The Partner Paradox: Why America’s Strongest Allies Are Ceding The Field

Forbes

As the United States rolls out a new global geostrategy centered on burden-sharing and burden-shifting, it is discovering that many of its allies and partners lack the capabilities to assume greater responsibility for regional security. France is a case in point, with its international influence eroding as its ability to shape the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East has fallen short of its ambitions and rhetoric. This decline is particularly evident in the Middle East, where President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly clashed with Donald Trump on Gaza, the Persian Gulf and Lebanon, and in the South Caucasus, where the geopolitical consequences of both conflicts are converging. For Paris, the region has thus become a revealing test of the limits of French power and its ability to act as a meaningful security provider beyond Europe.

France said on Aug. 8 that Baku and Yerevan had taken “important and courageous steps” toward peace, while calling for a formal agreement, the reopening of borders, and regional connectivity, and reaffirming European support for their sovereignty and territorial integrity. On Aug. 18, 2026, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met in Yerevan with U.S. Congressman Abraham Hamadeh (R-AZ) to discuss deepening Armenia-U.S. ties across the political, economic, and technological spheres, as well as implementation of the TRIPP transport project. The meeting came amid growing pressure from Moscow, after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin warned on Aug. 11 that Armenia needed to hold a referendum by December 2026 to choose between EU and EAEU membership, or face Kremlin-led countermeasures. On the same day, marking the first anniversary of the Aug. 2025 Trump-hosted White House summit, the United States, Armenia, and Azerbaijan credited the meeting with ending decades of conflict and highlighted progress toward border normalization.

Despite its official support for the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, France has been largely missing in action in the South Caucasus, especially since the end of the 2020 Karabakh War. This reflects Paris’ difficulty adapting to the region’s new strategic realities, particularly Azerbaijan’s emergence as the preeminent regional actor and Turkey’s expanding role. France has not only failed to improve ties with Baku, but its traditionally close relationship with Yerevan has also suffered as Armenia has sought to diversify its partnerships beyond Europe and Russia to the U.S. As a result, Paris has found itself with limited leverage in a region where its diplomatic ambitions have outpaced its ability to shape events.

France’s post-Soviet role in the South Caucasus began as a formal, balanced mediator – its unique seat as the only European member of the OSCE Minsk Group gave it institutional standing on the Karabakh conflict for three decades. Critics argued this format let Russia manage and freeze the “cold conflict”, inserting itself into the strategic region rather than resolving the dispute, and even during this period ties with Baku were consistently strained by Azerbaijani suspicion of French bias toward Yerevan.

After 2018, driven by Pashinyan’s rise, deteriorating Armenia-Russia relations, the Second Karabakh War, and a large domestic Armenian diaspora, France’s posture shifted sharply toward Armenia, producing largely symbolic gestures like the 2020 Senate resolution and public criticism of Azerbaijan’s 2023 offensive that further soured relations with Baku. This tilt left Paris looking partisan and irrelevant rather than balanced, just as Baku and Yerevan began pursuing direct normalization. By 2025-2026, France’s influence appeared to be waning further still, with reports that Pashinyan had moved to curb French sway within his own government in favor of closer ties with Washington, leaving France with poor relations with Azerbaijan and diminishing leverage with Armenia alike.

In late July 2026, Pashinyan removed Araik Harutyunyan, who had headed his office since 2021, officially citing the need to adjust the government’s priorities and transition to a new phase. European and Ukrainian sources, however, allege that Harutyunyan had been recruited by French intelligence and was passing political assessments and information about Pashinyan’s plans to Paris – claims that remain unverified but, if accurate, would cast the dismissal in a very different light.

The appointment of Lilit Makunts, Pashinyan’s former ambassador to Washington and chief adviser, as Harutyunyan’s replacement further suggests a shift in the prime minister’s inner circle away from French influence and toward the United States. Taken together, the reshuffle may signal that Pashinyan is recalibrating Armenia’s external partnerships as the regional balance changes, with Washington increasingly displacing Paris as Yerevan’s preferred Western interlocutor.

The episode in Armenia is therefore less important for what it says about one official than for what it reveals about the broader erosion of French strategic influence. Paris has spent years trying to preserve a global role that increasingly exceeds its ability to shape events, leaving it poorly positioned to adapt when regional power balances shift. The pattern is evident not only in the South Caucasus but also in Africa, where France has been pushed out of several traditional post-colonial spheres of influence, particularly in the Sahel, forcing it to recast its approach toward the continent.

The Middle East has presented a subtler version of the same problem, with Paris retaining diplomatic and economic ties but struggling to translate them into commensurate strategic leverage, underscoring the widening gap between France’s strategic ambitions and its ability to shape outcomes beyond Europe.

Even within Europe, France has struggled to translate its political weight into continental leadership, despite Brexit and Germany’s prolonged economic and political difficulties creating an apparent opening for Paris. The problem is compounded by an EU that has passed its post-Cold War peak and is increasingly divided and incoherent, limiting France’s ability to mobilize the bloc behind any strategic agenda, let alone Paris’s. To a significant extent, this flies in the face of the new U.S. geostrategy, which is pressing European allies to assume greater responsibility for their own security rather than relying on Washington to underwrite the continent, a shift that has intensified debates over burden-sharing and strategic autonomy. The ongoing war in Ukraine has magnified these pressures by exposing Europe’s military shortcomings, straining national finances and political cohesion, and forcing European governments to confront security challenges that they had long assumed the United States would manage.

The war in Iran is also reshaping the South Caucasus by accelerating Armenia’s departure from the geopolitical order centered on Moscow and Tehran. As Iran weakens under U.S. and Israeli pressure, Yerevan has fewer incentives to preserve its traditional alignment with Tehran and greater reason to deepen ties with Washington while normalizing relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey. This is producing a broader realignment in which the United States, Israel and Turkey are increasingly shaping the South Caucasus through their expanding influence in the Middle East. France and other European allies, despite their relative geographic proximity, are largely absent from this process, constrained by the war in Ukraine and the resources and political attention it continues to consume.

The broader lesson is that the South Caucasus illustrates the central challenge of America’s new geostrategy: Washington increasingly expects allies and partners to shoulder primary security responsibilities in their respective regions rather than relying on the United States to do so. In the strategically vital South Caucasus, wedged between two of America’s three principal adversaries – Russia and Iran – Washington is still a relative newcomer and therefore needs capable regional partners to translate its growing engagement into lasting influence. Yet the paradox is that some of America’s most advanced allies, such as France, Germany, and U.K, have proved less able to fill that role.