Global Gateway is a much larger funding campaign, involving 300 billion Euro to be spent between 2021 and 2027. About half of that are planned to go to African nations. It's Europe's counterpart to China's New Silk Road programme and largely seen to be directly competing with that.
With China and the Axis offering military hardware and sponsorship, and the EU only giving general development options, the only outcome I see is African leaders bending over at Axis demands and pocketing naive Europeans' money.
They don't care about infrastructure and development. That's just a bonus for popularity. But if the people won't like them for the development and reforms, they'll fear them. First and foremost they need weapons to have their little civil wars and to protect their own rule.
Macron being the usual dummy and demanding Fr*nch exclusivity over ReArm. France doesn't have the industrial capacity to do that.
France accounts for about as much of global arms exports as UK and Germany combined. But it is mitigated by production going almost purely toward exports and very little toward military modernization and expansion.
When we look at other exporters, we see Italy making a huge leap in total exports which in turn means higher production realized or anticipated.
And when we look at Europe in general, there are quite a few small nations we hear about making strides in localizing defense production and bringing in capabilities that can benefit the entire Europe.
As long as anyone tries making ReArm an EU-production-only or an X-country-only thing, it's doomed to fail.
