France wants European rapid reaction force with 5,000 troops in 2025 – Current affairs

“It is a fundamental issue and one on which I hope we can reach a conclusion next year, being very reactive and very fast”, said Sébastien Lecornu in an interview with the France 2 television channel.

The minister insisted that this rapid reaction force, “to put European, Portuguese, Italian, German and French citizens to safety”, must be able to be created “very quickly”.

According to Lecornu, the objective of this project is to “put forces in a position to contribute” to “be reactive in the event of a crisis”, and added that there would be no loss of sovereignty for the countries involved, which would maintain control over their military devices. .

Sébastien Lecornu justified this project with the fact that there are “many crises in which NATO does not have the competence to act and in which France often carries out operations alone”.

The minister gave as an example the evacuation of European citizens in countries in crisis, as happened in Sudan in April 2023, when Paris mobilized military planes and ships to evacuate more than a thousand foreigners of more than 80 different nationalities, including just over 200 French citizens.

Lecornu considered that operations like this (called Sagittaire) in Khartoum, in the capital of Sudan, with many countries involved, it should be natural to share the burden, which “has a price and a value”, among European countries.

“We have missions that are militarized, but that NATO does not need to know about for a series of reasons, and about which we now say ‘let’s do it in Europe’, and that, for us, is pragmatism”, stated the minister.

This “European rapid reaction force” was one of the initiatives launched on Thursday by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, in a long speech at the Sorbonne University, in Paris, in which he defended the relaunch of the European Union (EU), in the context of elections for the European Parliament in June.

In his speech, the French President presented his vision for Europe, focusing mainly on defense and economic and trade policies, after taking stock of the EU since 2017.

Macron stated that Europeans cannot rely solely on the support of the United States for their defense, because for Washington “it is not the priority” and, without going so far as to ask for the creation of a European army, he called for “strategic intimacy ” in the military domain among EU member states.

The French President explained that it is necessary to “increase defense spending”, suggesting a European loan to finance the defense effort, in addition to applying “European preference in the purchase of military equipment”, as well as accelerating the integration of armies in the face of to threats such as Russia, with which there has been an increase in tensions in recent weeks due to the support provided by France to Ukraine.

All this is based on the idea that Europe is “mortal” and that it “can die” or be “relegated”, as highlighted by the French head of state in the same intervention.