France’s military humiliation in the Sahel was not supposed to end this way. After more than a decade of counterterrorism operations across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, Paris was forced into a series of ignominious withdrawals that no amount of diplomatic language could disguise. Juntas in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey did not merely ask the French to leave. They expelled them, to cheering crowds, under Russian flags. What followed was a period of strategic disorientation in the Elysée that is only now beginning to resolve itself into something resembling a policy. Macron’s answer to the wreckage of Françafrique is a pivot: southward to Egypt and eastward into anglophone Africa. It is a rebranding exercise masquerading as a doctrine, and it deserves to be examined with clear eyes.

The pivot to Egypt is the more revealing of the two moves. Cairo is not a natural partner for Paris in any organic sense. France’s relationship with Egypt has historically been mediated through arms sales, cultural diplomacy, and periodic alignment on Mediterranean security. What has changed is the collapse of France’s Sahelian footprint and its urgent need to anchor itself to a large, militarily capable Arab state that can provide a veneer of legitimacy for whatever comes next in North and Central Africa. Sisi’s........

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