The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why France and Azerbaijan Are Fighting Over New Caledonia || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

It's no surprise that the French like to be "involved" in as many places as possible, but what's going on with the current rebellion in the French protectorate of New Caledonia? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/france-and-azerbaijan-fighting-over-new-caledonia

Nothing says power politics quite like a castle. So I thought this backdrop would be a great way to talk about. The Southwest Pacific. Specifically, we've got a rebellion going on in the province of New Caledonia. It's an island that's a French protectorate slash colony. And we're starting to see people walking around with flags of Azerbaijan. So, you know, this requires a little bit of unpack. So first of all, this is a territory that survived as a French protectorate,

even after the rest of the colonies were hived off. on purpose or not in the aftermath of World War II during the decolonization period. The French hung onto New Caledonia for two reasons. Number one, strategic positioning in the Southwest Pacific, gives them a leg in that part of the world. And second, and from an economic point of view, far more importantly, New Caledonia is the third largest mine for nickel in the world. Nickel, obviously, is using stainless steel and of late. It's becoming far more important for green transition technologies, everything from solar to electrical grade steel to electric, vehicles. Now, New Caledonia's had kind of a rough time over the last few decades because their

nickel isn't all that economically viable. The mines are the best in the world and far more importantly, it takes a lot of energy to process nickel and to be perfectly blunt if you're on a small island of the South Pacific energy is really, really expensive. So it hasn't broken even for much of the last 30 years and even companies like Glencore, which are, how should I put this, typically not bound by a lot of ethical concerns are in the process of trying to get out. But, but, but, but, but, but if the green transition really does happen, we need 10 times as much nickel,

and that's going to change the math for pretty much everything involving the island, which is why we've got the unrest right now. There's an independence movement that is gaining steam and the French are in the process of making sure that it cannot succeed so they've changed the electoral loss. It used to be that if you, had been in the province on the island for more than 25 years, you could vote local elections. And that gave the local kind of minority, majority status. But the French were in the process

of changing that, so you only had to have lived there for 10 years. And if you include all the mainland French imports to the island that have moved in the last decade, all this, or in the last 15 years, you got a very different picture and the independence movement will never succeed. So that's what's going on to the French point of view. That's what's going on from the island point of view. That just leaves the Azerbaijani flags. As we talked about recently, France is getting involved in the Caucasus, specifically helping out Armenia where it can diplomatically, thinking that that's going to give them a leg up in the Caucasus, and that might provide them with some diplomatic heft that they're losing in West Africa. Azerbaijan's on the other side of that conflict. Asbrajan and Armenia fought a number of wars, and at the moment, Azerbaijan's doing a lot better for a number of reasons, twice the population, 20 times.

the economic strength, much more powerful military, and has recently kicked the Armenians' ass in a couple of regional wars. Well, so France mucking about in Armenia has triggered a counter-response with Azerbaijan now munkinging around in New Caledonia. Now, Azerbaijan brings nothing to this fight. They have no experience in supporting dissidents. They don't know how to do paramilitary attacks at all, but what they do have is a metric butt-tut of money. This is a country with barely 10 million people who have a million barrels per day of oil exports and they can throw a lot of cash at a lot of things at a lot of places if they want to. And for their first big trick, they're trying to sponsor a revolution in the South Pacific just to piss France off. It's working.