1 SEPTEMBER 2022 - CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC ON THE OCCASION OF THE

AMBASSADORS' CONFERENCE.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, Ambassadors, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear friends.

I must tell you that I am particularly happy to see you again for this new edition of the Ambassadors'
conference after two years when the global health context prevented us from honouring this
appointment. This was missing, even if last year it was held through other means, but the conviviality, the
informal exchanges, the ways and means of building convergences are not the same. Allow me to begin by
thanking you, because this long Covid-19 crisis which has affected our country so deeply has also had
a great impact on your teams, and sometimes on you and your families. Several of you have had to
serve in countries that were heavily hit, have been under severe constraints, have stayed for many months
in difficult conditions. But above all, you and your teams have contributed to the essential mission that we
had during this period to protect the French people. And I would like to pay tribute to the exceptional
commitment that you and all your teams have shown towards our nationals: protecting, sometimes
repatriating, as we remember in the early days of the epidemic; allowing access to vaccines,
repatriations during the crisis, taking charge of children's education and all the hardships that this
unprecedented period has confronted our diplomatic, consular, cultural and educational network.

I would also like to salute each and every one of you in your positions in the Crisis and Support Centre,
which has done an exceptional job in the face of this health crisis, as it did with the help and support of
several of you in Afghanistan last summer and today in Ukraine. Over the last few years, the crises have
multiplied, exacerbated if I may say so, but wishing that one crisis does not drive out the other, I wanted to
begin by saluting this strong commitment which has been yours in particular during this period.

Despite the pandemic, I have been able to count on you and your commitment over the past five years in the
service of our country. Despite the occasional headwinds and unexpected events, I think I can say that
we have built both concrete actions and useful reference frameworks for collective action. We have made
the strengthening of European sovereignty a tangible reality. And I say it here with great force, when, in
September 2017 at the Sorbonne, I spoke proposing on your behalf, on behalf of all of us, a more
united, more sovereign, more democratic Europe, there were many comments all over Europe saying
"French fad, more sovereign Europe, what is this business? What kind of strategic autonomy is this? We will
soon go back to the principles in which we had lived until then. The reality will be different, it will remain
words. We have set the framework. I am pleased to see that this framework has now become widespread. It
has been gradually adopted by the whole of Europe and is now being taken on by Germany. And I would like
to welcome the speech that Chancellor Scholz gave two days ago in Prague, which is completely in line with
this thinking and this action. Above all, we have acted together, building a stronger Europe of defence, brick
by brick. We have done this multilaterally and bilaterally, with special agreements with Greece and Croatia,
to name but two. We have strengthened this European Union. We have also structured unprecedented
bilateral agreements with Germany and Italy.

And then our Europe moved forward in the face of crises. In the face of the pandemic, through the action of
our network, it was our Europe that provided the vaccines and thus helped to protect. It was also our
Europe that provided
an essential economic revival through an agreement between Germany and France as early as May 2020,
and then a European agreement in July 2020 which allowed us an unprecedented investment capacity at 27
and the mutualisation of common debts for future investments. Here again, this seemed totally unthinkable.
And faced with the return of war to our continent, we responded in a united, swift and strong manner
by imposing massive and unprecedented sanctions on Russia two days after the start of the conflict,
by keeping our unity, by banning the Kremlin's propaganda organs from our democracies and by taking the
historic step of granting candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova.

But it is not simply by responding to crises that our Europe has moved forward. There is a record, as I
said, of the Europe of defence, for example, to name but one. There is also a record of a more sovereign
Europe in terms of technology, with regulation of the Internet that is absolutely fundamental. There is the
assessment of the French Presidency of the European Union, which is your assessment. It was carried out
by t h e action of the Quai d'Orsay, our permanent representation, which steered the interministerial
approach in conjunction with the SGAE, which mobilised many ministers here. But despite the war that
began on 24 February, despite the pandemic that was still with us, despite the context in our country,
which I don't need to go into again, on the political level, our French Presidency of the European Union has
made it possible to make fundamental progress for our continent.

In the fight against climate change to achieve our goal of a 55% reduction in emissions by 2030. The
famous Fit for 55 package, to speak in good Breton, has made progress, with more than ten texts that
have been devoted to this. On the improvement of the working and living conditions of European citizens,
with the directive on minimum wages, on equal pay for men and women, but also on equal representation,
precisely within the management committees. Texts that had sometimes been blocked for more than 10
years, and which, thanks to the new German coalition, made it possible to change the balance. On the
regulation of digital giants to put an end to the law of the strongest with the two directives known as
DSA DMA. On defence too, with the adoption of our Strategic Compass, an exercise that we launched
alongside our German friends under their presidency. We have transformed our Europe. It is not the same as
it was five years ago. It is more self-aware, more sovereign, stronger. And in doing so, we have proved
wrong all those who saw the Brexit as the beginning of a long series of renunciations and demonstrated the
strength and vigour of a united Europe and its principles.

The second element that I wanted to emphasise in paying tribute to the work done in recent years is the
effective multilateralism that we have defended. It has to be said that five years ago, we were at the side of
an American power that is normally, and fortunately has once again become, the guarantor of many balances
and texts, which decided to withdraw from most of the agreements that it had helped to build, for which it
had worked hard: on climate and the Paris agreements or in the fight against nuclear proliferation and with
the JCPoA. And so we were at a time of great fragility of this multilateralism. Is everything settled? Far
from it, but I will come back to that. But in the face of common challenges, without ever giving up lucidity,
and this will be one of the threads for me of this expression before you today, I believe that we have tried
collectively to preserve this effective multilateralism by associating all the actors: States, NGOs, civil
societies, companies.

To take just one of the latest examples, because what we have collectively built, and French diplomacy has
played a prominent part in this, is the response to the pandemic. A few weeks after the pandemic, we were
at the forefront of the so-called Act-A initiative. A few Europeans worked with African states that were
affected like us by the pandemic, but even more fragile. France was invited for the first time to an African
Union executive board to share a strategy. And between the African Union and very quickly the G20, where
we brought it to the table, we built an unprecedented strategy for access to vaccines, the development of
production capacities and the strengthening of health systems. From 2017, faced with the fragility of the
Paris Agreement and the American withdrawal, we also mobilised the entire network. And where France
had succeeded in 2015 in bringing together the
We have succeeded between 2017 and 2020 in preserving the Paris Agreement. Several
I would remind you that the powers that be either did not sign or did not ratify and the United States
withdrew. As I speak, the United States has decided to return, but Turkey and Russia have ratified,
regardless of the international context.

As early as 12 December 2017, with the One Planet Summit, we remobilised, set up new coalitions of actors
with States, companies, NGOs, researchers, also attracted many American researchers with strong
initiatives and led to a concrete climate agenda. And we adopted the same method, we then scandalised it
on financing and private financing. We adopted the same method on the issue of biodiversity by
launching the same initiative for biodiversity here in January 2021 in the face of the groping of the COP
that was underway and which had obviously been hit by the pandemic.

In the same way, on the regulation of digital technology and its content, we took the initiative in 2018 of
Tech for Good, again associating the major international digital players and our diplomatic network to try
to find ways of positive regulation. We supplemented this with the European regulation I mentioned and we
crystallised this action with the Christchurch appeal, which was held here in Paris after the attacks in
New Zealand and which today enables us to better fight against terrorist and hateful content online.

We invented the Paris Peace Forum on the occasion of the centenary of the armistice of the First World
War, where every year, project leaders from all over the world meet and build convergence, new
consensus and a new balance.

We have not let up either in this period of the fight against inequalities by supporting the Global
Partnership for Education alongside Senegal, by organising the Generation Equality Forum, by obtaining
tangible progress on women's empowerment, girls' education, the right to sexual and reproductive
health, the fight against violence, and support for freedom fighters.

Throughout this period, we have also fought for the protection of fundamental rights by defending, through
the Information and Democracy Partnership, the exercise of freedom of opinion and expression and access
to reliable information. We have committed ourselves alongside all humanitarian actors to international
justice and the fight against impunity, and we have translated this commitment into concrete support for
the fight against war crimes committed by Russia on Ukrainian soil, to name but one. And to thank all the
humanitarian actors who are such courageous supporters and volunteers, as we experienced in Niger
two years ago.

And we have ensured that France remains a balanced power in this period, which enables us to limit
disorder and build new partnerships with a strong army. And I think that it is a key element of this strategy,
by assuming a strategic exercise in 2017, by building a military programming law for 2019-2024 that was
respected to the letter, which enabled us to repair capability elements, but also to rebuild a strategy, I
believe, that is more adapted to the realities of the world and to make the French army the first European
army for sure, to consolidate our nuclear deterrent and to have the place that we have today, and that
supports our diplomacy.

We have also, as a balancing power, placed our partnership with Africa at the heart of our multilateral
action, again in a new grammar, by involving Africa at the heart of the Biarritz G7 - which France had to
organise in 2019. Not simply invited to the last half-day in what is nicely called outreach, but by
involving it at the heart of the strategy, in the design of all the meetings and by carrying out initiatives
together on the international stage by developing a Euro-African axis. We have also built this new
partnership with Africa. I will have
the opportunity to return to it by looking at our past and in particular by renewing our relationship with
Rwanda, which is today an important partner in our initiatives on the continent.

Throughout the world, we have dealt with crises by playing, I think I can say, our full role as a permanent
member of the Security Council, with the same determination to have a useful effect in preventing
escalations and finding diplomatic ways to resolve conflicts.
In so doing, we have multiplied our efforts to respond to the urgent humanitarian needs of our citizens
and civilian populations in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon and, in recent days, in Pakistan. This is only
a partial assessment of the cavalcade. But around a stronger Europe, around this effective multilateralism
that I think I can say we have helped to preserve or save, and around the participation in the construction of
new balances, I want to tell you here that you can be proud of what we have collectively accomplished in
recent years.

France has not done everything on its own, nor thought up all the concepts. We have pushed some of them,
in any case we have always been, if I may say so, part of the avant-garde of good will. And this is, in
my opinion, the greatest pride, with a constant concern to find the most effective ways to bring people
together, with - what we must keep for the years to come - a concern for efficiency. Let's forget that the
idea comes from here, if the condition for it to spread is that it has several paternities. That's what we need
to do everywhere. It is much better. But I think I can say that your action, the defence of France's
interests, our convictions, and our desire to increase our influence and attractiveness - I will come back to
this - have been absolutely key during this period.

This is also why, since 2017, I have wanted the resources for our international action to be consolidated
and adapted. Through the law of 4 August 2021 - I welcome the presence, Madam Minister, of your
predecessor and the continuity of action in which we are involved - through the law of 4 August 2021, we
have established a growth trajectory for the resources of our official development assistance that
will continue during this second five-year period. We have ensured that these resources will give our
diplomacy back its agility and its capacity to drive, which I know many of you felt had been weakened. We
have initiated a structural evolution that will be continued to move from a development policy, which
we were already changing but which was not sufficiently perceptible to our partners, to a solidarity
investment policy that allows us to act with a greater number of actors, countries, international
organisations, companies and civil society actors. And above all, with this desire to build partnerships on an
equal footing, particularly on the African continent, but more widely. And so, through this text, we have
given back very strong resources, and put an end to several years of decreasing credits for our official
development assistance, but above all, we have re-imposed a new philosophy. The ministry is behind it, as
are the supervisory ministries, since the Quai and the Economy and Finance Ministry have a key role to play
in this respect. And the operator of this main action, the AFD, has a key role in it, particularly with the
philosophy behind "Finances en commun", which has also enabled us to restructure our action and to
multiply it through the network of relations with development banks and regional banks throughout the
world. And I believe that we have here the beginning o f a new grammar, but of a much stronger and
more powerful action throughout the world.

However, this is not enough. That is why, in 2023, for the first time in at least three decades, your
administration, the Quai d'Orsay, will see its number of jobs increase at the same time as its financial
resources continue to rise. For three decades. I know your expectations and your commitment to serve.
I would therefore like to express my full confidence that your energy and the means of our foreign policy will
be effectively implemented in the service of France's interests. I am also aware of the confusion that the
necessary adaptation o f public action that we have undertaken may have caused you. Our diplomacy is
already the work of practitioners from many different backgrounds whose skills are not based on their
membership of a corps, but on their experience and their ability to carry out many jobs at the same time.
And I want to make a very simple clarification here: defending a profession, which is what I do deeply and to
which I am attached
like you, has never meant defending a body. And so defending a profession is essential, and I say this in
a ministry that is one of the most open to interministerial cooperation, already aggregating a great deal of
talent in eminent positions that come from other ministries, which we must be able to generalise to our
neighbours. What the reform of the senior civil service should allow us to do is to consolidate the expertise
and professional fields that are essential to the success of our diplomatic action. These are professions,
they have their own specificities. They are talents that we train, and then continue to train, whose
careers we build. We must continue to do this and do it even better. And then we need to be able to
deploy this talent even more widely within the State, because we need it, and also better aggregate
technical skills from other horizons at the heart of our diplomacy, and you know this perfectly well. And this
reform should allow us to have an even more agile diplomacy where - the pandemic has shown us - as I
mentioned for example on the regulation of digital technology, we need to combine what it means to
be a diplomat with extremely specialised knowledge in technology, social networks, or epidemiology. And so
the time has come to be able to use the skills of the diplomatic profession, which we know how to train
and which is one of France's strengths, with the highest level of technical expertise in useful and
extremely mobile task forces. We cannot be satisfied with having, if not good generalists everywhere.
This is not the case, but we must further strengthen this coherence and strength of our action. This is the
philosophy that will guide us.

That is why I encourage you to take full ownership of this reform, which I think is good, especially for the
Quai d'Orsay, so that the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs is truly the interministerial leader of
international action. And this is also what it will make it possible to do, where for several years, not to say
decades, there has been a form of progressive temptation, because of increasingly technical matters in the
international arena, to see the subjects leave the Quai d'Orsay to have international irredentisms in each
ministry. It is also through this reform that we will find this coherence of action where the Quai d'Orsay has
this interministerial vocation of bringing in good synergy and knowledge, with a clear leader.

In this respect, I ask you to be able to enrich the reform under the authority of the Minister and her entire
team, so that our diplomacy will be even better tomorrow, even more agile, even more expert, even
stronger. I have asked the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs to work with you in connection with our
elected representatives, the Parliament, within the framework of the Etats généraux de la diplomatie which
will be opened in a few weeks, on the missions and the organisation we need to move forward. This
must be done with the same spirit of responsibility and requirement that I know you have when you are
posted abroad. The same spirit of balance and hindsight, the same will to act, because this is a moment of
collective reflection and because we are also living, and I will come to this, a moment of change in the
world that is so intimidating that, in a way, each of us has a duty to be even better at serving the
French, to be more efficient.

I am talking about all this in the service of France at a particular moment. And allow me, at this point in my
speech, to try, alongside you, in all modesty, to describe the international moment that we are experiencing
today. I think that I myself, and many of my predecessors, must have said that the moments we are living
through have something exceptional about them, and this is undeniable every time. But I think the
evidence is mounting for us this year. And there is something in the moment we are living through which,
I believe, is the result of both very deep and long-term trends, but also of the acceleration of the
multiplication of crises and, in particular, the return of war to European soil. This is not an event, if I may
say so, that can be isolated from the rest, but it is almost a logical consequence, a catalyst for many
phenomena that were at work.

I'm going with a reasoning that is probably very incomplete and very partial, but by trying to put some
bricks, try to tell you how I see things on this subject from your side.
First of all, as I was saying, the moment we are living in is a moment of major trends. The world in
which we live has extraordinary strengths, and I don't want to start with a catastrophic speech. For
the past few decades, we have been living in a world that has never lifted so many of our fellow citizens
out of poverty - the system for organising international trade has made this possible over the past few
decades, it's a reality - which has allowed an unprecedented acceleration of innovation and its spread.
Never before has humanity succeeded in inventing a vaccine for a pandemic in less than a year and
making it so quickly accessible to a large part of humanity, with the inequalities that we have seen at
work, but also with a mobilisation to try to ward them off as quickly as possible.

We also have an unprecedented interconnection of the world, which is a strength - it serves

intelligence, innovation, and dissemination - and which gives many countries and public opinions a
universal awareness. But we have to admit, and I won't go into all the reasons for optimism in the world
we live in, that we are plunged into a reality where there is basically a form of paradox. Never before has
the national scene been so linked to the international scene, never before have the problems we had to
solve been essentially global, and never before has the world order been so fractured and in the process
of accelerating fracturing. And that is our main difficulty.

It is the difficulty of this context that makes the war launched by Russia in Ukraine even more dramatic. Let
me explain. Indeed, our economies and our public opinions are increasingly interdependent with the rest
of the world for the reasons of innovation that I mentioned, and which have profoundly changed our
societies and our democracies. Our economies are open and interdependent, our people travel, and
therefore our countries are interdependent in all respects and we are connected with the rest of the
world. We compare, we know, we are informed. So all of this is a big shift and shakes up our countries
intimately and the established order. We experienced this directly in the pandemic that brought the whole
world to a halt and disorganised all the value chains at once, and this lasted for a long time, through a
pandemic that spread in an extraordinarily accelerated way, which is the fruit of the globalisation that we
had experienced. As I said, the lasting consequence of this pandemic is that it has fractured the value
chains - I will come back to this - but it has also plunged nearly 78 million citizens of the world into
poverty.

The climate crisis, a global problem that affects us all, has been experienced in its disruptions in recent
weeks in our country, but the tragedy underway in Pakistan, in Lake Chad and in many others. The latest
IPCC report has shown that almost half of humanity is now living in the danger zone, that many ecosystems
have already reached the point of no return. This means that climate disruption and the vulnerability of our
biodiversity is a global phenomenon that affects the intimacy of each of our societies, but which
disrupts our organisation. It has already started to be a source of migration and will be the main source of
migration in the coming years. It will also be the source of international rebalancing, given the magnitude
of these impacts.

In the same way, what seemed to be a matter of spontaneous adjustment of the world and the invisible
hand of the market - to name but two, energy and food - are once again, as a result of the crises, profound
geopolitical issues. In fact, they used to be, but now they are resolutely and assertively. This is a
complete change in our grammar. But this means that even for our countries: Europe is experiencing it
in its flesh, some neighbours more than us, given the strength of our energy mix and our model. But
this means that what was obvious is now creating dependencies.

And then security risks, probably today even more than yesterday, whose grammar is above all
international, are destabilising several regions. I am thinking in particular of nuclear proliferation at a
time when the 10ᵉ Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,
which has been a fundamental element of our security architecture for half a century, has just
to end in failure. I am also thinking of the terrorist threat, which remains very important in Africa and in the
Levant, and which feeds on destabilisation, inequality and the increase in poverty or climatic
destabilisation, because all these major global phenomena have an effect that is reinforced and feeds
on it.

Should I mention, and I am not yet exhaustive, the demographic fact that will massively, profoundly
structure the geopolitics of the coming years. It is beginning to do so in our Europe, implicitly through the
profound movements and demographic decline that many Eastern European countries are experiencing.
But above all at a time when humanity has never been so numerous because of the profound
imbalances that have been established between the continents and which will increase in the coming
years. I say this to mention only some of the challenges we face. But as you can see, all the
challenges have a profoundly international dynamic that seals the interdependence of our
vulnerabilities, our challenges, our national agenda, with our ability to resolve them internationally. We can't
address, we can't provide effective and sustainable solutions to these issues simply at the national level, at
all. We can only do so if there is a strong national order and if cooperation is established with shared
objectives. And yet, and this was the paradox I was referring to, probably rarely in contemporary times at
least, have the frameworks, structures and norms of the international order been so shaken and weakened.

We must look at the situation we are in with lucidity, even if the reality is cruel for us, and without
weakening ourselves. The economic order, open, liberal capitalism, which was a force, which I believe
remains a force, and which had enabled so many millions of citizens of the world to escape poverty, has
broken down. And confidence in it is no longer the same, in our country and internationally. This is a reality.
It went haywire at the time of the financial crisis when the unthinkable happened. It went wrong in the
resolution of the financial crisis, where those who suffered most were the middle classes, particularly in
Europe, and so there is a form of de facto injustice in the resolution of this crisis. And it has contributed to
weakening the international consensus on this model, and basically its extension within our borders and
outside.

The reality of the climate crisis that I mentioned and the biodiversity crisis have also shown, along with the
inequalities in our societies, that this model is no longer sustainable because it can no longer leave so
many externalities managed by others. The climate and social balance are externalities of the financial
model that are not reintegrated into it. And the third episode that has deeply fractured it is the pandemic.
Here again, it is another unthinkable. All of a sudden, everything closed up and our economies experienced
the sudden experience of autarky. Then they saw that it was not possible. They saw that it was not
sustainable. But they also saw that the vulnerabilities associated with perfect international trade, where in
a way no goods were strategic because it was assumed that they would circulate freely for all eternity,
were no longer true. And so the reality is t h a t the pandemic has fractured production chains. It has re-
regionalised, sometimes re-nationalised, certain production chains. And I think that it has durably de-
globalised a large part of world production. This is the first reality that is fracturing the international
economic order, whether we like it or not. This is not an easy way to solve part of the problem.

The second element is that, at the same time, the political liberalism that was at the heart of this project,
and here again I look at the reality of the world, is increasingly being overturned. So they had something of
a twin, since it is true that our democracies have progressed on the basis of a political and social
consensus, the primacy of the rational and free individual, an open political system and the rule of law, and
progress assured for the middle classes. But we are now experiencing the beginning of an illiberal
moment. And the teleology in which we have been immersed since 1990, which was the extension of our
values, our legal systems and our political systems, is no longer a reality. The ability to convince or
impose it as a model that is somehow non-contestable and that would be the culmination of humanity, I say
here, no longer works. Modest, lucid experience of discussions with many heads of state and
government from several continents. Because it is being shaken up first of all at home, and then because
that a lot of people say to us, "is this model so strong, you seem so unhappy. We looked at the Capitol
last year, we see you at home, the extremes are rising everywhere. You can't deal with extreme poverty.
You are debating the climate. I'm not making a plea, I'm just saying it's a reality. We will have to deal with
it, it is a huge challenge for us because I believe, despite everything and above all, in the universality of
our values and the battles that France has waged when it helped build humanism and above all the
values of the Enlightenment that presided over it. But we have to admit that things are more fractured
today and that this moment is a fragile one.

The third element is also the affirmation of authoritarian powers and imbalances that we have difficulty in
countering or containing: Iran, I hope that in the next few days the JCPOA will be concluded, but we see the
difficulty that we have collectively. And Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, an
endowed power, which deliberately violates the United Nations Charter in an assumed imperialist logic.
This is a profound change. But the fact that in recent years we have not succeeded collectively in
containing or curbing these powers of imbalance through the law and the interplay of powers and the
balance of deterrence capabilities is obviously a problem that weakens the international order.

And the last point, each one is linked but not the least, is that it is becoming more and more obvious and it
is the fact that will become more and more structuring and that, despite the current situation, we must
not lose sight of: geopolitics is gradually being structured around a competition between the United
States and China. And this competition is problematic for us in several respects.
First of all, because it encourages China, and we see this at work, to redefine the rules of the international
game by installing a narrative according to which these rules are basically centred on American power and
that what was an established universal consensus is now something that they can legitimately challenge.
By proposing solutions, values that are better suited to several geographies of the world. So there is a
kind of competition of universalism at work. China, in doing so, is trying to build an international order in its
own interest that is in competition with the one that Washington was the guarantor of in the last resort, but
which was also ours in all these respects. This weakens the capacity of the international order.

On the other hand, there is one thing in this context that is clear, and that is the strength, I believe, of
French diplomacy and of our Nation. We have never been aligned or vassalized behind any power. We have
partners, we have allies, we have a strong convergence of values with the United States of America, but we
have always kept, and I will come back to this, our independence. The threat at the moment is obviously
that everyone will be asked to choose sides, and that this structural competition will fracture deeply and
weaken international initiatives. We have seen this competition at work within the World Health
Organisation itself, at the heart of the crisis. All this to say that - and here again I am only giving a partial
overview - the capacity of the international order to act collectively on the basis of a consensus
established and shared by all, despite partial disagreements, has weakened over the last ten years. This is a
fact. And at the very moment when we need more cooperation to solve the problems that are also ours
and those of the planet, the capacity to produce it has weakened. That is our challenge.

It is in this context that the war decided by Russia in Ukraine and the return of the war to European soil
takes on a very special nature, and is a moment, I believe, of profound change for us, our continent and the
international order. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a historic rupture because it directly affects our
security in the context I have just mentioned. It violates and undermines the principles on which we have
built peace for decades: the territorial integrity of states, their sovereign equality, the United Nations
Charter. It makes it even more difficult to resolve international crises through the deep division of the UN
Security Council and the deconstruction of the treaties and frameworks of our security architecture. So it
supports what was already at work.
It is also a breakthrough because of the nature of this war and the global consequences that it has and the
power of its consequences on energy, food, immigration and global information - as we can see in our
opinions. And already this war, and I will come back to this, for which we are doing everything to ensure that
it is not globalised, is a hybrid, globalised war. It is the first hybrid war which, through the techniques used
by Russia, starting with the use of migration through Belarus several months before the war, has decided to
use what it theorised a few years ago, hybridity, and through this hybridity and the few levers I have just
mentioned, has globalised the conflict. It also means that we are plunged into a war of narratives, into
a war of interpretation because Russia wants to use the context that I have just mentioned, and in a way
installs a contemporary relativism where with the work of undermining that has been done on the
universalism of our values and the consensus that existed until then on the principles of the
international order, Having been weakened or shaken by some, it invokes rationality, logic, in a way, it
changes the system of guilt by putting it on the side of NATO, and it naturalizes and, in a way, legitimizes in
totality in an implacable logic its own intervention.. In so doing, it seals a work that is at work to weaken,
but which is extremely dangerous for the international order and for the intimacy of our democracies.

It also adds to the sum of pre-existing imbalances the danger of an explosion with a global impact. And
basically, to make these fragmentations that I mentioned, these fracturations totally irreversible. It also
creates new and profound imbalances. It aggravates the North-South divide, firstly because we have to
look at all the countries that abstained when we asked everyone to choose. In a way, this has cast
doubt on a consensus that was thought to be much more powerful. This is a reality that must lead us to
work, I will mention this in a moment, because more than 1.7 billion people in the world are directly
affected by the rise in food prices, energy prices and many more in the weeks to come.

So this war basically risks accelerating, and is in the process of doing so, the fracturing, but also the
Summa divisio of the world, with Russia being in a way the trigger, the power of imbalance that will
accelerate this summa divisio between the United States and China. Because China is lurking in the
background, having structured the camp of abstention, and is seeking to push its deepest interests and to
establish a rebalancing, or at least a split in the international order, which is absolutely not in our
interest and which we must prevent. Finally, the forces are there, at work, which must lead to this. And the
current tensions in the Taiwan Strait over the past few weeks are helping to make this grammar
implacable.

This is the reality, in the context that I have just mentioned, that we have to face: a war of annexation on
our doorstep by an endowed power, a permanent member of the Security Council, backed up by a hybrid
war, deployed on a global scale and a historic deconstruction of the frameworks that allowed globalisation
and relations between nations to be regulated. This is the war in Ukraine. And so I say it here with great
force because it is a profound change for our country and our diplomacy. The time when we could hope to
reap the dividends of peace is over, and I think for a long time, because we are going to have to defend
it and rebuild it. The time when we thought we could enjoy our freedoms without paying the price is
over. We have to cherish our freedom, our values, but we are going to have to defend them, fight for them
and accept all the consequences that this implies when others fight on our behalf. This is exactly what is
happening today in Ukraine. And the time when the international order defined after the Second World War,
consolidated at the end of the Cold War, was at the heart of relations between nations and is being
shattered, we have to rebuild it.

This is the observation, and in my opinion, the heart of this moment we are living through. As you can
see, none of this should lead to pessimism or fatality. It is an immense challenge. And so, to do this, we
really need a diplomacy of combat in the plural and to try to define very clearly some principles and
some objectives to avoid, as it were, the gravitational movement that I have described
This is the challenge that France and its diplomacy are facing today, and that is why it is so important that
we do not allow the war to spread and accelerate the phenomena at work and the international disorder
that I mentioned. This is the challenge facing France and its diplomacy today.

So, to do this, in a very prosaic way, but in these complex moments, I think it is always good to remember
simple things. I would just like to give some invariants in my view and means of building this diplomacy
and give us three major objectives. They will not be exhaustive, but I think they give us a useful direction.
The invariants and the means, I want us to keep in mind, are first of all respect for the sovereignty of each
State and its territorial integrity. I think this is very important. First of all, because it is the best argument
we have today against Russia. Sometimes we have been able, the West has been able, to introduce
doubt on these issues in the name of our values. Sometimes we ourselves, by our actions, have
documented the trial that others were putting us on in this regard. I want to make it clear here: for me,
this is an invariable. You cannot change the destiny of peoples by taking their place. We can build
coalitions so that they are forced to change their leaders, we can exert pressure, we can build useful
actions. We can legitimately, over time, question the mechanisms for doing this usefully. I believe in
regional coalitions, in multiple pressures from actors. Moreover, we will have to collectively re-evaluate our
entire sanctions system in the light of what we are doing and the results we will have in the coming
months and years. But I would like to state here that the sovereignty of peoples and the territorial integrity
of States are invariable.

The second thing in this complex world is that we have to assume at all times that we can and will continue
to talk to everyone. If diplomacy were the art of talking to people with whom we agree, I would not propose
the ambition for the network that I outlined earlier because we would need far fewer posts and far fewer
resources. But we have to assume it completely and we must not give in to any form of false morality
that would make us powerless. Who wants Turkey to be the only power in the world that continues to
talk to Russia, and to be a member of NATO, I must remind you? And tomorrow, the same people who forget
to denounce it will be able to say "It's great, look how strong Turkey is, France is not even capable of
building peace. Big deal, you tell her every day not to speak anymore! Yes, the job of a diplomat is to talk
to everyone, including people and especially people with whom we do not agree. And so we will
continue to do so, but with simple grammar. We have coalitions, we have allies, we defend
consistency with our allies. That's why, as a NATO ally, we have decided with the other members to
impose sanctions. And we are not part of some NATO members who have not put sanctions in place
but who are going to trade with the same Russia. I say this here in parenthesis, but as it is done in a
deafening silence, it is good to remember it. We have alliances and coalitions of action. We are
coherent, but we must defend freedom of action and dialogue in order to have useful action.

And then the third element is that I believe that we are going to have to increasingly - and I think that this is
a strength of our network, it is in its genes - build balanced partnerships, of equals. Large structures with an
umbrella power that tries to vassalise the others no longer work. It will work less and less. But the idea of
building regional partnerships, I will come back to this, bilateral partnerships where, with a lot of respect,
we redefine balances, with a grammar that is also different. Sport, culture - I'll come back to this later -
elements of gastronomy, what we call influence or soft power in good French, I think, are key elements of a
capacity to act usefully and to complete our axis even more.

These are both the invariants and the principles of method. I wanted to remind you of them here so that
things are clear to everyone and so that we can move forward. Then, I would like to set three simple
objectives, which, moreover, are part of the coherence of our action, because I think that what we have
done in recent years was not orthogonal, quite the contrary, with what we
We are now seeing it play out in front of us.

I think that the first objective of our diplomacy must be to defend the strength, influence and independence
of France. The first, and sometimes when there is only one to follow, is this one. It is coherent and it seals
this intimacy between the national and international objective. Firstly, because there is no strong diplomacy
without a strong economy. This is not true. People look at you, they look at your armies, as I mentioned
earlier. We have that. They look at your economy. We have put an end to a long period of deindustrialisation.
I am proud that we are the leaders in the creation of start-ups, in development. We are reindustrialising.
But in the end, we are far from the mark. Diplomacy must serve this agenda, for today and for
tomorrow. Because the stronger the country is economically, the more we will have the capacity to
radiate, to install, to develop our strength. And in this respect, I really want to salute the work that has been
done in recent years by all the operators, by the whole network, because I also like coherence on the
ground. We have operators, but in the field, it is the ambassador who must lead the different ambassadors.
There is a France, everywhere in the world, there is a France. Then, it uses levers, the diplomatic network,
its cultural advisers and the instruments it is given, whether it is the AFD, Business France, etc. This is very
important. I will close this parenthesis. But a great deal of work has been done. I thank you for it.

I want us to continue to accelerate the work to make us more attractive. And so we are obviously going to
perpetuate the famous Choose France. We are going to continue to bring our economic strength, but
also our cultural, sporting and gastronomic strength, because I believe in the synergy of these agendas, it
is very powerful. The strength, we must not put things in silos, big companies are like citizens, they are
looking for an experience. France has values, it has a relationship with beauty which feeds its
attractiveness. All this has a lot of synergies, and we have been able to develop it perfectly. And I tell
you: it works much better to make Choose France at Versailles, to be able to talk about culture, to have
all those who carry out our major cultural projects meet at the same time, to explain our reforms, which is
a comparative advantage of France compared to many others. And I'm writing to you, within 10 years, it will
work better than stations isolated from the rest of the world to bring people together near Paris in very
beautiful places. So we will continue, but this attractiveness agenda is key in my eyes, key. And so, I really
salute the work of all those who have carried it out. But I ask you to continue to go even further. In the
same way, everything I want us to continue on gastronomic diplomacy, the development of our tourism is
absolutely key. And so, here too, the role of Business France, Atout France, the initiatives for gastronomy,
the prizes that we have been able to create, what has been led is absolutely necessary, it is not an
accessory mission because there too, it has a lot of synergies with the rest.

I then want us to be able to continue to develop our foreign trade strategy in the service of this
economic agenda. I would just like to give two tonic actions to complement everything that is being
done. I am struck by the fact that - you will tell me that the delegations of the President of the
Republic are my best examples of what I am going to denounce here, but we have many habits
collectively - often the same groups in my delegations and sometimes in some trips, I realise that
they are not necessarily those who need me the most to set up in the countries. Then, afterwards, I
sometimes even look at whether it creates many jobs in France. It is not always those who have created
the most jobs in France. So I think we need to resynchronise these agendas so that they are
understood and supported by our compatriots. We need to provide much more support - although
we've started to do this in recent years - for small and medium-sized companies and intermediate
companies abroad. If we are differentiating, it is there. And what we have managed to do by putting the
Public Investment Bank and Business France in synergy: the network is key. But we can change the life of
a small and medium-sized company, of a French territory, if we take a ministerial trip, or if a
It is well known that the embassy takes a much greater initiative than a large group. And so this work has
largely been started in recent years. But we must absolutely accelerate it to be able to multiply this
support strategy which is a demonstration, I would say, of the most perfect and automatic strength of our
network, of its power for the economic actors of the French territory. They are, if I may use this
expression, your best ambassadors.

Next, I would like us to be able to make our foreign trade strategy consistent with France 2030. We are in
the process of investing massively in several innovation segments, but also in the transformation of our
creative, agricultural and industrial fabric. It is absolutely key that the network accompany the priorities of
France 2030, because that's how we will immediately have actors who have the right mesh of action and
who will find the right partners. This is what will also allow us to better serve certain agricultural SMEs,
for example, which are at the heart of these projects, our cultural and creative industries, which are a
key element in my opinion of what we can do in this respect.

And then, lastly, the contribution to making France stronger and participating in its influence and influence.
It's beyond what I've said, to fully assume a strategy of influence and influence for France. Some people find
our influence outdated. I like the word "influence", and we must assume it. Influence simply means
explaining what we are and being able to carry it out while respecting each other and assuming that there is
not necessarily, if I may say so, an unbalanced relationship. But it is to explain what we are. It's at the
heart of our strategy, and it allows us to make France stronger, more understandable in the rest of the
world, and therefore more influential in the end. And so, beyond what I have said about our
attractiveness strategy, our foreign trade strategy, I want us to continue the work that has been started and
to strengthen it on schools and education. The reform that we carried out at the AEFE, to whom I would like
to pay tribute here, was absolutely clear and allowed us to increase the number of schools by changing the
frameworks. So it sometimes created annoyances because we assumed what was sometimes a reality on
the ground, but we made it possible to turn it into a real issue allowing our children to be educated
everywhere abroad. And we know where we have to help to do better, but also very often to provide
schooling for children from other countries throughout the world who wish to have access to the French
language and to the quality of our teaching. This is a huge strength. And so, we are going to continue to
invest, to support and to increase cooperation, in the same way that I want us to be able to further
strengthen our university cooperation with the players in the key countries for us in this area.

The other point is culture, which I mentioned quickly. The network has a key role alongside the French
Institute, which is also the umbrella entity in this respect. And I thank the mobilisation and that of all the
agents to enable us to build cultural projects throughout the world. You do this every day, but I would
like us to give it a new impetus. We have succeeded in doing this over the last few years, and we can see
the strength of this in many of the countries I have visited recently, particularly in Africa. But I want these
cultural projects to be built on this philosophy of equal partnership and also based on the risks we have
taken collectively. The profound change in philosophy that France has brought about on the restitution of
works of art is an extraordinary lever for cultural partnership and creation. Benin is the best example of this.
The restitution of the 26 works of art from the Abomey treasure has made it possible, not just what I
consider to be a work of justice and scientific and cultural coherence, but to irrigate contemporary
creativity and then to circulate it in France and to show it off. And this is what we need to deploy
everywhere, because it profoundly changes the way many countries look at France, the way their public
opinion or their youth look at France. In this respect, we must also increase our cooperation on the
cultural and creative industry, on heritage, and succeed in using partnership forms that we reinvest in. This
is what was done several years ago under the authority of François HOLLANDE with ALIPH, which is, I
think, a formidable capacity for France to radiate heritage in crisis or war zones and to have this
scientific and cultural power. This is what we are doing with the French-speaking world, where we
have taken on the responsibility for
In a way, the epicentre and the key players today were undoubtedly the African countries - and as I have
said several times, the epicentre is in the Congo River basin - but by assuming a role for France there
too, accompanying translation projects, projects for the recognition of writers, the defence of writers, a
game through public opinion and creation, also the deployment
of our values and our diplomatic agenda, but by other means. And also with strong initiatives such as
Villers-Cotterêts, which we will open in the spring of 2023, where we will have a project in the heart of
France that will showcase not just a museum, but also a place of research, education and creation of
the French language. And not just in France but throughout the world. And so you see, this set of initiatives -
and here again I am partial - is key to this strategy of influence of France and places culture at the heart
of this agenda.

Our sport must also be at the heart of this agenda of influence because the opportunity we have been
given to organise the Olympic and Paralympic Games in France in 2024 is an unprecedented moment of
mobilisation of our entire network. Firstly, because we will have a unique diplomatic and protocol event
organised in Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis, Marseille, French Polynesia and all the territories that are
mobilised around this event. But above all, we have to set up a sport-education strategy that is at the
heart of our diplomacy, because it is also one of the means of our influence and our ability to speak
differently to public opinion and to certain countries. With the African continent, with the Asian continent,
with the Latin American continent, the sports and educational strategy is a lever for creating joint projects,
as the ministry has done, among others, with the AFD, but it is a complete change of perspective, it is
other actors. It is the capacity that we have through sport to enhance our diasporas and it is also a
complete change in the perception of France. So the creative power behind these initiatives means that,
and this is why I insist on it so much, they are not at all anecdotal subjects.

As you can see, this strategy of influence in the service of a stronger France, which involves gastronomy,
schools, culture and sport, is absolutely central to the missions of our network. Heart, because it allows us
to change perspectives. It gives us more strength. It allows us to have much more leverage over civil
societies. To create other connections from civil society to civil society for a country like France, which
has such strong diasporas and which is also a lever for recognising the strength of our diasporas for
themselves and by themselves.

Speaking of influence, I also want to talk about a more defensive lever, and this is a new mission in recent
years that must be at the heart of the network's missions. The world has changed, as I mentioned, and our
country is often attacked. It is attacked in public opinion by social networks and manipulations. The African
continent is the best laboratory for this. So, with everything I have just said, I want us to undermine the
underlying factors. It is because we will have a real partnership policy that goes through culture, sport and
that values the diaspora, that we will remove, if I may say so, the underpinnings of the Russian, Chinese or
Turkish narrative, which would explain to them that France is a country that does neo-colonisation and
installs its army on their soil. That's what's happening. So we have to break, in a way, the elements that
we would let them use.

But we need to be much more aggressive, mobilised on this subject. This is why we have created an
ambassadorial post in recent years specifically dedicated to this issue, which is absolutely fundamental
and which, in my view, is key, as I have just mentioned. It allows us to work on public diplomacy in Africa,
to set up our narrative and to give our arguments. I think that collectively we must be much more
reactive, much more mobilised on social networks, and work with France's allies and partners in public
opinion. Not just to counteract this false information, of course, but to be able to stop it very clearly, as
quickly as possible, and to promote our own actions.

In this respect, we must make much better use of the France Médias Monde network, which is absolutely key
and that must be a strength for us. I think that we collectively have to rethink our common grammar.
Because there is sometimes a conceptual gap between the idea of independence that we have within
our borders, which is quite legitimate on the part of journalists and newsrooms, and the reality that these
same newsrooms are confronted with on the ground when there is real anti-French propaganda. We
need to have communication tools that say when France is wrongly attacked, that say what France is doing
and that relay our action: the action of our writers, our artists, our sportsmen and our diplomats. Today,
we either suffer too much, or we don't do enough. It is therefore a profound change of conception, of
organisation and of tools. We have started to implement it and it is very consistent with what we are
doing on national soil because we have to suffer the consequences and because this propaganda is now
also very active at home.

But I am really counting on all of you and on the network to mobilise in this strategy o f influence and, as
you can see, also to counter-influence in order to combat false narratives and information and defend the
reality of our action. It's not a question of propaganda, it's a question, for some, of defending free
information in a constructed framework - I'll come back to this for the wider action - and for others, of
defending even stronger reasons everywhere, and we're going to give you the means for joint action. This
is a key point for me, as you have understood.

Defending and enabling France to be stronger and more influential requires this mobilisation and all these
elements that I expect from the network. It also involves mobilising our diplomacy at European level to
strengthen this independence. We are at a key moment that will structure our action, particularly at
European level, on this aspect. We have started to do this, we have laid the foundations, but we will have to
go much further. At the Versailles summit a few months ago, under the French Presidency, we agreed to
generalise the agenda that France had set for 2017 in this area. The months and years will be key to
building our energy and technological sovereignty. This is absolutely key. We have the means to do
so, but here too it is a profound change and Europe is the right vehicle.

We must not choose between energy sovereignty and climate. We must do both at the same time and it is
at the European level that we can do both at the same time. This is why we will have to defend a very
proactive agenda in this area in order to put an end to our energy dependence on Russia, to speed up the
implementation of our climate ambitions, to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, to diversify our supplies
and to accelerate our transition strategy.

What does this entail? Having a real Europe of energy and then having a real Europe of electricity networks,
which is one of the projects on which we agree with Germany. But I also say very strongly that France must
defend an agenda that does not involve recreating other dependencies. When I hear that hydrogen could be
substituted for gas, it's true, if hydrogen is produced. But if we substitute hydrogen for gas - which is
certainly a cleaner means - which is produced elsewhere, big deal! We will recreate the geopolitical
dependencies that we are now seeing the price of. Because we have both renewable and nuclear energy
and we have a strategy over time that will carry it through - but it must be a European ambition - we
have the possibility of producing decarbonised energy. And so we will have to be vigilant in Europe to
ensure that, in the light of the crisis we are experiencing, no new energy dependencies appear. And
that, for me, is at the heart of France's missions.

We will also have to build a stronger European autonomy agenda for critical raw materials, semi-conductors,
health, food products and, of course, digital products. This is something that we are already doing, but
which will be key in the coming months. In the same way, it is at European level that we will have to
complete the work on security and migration issues and on defence issues in order to build this
independence for France. We started under the French Presidency with the reform of Schengen and the
pact on asylum and immigration, to better
to protect together and in solidarity in the face of migratory crises. We still have a lot to do to better
prevent arrivals and better organise cooperation for returns to countries of origin and above all to
homogenise and bring closer together, as we know, our reception and asylum systems.

In terms of defence, we will have to strengthen our European defence capabilities by increasing joint
spending and encouraging joint projects. But I want to say very clearly that France will have a three-tier
strategy. Firstly, the national level. This is why I have asked the Minister and the Chief of Staff of the
Armed Forces to build a strategic exercise which will be completed by the end of September. This will
then give rise to a reprogramming exercise of a military programming law which, at the end of the year or
at the beginning of next year, will be finalised and which will then give rise to a text of law which could, at
the beginning of 2023, reach Parliament. Here again, the new realities and new needs will be taken into
account.

The second stage will obviously be the European stage, with the consolidation of the new cooperation, with
a stronger coherence that we must have. If each European State spends more, it is not to buy non-
European. Here too, we must gradually move away from a logic of dependence, which is key to our capacity
for strategic action and not to be subject to the standards imposed outside Europe. It would be absurd for
the continent to decide to invest massively, in an economic context such as ours, in order to buy elsewhere
and not have the freedom of action. So we will have to continue to carry the iron because it is not automatic
with all our partners, but I believe that it is coherent.

Then the third tier is NATO. I believe that we have collectively demonstrated that European defence is not
in competition with or a substitute for NATO, but that it is one of its pillars. Here again, it is the case that in
the Alliance we do not want to be simply vassalized partners who depend only on a power that has the
capacity. Having a stronger Europe also means acknowledging that Europe sometimes needs to be able to
choose security for itself on its own soil or in its neighbourhood. I am pleased today that we have a
President like President Biden, who shares our values and who has put the United States of America
back on the path of progressivism and cooperation with us all. We have paid the price of uncertainty. But
can we hang our collective security on the choice of the American voter? On a personal level, having lived
through the consequences, no. But it is great to have a strong, mobilised ally who thinks along with us on
many things and is ready to act. It's even better to be able to mobilise them alongside us, but not to
depend on them. This is the grammar that we are installing within NATO. I think it is indispensable. In this
respect, I am pleased that in recent months we have consolidated Europe's defence with the choice made
by Denmark to join our common policies in this area and consolidated NATO with the choice made by
Sweden and Finland, a sovereign choice, to join the Alliance.

As you can see, it is our independence that we are strengthening and consolidating. It is this same desire
for independence that I also want at the geopolitical level. Indeed, Europe is increasingly autonomous and
thinks more and more in geopolitical terms. However, Europe is not limited to the European Union. You
have often heard me say: if we do not think about Europe outside the European Union, we are condemning
ourselves to the fact that the European Union will eventually marry Europe. We will have to choose
between the intimacy of our policies, the proximity of the States and the geopolitical coherence of what
Europe is. It is because of this tension and this reality that, a few months ago, I proposed this project for a
European political community, inspired by the French projects for a confederation that were put forward just
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I am speaking under the supervision of those who took part in it. These
projects were probably not followed because they appeared too much like a substitute for enlargement for
some people, whom they considered to be owed something - I am thinking of many countries that were
on the other side of the European wall - and because Russia was a member from the start. You are
therefore right to point out that it was a member because it had a leader who honoured it and who had
taken eminent political risks. This allows me at this stage of the speech to have a word and to be able
to pay tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev, for the historic action that he has
conduct in this period.

Nevertheless, on the basis of this experience and the reality in which we live, the European political
community must first of all allow us to meet every six months between members of the European Union,
but also the British, Norwegians, Swiss, Western Balkan states, Ukrainians, etc. The question of Turkey has
been raised by many other members, it will be debated and France has no veto to put in any case in favour
of a broad and most inclusive formation but where the institutions of the European Union are not at
the heart of the project, nor what structures it. Otherwise we will return to all the forms of partnership
that we already know, where the States that are not members of the European Union only come there
to get credits or join the club at some point. No. We need to build strategic intimacy on these key issues
with all these states in a very intergovernmental way. We need to be able to build with them on climate
change, energy supply, foreign and security policy, raw materials, food security, at least every six months. I
can tell you that this will be a radical change because this is what will allow us to stop the growing
influence that in the Western Balkans region, for example, Russia or Turkey can have because there are not
enough contacts at the political level. This will also allow me to stop a kind of music of non-
recognition of many of these states and governments. It will allow us to stop this logic of infinite
expansion of the European Union, which, given everything I have said, needs to be stronger, more sovereign
and more autonomous, and therefore must already solve its problems. But we need this geopolitical
space.

I am pleased that in his Prague speech, Chancellor Scholz endorsed this idea. In addition to welcoming his
speech, I am pleased that in October in Prague, the Czech Prime Minister will organise the first meeting of
this European political community, which will enable us to build, I am sure, new alliances, to think of other
forms of political cooperation on a continental scale and to build this Europe which is made up of both
diversity and common will. We will thus be able to talk about strategic projects, cultural projects and
many other things.

We must also assert our independence on a European scale in this Sino-American confrontation - I will
end the chapter on independence here - with the same requirement that I mentioned earlier. Independence
is not equidistance. I read what was said when I spoke of France as a power of equilibrium. We are
independent, that is to say that we have the United States of America, which is our ally, which is a
great democracy with which we share common values and interests, but we do not want to depend on it,
as I said. We have China, which is a systemic rival, with which we do not share our democratic values,
but with which we must continue to act to find answers to common challenges - climate, biodiversity -
and with which we want to continue to talk to try to help resolve regional crises and elements of
destabilisation. France and Europe must therefore build this independence, also geopolitical, in relation
to the duopoly that is being formed. We must not be forced to choose how to guide our policy. We must
be able to maintain the freedom of action that goes with loyalty to alliances and coalitions.

This is also why, to take just one example, the Indo-Pacific theatre, we have established a strategy. First,
a French strategy in the spring of 2018, which was then Europeanised. The disappointment, I must say, of the
AUKUS announcement, some wanted to see in it a weakening of France. I saw it as a betrayal, essentially by
two leaders who will not have to decide for their country in the months and years to come and with the
arrival of new leaders who are ready to reconsider this strategy. But we are consistent: we are not ready
to have a strategy of confrontation with China in the Indo-Pacific area. We have a strategy in the Indo-
Pacific area which is to preserve the freedom of sovereignty, the protection of our space, and dare I say it,
also the protection of our maritime space - it is largely in this region - and of our nationals, of our partners.
So we are defending the freedom of sovereignty.
We want to curb the desire for hegemony in this region and contribute to it, in particular with India and
Australia. We have a military, diplomatic and climate strategy. But we are not in a confrontational logic
and we do not consider that alliances that have been structured for certain oppositions should extend to
the Indo-Pacific area. This is clearly what French geopolitical independence means in this context.

This is for the first major objective, that of independence and therefore to work towards a stronger, more
influential and more independent France.

The second objective that I wanted to assign to our diplomacy is obviously to act for peace and stability, to
be this power of balance in the plural that I mentioned a few years ago. Not because we have a vocation to
replace the General Secretariat of the United Nations, but because there are certain places where acting
for peace and stability is in our interest. Because it is not in our interest for this to spread, because it harms
our compatriots, because it threatens some of our alliances, and because we have partners and friends
who are upset by these imbalances.

The first theatre of expression of this objective is obviously the war in Ukraine led by Russia. I will state
very clearly the objectives of our diplomacy.

The first objective is to help Ukraine in the conflict it has suffered. To help Ukraine economically,
humanitariany, by delivering the weapons that allow it to face aggression and defend its territory, and to
work on reconstruction now. The objective is simple in a grammar that I have set from the beginning:
we are not participating in the war. We do not want to participate in the war. We cannot let Russia win
this war militarily and conquer territory, and at the same time show the defeat of our values and the
international order on the basis of aggression.

We want to build the conditions that will allow, at a time of Ukraine's choosing, either a military victory
or a negotiated peace on terms that are not simply those to which it would be delivered if we abandoned it
to its fate. This is our primary objective: to help Ukraine, with this objective, this voluntarism. I must say that
the help that the United States of America, the European countries and some others have already given to
Ukraine, thanks above all to the bravery of this people and the strength of its army, means that the situation
is very different from what many of the best experts anticipated a few months ago, and above all - I think I
can say this - what Russia anticipated.

The second objective we must have is to maintain European unity. We must not allow Europe to be divided
in the face of this war. This is a daily challenge because we do not have the same experiences with
Russia, because we do not have the same history with Russia in our Europe. As President of the Council
of the European Union for six months, I have taken care of this, but it will be a daily challenge for us all.
Europe must not be allowed to divide itself or to align itself with the most war-mongering countries, which
would run the risk of extending the conflict, of completely closing the lines of communication. Nor should
we consider that we could leave a few European states on our eastern flank to take action alone. European
unity is key. And dare I say it, the division of Europe is one of Russia's war aims. So our responsibility is
precisely to preserve the European Union and its strength in this context.

The third objective is that we must prepare ourselves for a long war. To do this, we obviously need to
have a national and European organisation, in particular for energy, food and many other things. But very
clearly, faced with this long war, we must take action to avoid escalation and prepare for peace. Avoiding
escalation means that France's role, for me, is to avoid an escalation on nuclear issues, or a geographical
escalation. So we must do everything possible to ensure that countries do not get involved in the
conflict in an ill-considered way, leading to a geographical extension; and we must do everything
possible with our diplomacy to prevent either civil nuclear energy, or the
Some people would say that the threats to nuclear energy do not lead to a "vertical" escalation. In this
respect, France, as you know, has mobilised a great deal in recent months, since the beginning, since
March with Chernobyl, and in recent days to ensure that civil nuclear power is protected in some way from
war, and that we try as much as possible, firstly to allow the competent international agency, the IAEA, to
carry out this mission, to ensure the safety and security of the plant, and also to recall the sovereignty
requirements of this nuclear power plant in the framework that is ours. Preparing for peace means
continuing to talk in this context, as I said to all the parties involved, and so France will continue, as I did
a few days ago and as I will do again after the IAEA mission, to talk to Russia, to be able to prepare the
terms of peace on each point where its role is useful.

This means avoiding escalation at any point in the conflict, and for example talking about civil nuclear
power. It also means preparing and working on the terms of a negotiated peace, but noting that the time
will be determined by the two parties involved, in accordance with the invariants and objectives that I have
given. France, the Europeans, or anyone else does not have to choose the peace that Ukraine wants, nor
the moment to negotiate it. But we must do everything to ensure that a negotiated peace is possible when
the two protagonists return to the table.

The fourth objective is to try to do everything possible to counter the partition of the world that is at work
in this war, thereby responding to what I described a moment ago. So we must mobilise the diplomatic
network to seek out and win over those who do not necessarily share our choices. Let's face it, the number
of countries that have openly supported Russia is very small, and the countries that have done so are not
very popular - we do see them, but they have clear geopolitical choices, so there are no surprises. But
the mass of countries that chose to abstain in the votes that were called for last spring and summer may
have reassured some commentators, but when I look at them demographically, they represent a good
part of humanity. This means that this large part of humanity does not fully understand what is going on,
and in the dialogues that we can have with many African, Asian, Latin American or Pacific leaders, the
speeches are there to say that this is a regional war, the effects of which they are suffering without
understanding exactly what is going on. Our job is first of all not to allow confusion to set in. It is an
aggression carried out by Russia and it is a violation of the principles of the international order. I can tell
you that there is no African public opinion that can support the violation of borders and popular
sovereignty. It was built on this point during decolonisation. And if we consider that this can be a new
dogma of the international order, good luck for peace on the African continent tomorrow. So we have to
lay the foundations clearly, otherwise we will settle and allow a form of contemporary relativism to take
hold on this subject. And you will see that we will be more and more upset.

So we have to reach out, explain the genesis, the reality of the facts, and why we are there, we talk to
Russia, but we disapprove and fight the roots of this conflict. The second thing is that we must respond
to their anxieties, their difficulties, their problems. This is the framework of the FARM initiative that we
have taken, and this is why, since March, France has taken an initiative for food security and to help the
food autonomy of many of these countries. We did this with Senegal, and it was endorsed by the European
Union and the African Union. Because if we don't show many of these countries every day that we are
dealing with the unintended consequences of food, they will eventually leave us. We must now succeed
in doing the same on the issue of fertilisers, which is absolutely decisive for developing agriculture in many
of these countries, where there were vulnerabilities and dependencies on Belarus or Russia. Then we need
to gradually build coalitions, even if they are imperfect, even if they are incomplete, with several of these
countries. I'm thinking of India, I'm thinking of China, I'm thinking of South Africa, Ethiopia, Algeria, Senegal
or Indonesia, to name but a few, which may share some of the objectives we have to set for this conflict,
or at least which may
I think that the role of our diplomacy, and through this work of conquest in a way, beyond those who are with
us, is to work on a progressive regrouping and to do everything possible to avoid a geographical extension of
this conflict in Ukraine or the tipping points that could occur in the coming months. I think that the role of
our diplomacy is, through this work of conquest in a way, beyond those who are with us, to work for a
progressive regrouping and to do everything to avoid a great partition where there would be - as some want
to write - the West against the rest.

There are many other crises in which I could obviously illustrate France's role as a balancing power and
the partnerships. From North Korea to the work that many of you are doing with us on the Western
Balkans or the Caucasus. And to follow in more detail what I mentioned about the Indo-Pacific - I am not
going to indulge in that exercise here, which would be even longer than the one I am already putting
you through.

I would simply like to take another theatre of operations to illustrate what the subject of balancing power is
and this role that I am asking you to play for peace and stability: it is Africa. France has played a key role in
the African continent, along with many others, in an absolutely fundamental role for security through its
army. I would like to pay a heartfelt tribute to our armed forces, to the choice made by my predecessor
François HOLLANDE in 2013, to launch Operation Serval and then Operation Barkhane. To our armies,
without which Mali today would no longer be a sovereign country with territorial integrity, since a
caliphate was preparing there. And I would like to remind you that this intervention was carried out at the
request of a sovereign state and of the regional organisation, ECOWAS. I would like to salute the
effectiveness of our armies, which, up until the last few days, have struck extremely hard blows, thanks to
the support of our services and our network, against many terrorists and terrorist groups. I would like to
salute the memory of the families of our soldiers lost in this theatre of operations and obviously salute
all our wounded. All this was done with courage and efficiency and at the request of the Head of State.
And I want to congratulate our armies for the perfect execution of what I decided last January, namely the
withdrawal from Mali, because simply, the political framework was no longer there. A sovereign state no
longer wanted us to be there, made us feel insecure and no longer wanted to fight terrorism. We
reorganised our operation, remaining involved in the fight against terrorism in support of the Sahel
armies, and reorganised essentially around Niger. This was done in an orderly manner, in a remarkable way
and finalised in mid-August. We thank you and congratulate you.

We must draw conclusions from what we have experienced. Our military power is key, it is an element of
credibility. Our institutional and political capacity to activate it when needed is decisive. Very few armies in
Europe and in the world could have decided and acted so quickly. Very few. It is a strength of France, let us
keep it. But we must, in particular in the fight against terrorism on African soil, define from the outset the
objectives sought very precisely, limit them in time, and reinscribe in a policy - what we have sought to do
over the last five years and which we had already installed massively - by considering that the useful effect
sought is only possible if the defence efforts are combined with diplomatic efforts and the
consolidation of states, and efforts of investment in solidarity and development.

But above all, what we want to do is to rebuild this partnership with the African continent, and to do so on
the basis of what I said in November 2017 to the students of the Joseph Ki-Zerbo University. It means
converging and acting on the challenges we have in common, but doing so in a totally partnership-
based manner. So on security, to do it at the request of States, in support of their armies, with a
mechanism that will be reorganised in the coming months where France will no longer have a
mechanism that has been in place for sometimes too long, but a much stronger intimacy with the African
armies that wish to do so, when they clearly express their need, with clear strategic objectives and a set
framework. We are in the process of building it with several countries in the region because it
concerns essentially the Sahel and the Gulf of Guinea, which are confronted with the extension of the
terrorist threat. What we have built, to take just one example, in recent months with Benin, is in this
respect a very illustrative element of what we want to do for the future. What we have been able to
establish with Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire to train armies with regional hubs, to build
The key is to give priority to the security of civilian populations, to be very clear about our commitment to
the fight against terrorism and to be very clear about one point here: never being a partner in the fight
against terrorism. The key is to give priority to the security of civilian populations, to be very clear about
our commitment to the fight against terrorism and also very clear on a point that I want to reiterate
very forcefully: never to be associated with ethnic tensions and to take all communities into account
in our approach.

With Africa, we also want this partnership to be consolidated on global challenges and therefore we
must build, as we have begun to do, convergences and Euro-African initiatives to involve other actors. This
is what we have started to do on certain climate issues, and what we have also started to do on the
financing of African economies through the May 2021 summit in Paris, the financing agenda for African
economies. We have sought t o build a new approach in which France has not simply issued special
drawing rights to the IMF, but has reallocated 100 billion to Africa. This is absolutely key to
revolutionising their model and being a powerful lever to encourage private investment and change scale.
So mobilise the international community to change and transform the modes of financing, convince the
G20 powers to do so, mobilise entrepreneurship in developed countries and African entrepreneurship
much more in a partnership manner. This is the economic New Deal that we sealed here in the spring of
2021, and I thank the authors, and that we want to pursue through bilateral exchanges, within the
framework of the G20 and through a Choose Africa summit that we will organise early next year in
France.

In this respect, we must also, for this new partnership, move forward hand in hand with African youth, as I
said earlier, by linking our diasporas, by associating them. And by emphasising digital, cultural and creative
industries, and sport as renewals of this partnership. To this end, we will organise the Creative Africa event
in June 2023. It will travel and multiply on the African continent. And in the summer of 2024 we will
inaugurate the Maison des Mondres Africaines, which is the fruit of work carried out by the Ministry in close
collaboration with the AFD, Achille MBEMBE and the experts he has mobilised. This place will itself work in
a network with partner places in France, in Europe, in Africa, with our French Institute, our diplomatic
network, but will also recognise the role and strength of our diasporas in this strategy.

This new partnership, I deeply believe, allows us to act without injunction or interference or feelings of
interference, in connection with our diasporas, in support of the actors who think and act so that
democracy is an attractive model in Africa. This is the task of the Foundation for Innovation for Democracy
that has just been created, and I thank Professor MBEMBE, who has already been mentioned, for having
agreed to head it. As you can see, it is a fundamental strategy and I said it in Ouagadougou, I said it in
2018 before you: it is a conversion of vision, it is a complete change of method, of approach. And the
additional resources that we have given serve this change, literally a different approach, which is much
more cooperative and which also mobilises many more actors and which will require us to be in much
more reticular, partnership-based strategies, by associating other forces but which also correspond to the
reality of all these countries.

This approach will be completed by a Mediterranean strategy that I will have to finalise by the end of the
year, when I continue the bilateral trips I started with some of you in Algeria, but which is essential. The
summits on both shores, like the initiatives taken in recent years and months, have made it possible to
lay the foundations for a civil society approach to the agenda that we must pursue.

Finally, the last point I would like to emphasise in talking about this role and this work, this objective that I
have set for you to build stability and peace, is obviously the Near and Middle East. I will do so with great
humility and in a very partial way, since these are only subjects that have occupied generations of
diplomats. And as I sometimes say, when you
On this subject, imagine a happy Sisyphus. Nevertheless, peace in the Mediterranean, peace in Europe will
only be possible if we know how to build new balances in the Near and Middle East. I would like to
salute the role of our diplomats in this respect, first of all to contain Iranian nuclear proliferation. And the
role that we have played in recent weeks, and again in recent days, to build a new possible
agreement, has been key, I congratulate you on this, and allows us to encourage the United States of
America to consolidate this framework. In particular, we have been instrumental in ensuring that the
IAEA's proper safeguards and independence are preserved in this agreement and that the security
interests of all regional players, Israel and the Gulf powers, are taken into account in it. This seems to me
to be fundamental.

In the next few days and weeks, we will say whether we manage to conclude it, but we know that it
does not allow us to build a complete framework for stability in the region. To do this, we have collectively
carried out what I believe to be an innovation, which was the format of the Baghdad conference a year ago
and which made it possible, for the first time in a long time, to bring all the powers in the region around the
table, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, and to try to find ways of convergence and dialogue. This will be
repeated under the authority of the King of Jordan in a few months' time, and I will go there and have the
opportunity to receive the King of Jordan to pursue this agenda. I think this is a good method that must
pursue a few simple objectives. To consolidate the sovereignty of Iraq, these last days have shown us the
decisive aspect and the fragility of this country where I believe we have played an increasing role in
recent years. To work for the sovereignty and stability of Lebanon, a nation that is so dear to us, so close,
but it must be said that it has its own fragilities and has been destabilised by multiple crises, and into
which all the destabilisations in the region are being imported.

The third objective is to build a security framework to deal with Iran's nuclear, ballistic and regional activity.
And to do this by taking into account the interests of all the states around the table and that of the State of
Israel, since we have always considered Israel's security to be one of the key interests in the politics of
the region.

I really believe that the dialogue opened in Baghdad is the framework for this policy of balance in which
France is the only non-regional power now involved, and where we are working usefully to try to build
key advances. In this respect and speaking of this context, I cannot forget that Syria cannot remain an
unthought-of issue in the region for long. It would take too long to address it here. France can only welcome
the fact that the Abraham Accords have helped to move the lines and, above all, to allow a normalisation
of Israel's relations with several states in the region, such as
of the African continent. But for all that, a certain caution leads me to say here that the terms thus set out
will not suffice to settle the Palestinian question and I remain convinced that the lack of a political
settlement of the Palestinian question will not allow for lasting peace and stability in the region.

Once I said that, I gave the limits of a reasoning. I have not given the answer. Don't see this as
cleverness, but also as humility and the awareness that I have already detailed many subjects. But on this
point, we will have to work, with the methodological framework that I have just given, with the
objectives that I have just assigned and with the few open questions that I have just mentioned which, in
my opinion, are not resolved by the initiatives taken elsewhere.

The third and final objective - and I will conclude with this point of our foreign policy after a stronger, more
influential, more independent France, and after this desire to be a balancing power that builds peace and
stability in strategic regions - is to continue to build this effective multilateralism that I mentioned and to
redouble our efforts on certain coalitions that we need. In this respect, as you can see, it is in a way a
matter of continuity on some points of innovation that I would like to assign to you very quickly.
Firstly, in the area of health. I think that the crisis has enabled us to see the usefulness of
international cooperation in health, the risks that weighed on the World Health Organisation, which some
people were undermining by their sometimes uncooperative attitude and others by circumventing
initiatives. I believe that our role must be to consolidate the World Health Organisation as the foundation of
a useful multilateral institution. We must absolutely consolidate the principles of information sharing,
transparency, scientific independence. We must consolidate the early warning agenda for epidemics and
we must build around the World Health Organisation the so-called One Health coalition for which we
must build a cross-cutting approach that encompasses public health, animal health, and the health of
the planet at all local, national and global levels. This is an agenda that was conceived during the crisis,
which is extremely structuring for our countries and for our cooperation and in which I think that France has
a key role to play through its expertise and the geopolitical opportunities that it provides. Because behind
this are new partnerships with Africa, the Latin American region and the Indo-Pacific. In the same way,
on health, I hope that we can consolidate the ACT-A initiative in two respects: continue to strengthen
primary health systems through our bilateral action. The effort must be continued, which is a key objective
for me. And afterwards, to go to the end of the capacity, to build hubs for the production of vaccines and
therefore, afterwards, of diagnostic treatments with some key countries that we must consolidate.

The second objective is the climate. This fight is essential for all of us. I mentioned it earlier. It is going to be
at the heart of our country's action, with planning carried out by the Prime Minister at the heart of our
European action. It has been at the heart of our diplomatic action and our diplomatic successes for several
years. But we must redouble our efforts, with new initiatives to be taken here too. Indeed, we will only
meet the climate challenge if we are able to obtain, first and foremost, an effort from the major emitters
that is commensurate with the stakes. This is the first point. You only have to look at the emissions. We
know where the efforts are: Europe, the United States of America and then the major intermediate
powers. A fair way to do this is to convince our major partners among the developed countries, within the
framework of the OECD, to take on maximum per capita emission commitments. I would like us to embark on
this structuring initiative to both remobilise and allow a system of constraints.

In the same logic of fair distribution of the effort, we must ensure that the emerging countries commit to
a virtuous path, whether they are African, Asian or Latin American. I say emerging countries. With each of
them, we must be able to find agreements to finance the energy transition in our common interest and on
less expensive terms than in the developed countries. We cannot ask emerging countries to move faster and
make the choice, in a way, between development and climate, with financing conditions that are much
tougher than in our countries and that will be tightened by the interest rate policy that is being
implemented.

And so, what we have started to do with the South African laboratory, and with the JET (just energy
transition initiative) that has been taken; to build comprehensive energy transition and financing
agreements. We must extend this to several countries - Senegal, Indonesia, India - and support them in
this work. This effort of solidarity and commitment to the countries of the South must necessarily go hand
in hand with an effort to adapt to climate change. And here, let's be honest, climate change is here. We
can fear temperature increases beyond the objectives of the Paris Agreement. At home, we need to adapt
our ways of doing things and our infrastructures, but in vulnerable countries, a major protection effort is
needed to avoid new crises linked to the massive displacement of populations as a result of climate
change. We must therefore help them to redouble their investments because for them it is already too late.
Secondly, financing adaptation and resilience, both here and in the countries of the South, means
protecting our ecosystems, our health, our food and our water reserves. And here too, it is a profound,
structuring diplomatic movement, which justifies the fact that at least 30% of climate finance must
go to nature-based solutions. This is a way of completely changing the logic of the discussions we have
been having with the South since 2015, which has greatly blocked many of the negotiations we have
had recently in the G20 and elsewhere. We need to mobilise all those who can contribute to this. And in
this respect, a One Planet Summit could be devoted to this major issue, with water management being one
of the specific issues.

More generally, we must ensure that international efforts dedicated to climate and biodiversity are well
synchronised, as we have begun to do, in the various meetings that will mark out our action: COP27 in
Egypt this year, which I will be attending, COP15 in Montreal, the United Nations Conference on the
Oceans that we will be hosting in 2025, where we must try to build a new agreement on the oceans. And in
this respect, the fact that in the last few years we have redoubled our efforts to preserve the Paris
Agreement, that we have been at the forefront of the One Planet Summit on biodiversity and building the
terms of an agenda for this and consolidating targets and coalitions for terrestrial and marine protected
areas; The fact that we have for the first time adopted a polar strategy and a maritime strategy that is
visible, clear, assumed, transposed into European law and brought to the international agenda, is a sign of
this convergence of agendas, which is a strength but which we must now internationalise. This is a sign of
this convergence of agendas, which is a strength but which we must now internationalise, because it is
extremely fruitful for building new partnerships with all the continents and helping us to have this logic of
cooperation. For example, on tropical forests with the Amazon in the framework of the alliance founded in
2019, with Africa thanks to the alliances built with Gabon and a few others on primary forests, and the One
Forest summit that we will hold on this particular theme, and all the commitments made in this area.

I'm going on a tangent, but you can see the multitude of initiatives taken, and the extent to which they are
synergistic and symbiotic when grouped together. But above all, there is a power of action and conviction
if you know how to carry them out, and above all, very profound results. This is also why we will
continue what we have launched with the Great Green Wall through concrete projects, especially in
agriculture, from the Gulf of Guinea to the Horn of Africa, to develop plant proteins, support the partners in
the region and help with this very diplomacy.

Climate diplomacy will be at the heart of these objectives for effective multilateralism because we are
going to redouble our efforts for France, but it only makes sense if no one can use the famous excuse of
what we represent, and therefore if we know how to multiply it at European level. The foundations are there;
in the private sector, we have started to build the terms and we must keep control of them and, in a way, the
terms of reference so as not to have Anglo-Saxon subjugated standardisation. And we are fully aware of the
fight against climate change, biodiversity, the oceans and the poles, and we have this massive agenda of
initiatives and concrete actions that mobilise and create new coalitions.

Finally, in this area, and here too I am talking about continents that need to be explored, effective
multilateralism will be tested, and therefore our action will have to be built, in new areas that are not
yet regulated, or are insufficiently regulated.

The first is digital. We have done a lot in recent years. A digital diplomacy has been built, the function of
an ambassador dedicated to this and working on negotiations has been built. We have been at the
forefront since the summer of 2017 with the United Kingdom, seeking to build a coalition, then Tech
for Good initiatives, as I mentioned, at the Christchurch call. We have achieved results, the famous "golden
hour" during which terrorist content is removed by platforms. We have changed things at European
level, but we have a continent to build. Digital regulation is still to be done. This is why you will be
mobilised, alongside your colleagues from the Culture and Digital Affairs departments, for the general
assembly for free information that we will organise in the autumn and which will also enshrine several
initiatives that we have taken, and I mentioned Reporters Without Borders just now.
Basically, we have to build an international digital public order. Because this public space has in fact
been created, it is in fact globalised. But as it was built by private actors and individual uses, it was built
without rules. And the very intimate battles we are waging to fight against sexual harassment, to protect our
children, to fight against violence against women, to defend our values in our country are being shaken up
every time because content that says the exact opposite is circulating freely on the platforms, affecting our
children, our teenagers, our families, when I am not talking about the propaganda of other States that
use these same channels. We need to rethink the terms of trade and the terms of reference of new
conflictualities. And so, yes, it is indeed a European and international regulation that must be built in this
space, both civil and military, because they must not be confused, and they must be distinguished.

And then, to mention just two others, space and the high seas are new international spaces that are now
being deeply invaded by powers, with new unusual and uncooperative behaviour. We saw this with the
Russian initiatives at the beginning of the conflict in space, and we see it with the multiplication of
initiatives either by sovereign powers or by private actors on the high seas, which presuppose, in space
and on the high seas, that they are regulated. And therefore an international framework must be built. The
failure of the BBNJ negotiations over the last few days, despite the commitment of our diplomacy and of
several of you whom I would like to thank here, must not make us give up. And here too, we must succeed
in rebuilding new coalitions of actors through the
appointments that I have just chanted.

That is it, ladies and gentlemen. I have not been complete, but I have been long. But as you can see,
the moment we are living through is one of vertigo that must grip every lucid mind. Basically, in
recent years, on several occasions, the unthinkable has happened. A world epidemic, the closure of all
economies, the return of war to Europe, the brandishing of the nuclear threat, etc. Let us prepare for the
unthinkable tomorrow. And so, in the face of this, we must have simple and clear objectives, which I
believe we have set. Some invariants and some elements of method on which we must never allow
ourselves to be intimidated, I believe I have recalled them. We must seek efficiency everywhere, we must
acknowledge that we must also have a more hybrid approach to our action. We must involve civil
society more, find partners and allies to relay our action and the explanation of our action, and adapt to
changes in theatres, cooperate without naivety and react without passion.

But in the face of all this, I think that we have real assets, obviously, a complete model of army, a strong
army, the first in Europe, and the choices we make, a strong diplomacy, and there too, in my opinion, the
most complete and the most structured at European level, which produces ideas and results.

We have two elements, if I may say so, in our genes. France, in that it is a nation with a universal
vocation. It is a force in this world. We have built ourselves for ourselves and by ourselves, with at our
heart the fight against obscurantism, the belief in scientific progress and for mankind, and a universal
will that puts the free and rational individual above all else. These values are universal. Whoever comes to
upset them will create chaos, disorder and unhappiness at home. It is essential to have carried them and
to continue to carry them with strength and to defend them in all theatres of the game, it is a strength. We
must do this without giving the impression that we are giving lessons by finding partners, but we must
assume it.

And Europe is a force. It is a means, in some respects, as I said, an objective on other subjects. It is a
strength because it is the best laboratory in the world for managing diversity and complexity.
There is no other area in the world with such a concentration of cultures, histories, past misfortunes and
languages that has been living in peace for so long, in cooperation, without hegemony. When we say to
ourselves that in order to build today's world, we must find solutions for effective multilateralism and
build balances, we say to ourselves that European technology is a good technology to export. And so we
have in our genes the recipes to do this.

To do this, we will also have to rearm ourselves morally. I mentioned this on 13 July last to our armies, but it
applies to the whole nation. Because when war returns, we must seek peace, build solutions. But we must
be a strong nation which, as I said, knows the price of freedom and the possibility of war, so that it never
commits itself to war as much as it can, but defends its interests when it has to defend them, if it has to
defend them at the time when it has to defend them in a choice that is its own and within a framework that
it defines sovereignly and nationally. All of this is immense, but it is exciting. And so what I want to say to
you at this moment is that, as you have understood, you have done a lot and we have done a lot during
these five years, we have decided and taken note of a future ambition. And in the face of this great change
in the world, we have immense work ahead of us. I know we are capable of it, I believe we are capable of
it, and I believe that together we will succeed. I am counting on you.

Long live the Republic and

France!