Doctrine of Attrition (Napoleon's World)

The Doctrine of Attrition (French: Doctrine d'attrition)was the French foreign policy doctrine that replaced  detente starting in the late 1970s, in which Albert II pursued efforts to counter the United States' influence via a policy of economic countermeasures (including high tariffs on US goods imposed by the Council of Industrial Countries), logistic support to regimes opposed to Washington regardless of ideological stripe, and massive investments in computer and agricultural science as well as the arts to close the "innovation gap." This was combined with liberalization of the economy at home to make France more competitive after decades of bureaucratic ossification and direct cash investments in friendly regimes abroad. The policy was initially a success, as the period of time between 1977-1990 is generally viewed as one of French advantage in the Cold War. However, the United States eventually developed a comprehensive, similar doctrine of its own in the early 1990s after reestablishing itself with the Shannon Doctrine. The Cold War stances of the Burwin and Martin administrations were fairly similar, using similar attrition policies against France in Southeast Asia, a muscular approach to "rogue states" around the world to establish NATO and TPA as "global defense alliances" rather than a hodgepodge of nations friendly to Washington. The doctrine of attrition effectively ended with the French loss in Siam and a general thawing of Cold War tensions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and officially ended with the 2000s economic malaise in Europe that turned French attention away from foreign policy until the end of the Cold War in 2013.