New Calendonia Collapsing
A French Pacific territory in crisis.
If you watched the report, things are terrible there, 2025 is going to feature real hunger. The three things I got out of this report are 1) French colony 2) having multiple independence referendums 3) where nickel mining was a major employer. Why do these things matter, geopolitically?
The west doesn’t think much about New Caledonia, except for World War II history buffs who immediately think “Battle of the Coral Sea”.
Zooming out and going clockwise, the Solomons were the scene of the Battle of Coral Sea, Fiji is French, Samoa is an American possession, then British New Zealand and Australia around the bottom of the dial. Papua New Guinea has been British, German, Australian, and they’re now on their own. They have a lot of extractive industries.
Digging into the New Caledonia unrest article on Wikipedia, I think we’ve got the clues we need.
On 16 May, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin accused Azerbaijan of interfering in the unrest by making a deal with independence advocates on France 2.[158] Azerbaijan denied Darmanin's accusations.[159] However, in July 2023, Azerbaijan had invited pro-independence activists from the French overseas territories of Martinique, French Guiana, New Caledonia and French Polynesia for a conference in Baku, which saw the creation of a "Baku Initiative Group" whose stated aim is to support "French liberation and anti-colonial movements."
And then a less well grounded accusation against Turkey.
On 16 May, a report by French radio station Europe 1 also accused Turkey of interfering in a "circumstantial alliance of secret services to designate a common enemy" or steered by Russia and China to "open peripheral fronts, such as in New Caledonia, or to weaken the French state".
Armenia & France Grow Closer (2024-05-24) was me noting that after Russian meddling in former French possessions in Africa, France was taking the opportunity to back up Armenia, who are in a bit of a geopolitical pickle.
This maps of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline might make this a little easier to understand. Did you catch Georgian President & Russian Influence last weekend? And Georgians Fend Off Russia was five months ago …
I’ve been watching the Caucasus since before the Boston marathon bombing. This seems to be an obscure, remote area to Americans. Looking from a geopolitical historical perspective, it could be renamed the East Balkans, with the implication being just as much trouble brews up here as it does in southeast Europe.
Nickel reserves by country is an interesting pie chart. Australia, New Caledonia, The Philippines, and Canada will stick together in a confrontation with China. Brazil is remote for China, Russian production of anything is hindered by sanctions. I don’t know much about Indonesia, but assume they would remain amenable to China trade.
As an investment driven economy China will flood commodity markets, with rare earths being the quintessential example. They aren’t producing 3% and sitting on 33% of nickel reserves, if they had it, they’d be extracting it.
Nickel’s primary use is in stainless steel, but vehicles with batteries are an important application, this Adamas Intel report goes into some detail.
Conclusion:
The Russian invasion of Ukraine took out a large portion of the world’s chip grade neon production. The enormous nuclear plants there make painstaking cryogenic separation of argon and neon from the atmosphere workable. Hurriane Helene hit the world’s top source of chip grade silicon in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. I don’t know that the world has a backup plan. There are simply too many commodities in this world where market forces have elevated a single player, like China with rare earths due to their naturally low cerium deposits, and this endangers our entire civilization when there’s the slightest bit of trouble.
Normally, these events, in that location, would have me wondering if China was about the throw New Caledonia a lifeline. Given the condition of their housing market, that does not seem very likely.