:france-cool:
"In January the general staff quietly established ten working groups to examine the country’s readiness for high-intensity war. French generals reckon that they have a decade or so to prepare for it. The groups cover everything from munition shortages to the resilience of society, including whether citizens are “ready to accept the level of casualties we have never seen since world war two”, says one participant. The spectre of high-end war is now so widespread in French military thinking that the scenario has its own acronym: HEM, or hypothèse d'engagement majeur (hypothesis of major engagement). The presumed opponents are unnamed, but analysts point not only to Russia, but also Turkey or a North African country."
Obviously, Turkey and France aren't exactly best buds. While the brain trust that uses /r/geopolitics, /r/neoliberal as NATO flairs think that just because these two are in an alliance of convenience they will be forever, it wouldn't surprise me if they actually got into some kind of conflict that would shatter NATO.
Not sure what France is gearing up for, the only actually sensical target is some north African country. Possibly Libya to "re-stabilize" it. I don't know if this type of gearing up is actually typical for France or not, either. It would be normal for the US, I guess.
The article mentioned an increase in troops in the Sahel region (think Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, etc.)
Good analysis from August 2020 about some recent tensions.
France has been against Turkey's entrance into the EU since 2008 (here's a recent article where Macron has kept up that same anti-Turkey stance). France has been pretty strong against Armenian genocide denial, which obviously annoys Turkey because they continue to deny what they did to the Armenians 100 years ago wasn't genocide (it was). France doesn't like that Turkey has been getting more proactive in Libya, which France views as its "traditional" sphere. France has also been quite islamophobic of late (here's some article about some recent tensions, but Macron has been cribbing notes from the Front National's playbook wrt islamophobia), which obviously bristles against Turkey. There is also a small (about a couple hundred thousand people), but fairly active, contingent of ethnic Kurds in France who do have some level of contact with the PKK (which Turkey really doesn't like), don't know how much that last one has anything to do with tensions but its something to note.
As comrade Mardoniush noted, France does also maintain a sense of imperial destiny over former colonies in West Africa as well, so when Turkey intervenes it does threaten their interests (read, it interrupts or threatens the flow of capital and wealth from the capitalist hinterlands in west and north Africa to the imperial metropole in France). You can read up on Michael Robert's analysis of modern financialized imperialism if you're curious about how France still maintains a modern debt-based colonial empire.