Name: Why France is Actually Preparing for War With Russia
Uploaded: 2026-03-22T17:07:38.000Z
Duration: 48 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

As most of the world's attention remains focused on the major wars still ongoing in Ukraine and Gaza, there is another massive proxy war going on right now between the French and the Russians across the African continent that also has the potential to send shockwaves around the entire rest of the world for a moment Last July, in 2023, the world's attention was briefly focused on this emerging proxy war between Moscow and Paris when military officers in Niger, a large landlocked country in West Africa, orchestrated a coup d' etat and overthrew the country's government.

Adverbs of manner

It was a particularly shock element because Niger was the sixth country in only three years since 2020 in Africa's Sahel region to experience its government getting successfully overthrown in a coup following the previous successful coups that toppled governments in Mali in 2020 and 2021, in Chad, Sudan and Guinea, all in 2021, then in Burkina Faso in 2022, and

then finally in Niger in 2023, which established this continuous belt of recently couped countries across the whole of Africa, from the Red Slave to the Atlantic, a geopolitical region that some analysts have started to controversially refer to as Africa's coup belt.

And after the coup overthrew the government in Niger In July of 2023, another coup broke out nearby in Gabon only a month later in August, that overthrew the longtime government there as well.

The coup belt overlaps some of the most violent conflicts going on in the world that tragically fail to attract the international attention that they deserve.

With an apocalyptic civil war still raging in Sudan between rival generals that exploded in April of 2023, and

with large swaths of territory across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger currently dominated by radical Islamist factions like ISIS and Al Qaeda that might be on the brink of unilaterally declaring their own independent jihadist states.

After the collapse of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and

after the expulsion of Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, both groups have reformed themselves and re centered their primary territorial bases of operations away from the Middle EAS wards, here in the Sahel region.

Amidst the chronic instability in the coup belt and tens of thousands of people have lost their lives and millions more have been displaced in the process.

For the very first time since the Global Terrorism Index began Compiling records 13 years ago, a country other than Afghanistan or Iraq climbed into the number one spot for deadly terror attacks in 2023.

And it wasn't Israel, even after the widely publicized scale of Hamas's October 7th attack, it was Burkina Faso who suffered nearly 2000 deaths from terrorism in 2020.

Three alone that represented nearly a quarter of all terrorism related deaths worldwide and represented a surge of terrorism related violence in the country, up 68% compared to 2022.

And neighboring Mali wasn't far behind it in third place overall, suffering more deadly terrorism in 2023 than either Pakistan or Syria.

This has made the tripoint border region between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger the new epicenter of global terrorism in first century.

As much of it has fallen under the direct control of either ISIS or Al Qaeda.

There is a genuine fear that many of these countries may be on the verge of imminent state collapse.

And with the sole exception of Sudan, who has its own problems, all of these unstable and fragile countries in Africa's coup belt are former and arguably still current economic if not political colonies of France that in nearly every case we're home to thousands of French troops who are ostensibly there fighting against the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda, but

who are also there to defend major French economic interests before the coup leaders took power and expelled them from the country.

Since the coups overthrew governments in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, French troops and even the French ambassadors have all been collectively expelled as a wave of anti French sentiment sweeps across the continent.

And in nearly every instance, the expulsion of French troops and French ambassadors have been met with a welcoming of hundreds to even thousands of new Russian troops from the mercenary Wagner group and the newly rebranded Russian Afrika Korps to fight against the ongoing insurgencies.

Instead, as the spaces on the board in West Africa begin rapidly shifting like falling dominoes away from France's sphere of influence and towards Russia's, it's a complicated proxy war that overlaps the struggles between West African nations, tribes and ethnicities themselves that is directly challenging France's long profitable and largely invisible neocolonial domination over their former directly ruled colonies in Africa that has continued on for generations after most Westerners believed it all ended, it is directly threatening the foundation that France has built its prosperity upon for centuries.

And it appears to be a theater of Russia's war with the west that Moscow is currently winning and that hardly anybody in the Western world ever reports on or really even understands.

And so, in order for you to understand why Russia is beating France here, why the Sahel region of Africa has become so unstable in the 2000 and 20s, and

why it's all so important to the outcome of both Europe and Africa's future, it helps to understand the uniquely exploitative history of French colonialism in Africa and the uniquely long lasting vestiges of French neocolonialism in Africa that have persisted long past all of the other former European colonial regimes in Africa into the present day, and

how this all intersects with geography, climate change, and Russia's own current geopolitical objectives.

Ambitions the Sahel region is a very long and narrow band of arid land that runs across the African continent for more than 3,500 kilometers, or 2,200 miles from the Red Sea in the east to the Atlantic in the west.

It is a biogeographical transitional zone between the vast deserts of the Sahara to the north and the wet savannas and rainforests further to the south.

And its name, Sahel, is derived from the Arabic word for shoreline, the shore of the sandy Sahara Sea.

Across thousands of years of history, inland trading ports on this shore of the Sahara made the region an epicenter of global trade and one of the wealthiest regions in the world.

Cities like Timbuktu and Gao in modern day Mali became major trading hubs in the medieval period between sub Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean, as vast camel trains carried the region's natural and human resources like gold, ivory, and

slaves northward and luxury goods southward, which brought enough wealth and prosperity to the Sahel that Timbuktu was once one of the biggest cities in the world in the 14th century, and

it was the core of the empire of Mansa Musa, who is often regarded as potentially having been the richest human being to have ever lived.

But then, Beginning in the 15th century, European trading vessels began sailing down the African west coast and opened up new maritime trading routes for these resources between sub Saharan Africa and the European world.

Instead, the trade routes shifted from the inland ports in Timbuktu and Gao towards the new maritime ports in places like Ghana and Ivory Coast.

And the economic fortunes of the Sahel began declining over the following centuries.

By the time of the Berlin Conference in the late 19th century, the relatively small French colonial empire in Africa that had already been established in modern day Algeria, Senegal, and

Gabon was dramatically expanded along arbitrary lines to cover nearly the entirety of the continent's west and the vast majority of the Sahel region.

The French colonial empire then rapidly expanded across the continent without taking into consideration the historically important overland camel trading routes that were still important for the region's nomadic peoples, who had no concept of nation states or settled societies.

Nor did the French take into account biogeographic realities like the ecological differences between the Sahara, the Sahel, and

And nor did the French take into account the boundaries of various ethnic groups or consider the differences between nomadic groups and settled Groups.

The French colonial authorities, like the rest of the Europeans who carved up Africa at the time, were exclusively interested in acquiring the region's rich natural resources, establishing their own authority and crushing local political rulers.

And unlike other 19th and 20th century European colonial projects in Africa, the French went so far as to declare in 1848 that Algeria was being annexed directly into the French nation itself.

Algeria therefore extended beyond a mere colony from the perspective of Paris, and

for more than a century until the 1960s, it was regarded as a core integral part of France.

Hundreds of thousands of European French settlers came to colonize Algeria following the 1848 annexation, to the point where by 1959, still under French control, there were around 1.4 million French settlers present in Algeria, who represented about 13% of Algeria's entire population at the time.

After the conclusion of World War II, in which France had been occupied by Nazi Germany for years, the French economy was in ruins and France's post war leaders sought to use their vast colonial project in Africa to maintain their status as a global great power going forward and to try competing with the Americans and the Soviets as much as possible.

Part of this included France's idea to push back against the US dominated global financial system that emerged after the war by establishing a brand new currency for all of their African colonies in 1945 that they called the CFA franc, an acronym that in French stood for the French Colonies in Africa Franc.

The CFA franc to be used in France's African colonies was to be pegged directly to the French currency, the French Franc, in a way that was deliberately designed to strengthen the French franc against the US Dollar.

In the post war world, the French franc was devalued near the end of 1945 in order to establish a fixed exchange rate with the US dollar.

And by 1948 the CFA franc was paid to the French franc at a rate of 2 French francs to 1 CFA franc, which spared the CFA franc from going through the same devaluation as the French franc did and deliberately overvalued the CFA franc relative to the French franc.

Essentially, what this meant in practice was that the colonies using the CFA franc would experience higher costs to export their raw materials to anywhere that wasn't France, since France would benefit from the frictionless conversion between their currencies which ultimately crushed the competitiveness of CFA frank user exports to anywhere that wasn't very France, while at the same time it also made the colonies imports of manufactured Goods from France less expensive than from anywhere else, which essentially enabled France to import raw materials from their African colonies for below market rates and then sell them back finished products for above market rates.

And with the direct convertibility of the CFA franc being directly paid to the French franc, French companies could open up mines and operations in the colonies and extract their resources while easily sending their profits back home to France without the fear of foreign exchange fluctuations.

It was a great system and deal for the French and it enabled Paris to partially fund their post World War II economic recovery through a rather sly wealth transfer from their African colonies to themselves.

But by the mid-1950s, there was increasing sentiment rising among the Africans for their independence from Europe.

In the beginning, France initially responded to these calls for independence in their colonies with overwhelming violence.

In 1954, Algeria rose up in a revolution to shake off the French settler colonial project there.

And what followed was a brutal seven year war for independence.

The French were particularly ruthless in crushing the Algerian independence movement because Paris still officially considered Algeria to be a core integral territory of France itself.

The French army committed brutal and wide scale massacres and other atrocities across Algeria and across the seven years of war, it's estimated that around 1 million Algerians were killed, at least 8,000 Algerian villages were destroyed and more than 2 million Algerians were rounded up and placed into French run concentration camps.

The French also treated the sparsely populated Algerian Sahara as their testing ground for nuclear weapons during the war as well, testing and detonating a total of 17 nukes in the country between 1960 and 1966 that exposed thousands of locals to radiation.

Over time, the Algerian war's brutality and high cost gradually turned French public opinion against it, as did international support for the war from France's allies like the United States, which eventually forced France to concede and grant Algeria its independence in 1962, which led to a mass exodus of more than 900,000 of the French settlers who lived in Algeria back to metropolitan France who were terrified of suffering Algerian reprisals.

And as all of this brutality and horror was very publicly going on for the whole world to see in Algeria, France began attempting to hang on to the rest of their African colonies through more covert, less expensive, less bloody and less internationally damaging methods.

After Having pressed the CFA franc currency on them in 1945, the French essentially hijacked and co opted genuine independence movements in the rest of their West African colonies by courting, influencing and placing their hand picked local elites into positions of power as essentially puppets before offering them their theoretical independence.

Each of these colonies were then offered so called cooperation agreements by Paris that would define their future relationship with France going forward post independence.

These agreements differed from colony to colony.

They sometimes granted French companies continued privileged access to their natural resources.

They sometimes enabled the French to continue maintaining military bases in their countries.

But they always advised the colonies to continue remaining within the CFA frank financial system.

The colonies accepting these cooperation agreements and remaining within the CFA Franc system after 1958 was and has always been presented by the French as being a supposedly completely voluntary arrangement where they were all free to say yes or no post independence.

But the French also made it extremely clear what would end up happening to any of these future countries post independence if they rejected the arrangement.

Guinea was the only one of France's colonies in Africa who flat out rejected France's offers post independence in 1958, including remaining within the CFA franc system.

With Guinea's then leader, Sekou Touret defiantly declaring during a speech in front of France's then president Charles de Gaulle, that he preferred to be poor in freedom rather than rich in slavery.

And the French decided to make as painful an example out of him and of guinea as possible.

The French agreed to fully withdraw from guinea and granted them their independence early.

But on the way out, they deliberately tore down and destroyed everything that they could that they considered to have been French contributions to guinea society.

They destroyed machinery, burned their plans for the capital's sewage system, destroyed their medicine rather than leave it behind, and

even unscrewed their light bulbs in their offices and took them all back to France.

All French foreign aid to guinea was eliminated.

And after guinea subsequently turned towards the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc for financial experts to help them develop their own independent currency, in 1959, the French took it as a direct threat to their CFA frink system.

And so they began flooding guinea with counterfeited Guinean currency to try and generate hyperinflation and crash their economy.

And they even started to begin arming Guinean rebels.

And when responding to other threats in Africa against their neocolonial system, the French responded with similar violent methods.

A Cameroonian anti colonialist leader of the era named Felix Roland Morny was assassinated by the French secret service in Switzerland in 1960.

Using a method evoking the current assassinations carried out by Vladimir Putin against his enemies in Europe, they poisoned him with radioactive thallium and gave him an agonizingly painful death.

In 1957, just before the colonies began getting offered their deals on independence, French geologists discovered large uranium reserves in a remote part of northern Niger.

And as it turned out, Niger had the seventh largest known reserves of uranium in the entire world and the highest quality uranium ore that has ever been discovered on the African continent.

Initially, the French wanted continued access to this uranium in Niger to develop their own independent nuclear weapons arsenal so that they could achieve strategic autonomy from both the United States and the Soviet Union.

But later on, they also wanted continued access to Niger's uranium to power their burgeoning nuclear energy industry.

The first commercial French owned uranium mines in Niger were opened in 1971, and

Niger's uranium has ever since become a majorly important component of France's energy strategy.

No other country in the world has pursued nuclear power as aggressively as the French have, to the point where today in 2024, the country is home to 56 nuclear reactors and 18 separate nuclear power plants that generate roughly 63% of France's total electricity output.

In order to fuel them and continue generating all of that electricity, France currently requires around 8,000 tons of raw uranium ore per year.

And without any uranium within France's own borders, all of it has to be imported from abroad.

Kazakhstan is by far the modern world's single largest producer of uranium, accounting for 43% of the entire world's production of it as of 2022.

While Niger, by comparison on a global scale, is a fairly minor player, producing only about 5% of the world's supply.

But because of the way that the CFA franc financial system has always worked in France's former colonies, for decades, decades after their theoretical independence, Niger's exports have always been expensive and uncompetitive, unless they are exported to France, who was able to use their own undervalued currency that was pegged to the overvalued CFA franc to purchase them for below their market value.