 2025, Macron said France had been right to intervene in 2013 to fight militants even if those same states had now moved away from French military support.
\n\u201cI think that they forgot to thank us, but that\u2019s ok, it will come in time,\u201d Macron said ironically.
\nFrench troops have in recent years pulled out of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso after successive military coups and are in the process of withdrawing from Chad, Senegal and Ivory Coast.
\n\u201cNone of them would have a sovereign state if the French army had not deployed in this region,\u201d Macron said.
\nMacron dismissed the notion that Paris had been kicked out of the region, saying it had decided to re-organize its strategy.
\n\u201cNo, France is not on the back foot in Africa, it is just lucid and reorganizing itself,\u201d he said.
\nMacron extended an olive branch to US President-elect Donald Trump, declaring that France is \u201ca solid ally\u201d as he outlined his vision for global diplomacy in 2025 during his address to French ambassadors.
\n\u201cDonald Trump knows that he has a solid ally in France, an ally he does not underestimate, one who believes in Europe and carries a lucid ambition for the transatlantic relationship,\u201d Macron said at the Elysee Palace, emphasizing France\u2019s commitment to fostering cooperation while urging European nations to fortify their unity and resilience.
\n\u201cIf we decide to be weak and defeatist, there is little chance we will be respected by the United States under President Trump,\u201d he warned.
\nMacron\u2019s speech, delivered against a backdrop of geopolitical turmoil, laid out France\u2019s foreign policy priorities, spanning the Ukraine war, European defense, and the Middle East.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PARIS: France\u2019s President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday he was still waiting for Africa\u2019s Sahel states to thank Paris for stopping them falling into the hands of militants and he dismissed suggestions his country had been forced out of the region. Speaking to French ambassadors at an annual conference on foreign policy for 2025, Macron …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":75293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75294,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75280\/revisions\/75294"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}