French President Emmanuel Macron has been on quite a journey these last years. The five-foot-even devotee of Charles de Gaulle (6’5), seems to have developed a Napoleon complex. In a televised speech last week, Macron sounded like a man at war, claiming Russian aggression “knows no borders” and offering to extend the French nuclear deterrent to all of Europe.
Such a proposal, as he surely knows, would have been anathema to Le Grand Charles who developed France’s nuclear arsenal because he knew of the absurdity of Washington’s pledge to wage nuclear war for Europe.
As I pointed out in an essay for The American Conservative in 2021,
…De Gaulle had a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of alliance dynamics. He knew that alliances have drawbacks and understood the risks they posed. His opposition to NATO was based on his not unreasonable view that a) a conflict having nothing to do with France—for example, between the U.S. and China over Taiwan—would unnecessarily drag it into a war with China and b) it was unlikely in the extreme, despite promises and the best of intentions, that the U.S. would ever trade New York for Paris in a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. As he told Bohlen, “no one could expect the U.S. to risk its cities for the defense of Europe.”
Now we are to expected to believe Macron would trade Paris for Lviv? Unlikley.
As the estimable British correspondent and columnist Mary Dejevsky points out,
The nuclear question places France front and centre as the only EU country to have a nuclear capability, and invites curiosity about whether, and on what terms, France might be willing to share it; Macron has said that this could be a possibility. The UK, now outside the EU, is the only other nuclear state in Europe, and there have been murmurings about UK-France cooperation to replace the US nuclear umbrella.
It looks like a nice idea, but it comes with many complications.
Trump’s determination to have Europe finally and at long last stand on its own is bearing some fruit yet France’s nuclear-sharing scheme is an unserious proposal from an unserious leader.