Emmanuel Macron is hosting Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in Paris from Sunday evening through Monday, according to Al Jazeera. It is the crown prince's third visit to the French capital, after trips in 2022 and 2023.
The visit opens at the closing ceremony of the Esports World Cup, held outside Saudi Arabia for the first time. Accords on health, transport and energy are due to be signed on Monday.
The item that matters most
Officials say the talks will cover energy routes that would bypass the Strait of Hormuz, including new pipelines and port networks.
That is the line to read twice. The strait is the channel through which a large share of the world's seaborne oil and gas passes, and it is bordered by Iran. Six months into the US and Israeli war with Iran, a Gulf producer and a European consumer discussing how to move hydrocarbons without using it are not planning for a hypothetical.
Building around Hormuz is slow, expensive and partial. Pipelines take years and carry a fraction of what tankers do. The fact that it is on the agenda of a two-day visit says more about how the war is being assessed than any communique will.
The rest of the list
Iran, Gaza and the Palestinians, Lebanon and Syria are all to be discussed. An adviser to Macron summarized the outlook on the war in five words: "It's difficult to see a way out."
Saudi Arabia's hosting of Expo 2030 and the 2034 FIFA World Cup is also expected to feature, which is the commercial register of the same relationship: France is a longstanding weapons and defense supplier to Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia is an increasingly large investor in the French economy.
The pact in the background
On August 7 Saudi Arabia signed a trilateral defense agreement with Turkey and Pakistan, the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, under which an armed attack on any signatory is treated as an attack on all three.
A European partner will read that carefully. It aligns Riyadh's security with two states outside Europe's alliance structures, one of them nuclear-armed, and it was signed while the war with Iran was under way. France sells arms to Saudi Arabia; it now sells them to a country with mutual defense obligations it did not have a month ago.
What we could not establish
We could not establish the value of the accords to be signed, which pipeline or port projects are under discussion, or whether France has taken a position on the Mecca agreement. We verified this account from a single publication, and the agenda items are as officials described them before the talks rather than outcomes.
