When he presented the White Paper on defence and national security, the President of the French Republic identified uncertainty and the major new trends of the world stemming from globalisation as the cause of a new French strategy.

Strategic uncertainty has taken over from the fatalism of the Cold War prevailing in the twentieth century. Actually, since the end of the Cold War, one can only notice the trend to a global ‘liquefaction’, in the literal sense as well, with global warming and melting of the polar icecap. By analogy with fluid mechanics, every action on a place causes reactions on the other side of the globe, even if it is still difficult to predict them. Because of this evolution, the security and defence of these interests are a major concern. Obviously, they cannot be designed like a Maginot Line or referring to Operation Overlord.

Thus, ‘the defence and security strategies have to meet new problems: not only the defence or monitoring of specific areas but also the recognition of galloping flows of people, goods or ideas.’⁽¹⁾ The various threats we encounter—terrorism, proliferation, disruption in supplies, environmental stress or against the computers—are less and less localized and are not state-centric. We also need to go into international waters, near the cause of those threats, most of the time within a multilateral framework to secure our borders. That is why maritime areas represent a strategic issue.