Macron should call Trump’s bluff
When it comes to defense, Europe has the means to stick it to Washington.
US President Donald Trump may be shaking the foundations of America’s traditional alliances but there could be a way for European countries to beat him at his own game. Taking their own initiative to reshuffle the cards on the diplomatic stage might be a good way to call his bluff or otherwise help him realize the limitations of his own policies.
For most of Washington’s traditional allies, that may be easier said than done. But one of them—France—has a trump card (no pun intended) it has played in the past that, if used again, could shift the debate about the raison d’être and future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
That’s because France has nukes.
Of Washington’s 31 NATO allies, all but two rely on the United States for their nuclear protection, commonly called the “umbrella”: Britain and France. But British nuclear capabilities are tethered to Washington. They rely on American-made missiles and, even if—as a government spokesman recently insisted— “the UK’s nuclear deterrent is completely operationally independent,” that’s far from the case practically. France has no such limitation because it has developed its own nuclear capacity outside NATO since the late 1950s. It enabled then-President Charles de Gaulle to regain French autonomy within the alliance in 1966 when he announced to a startled President Lyndon Johnson that his country would “cease her participation in the integrated commands and no longer place her forces at the disposal of NATO.”
Paris’s lack of trust in Washington’s foreign policy compelled American troops to leave their military bases in France, and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to pull up stakes in Rocquencourt, near Paris, and relocate to Mons in Belgium, leaving behind a few Cadillacs, Harley-Davidsons and a golf course.
If EU member states feel less need for the American umbrella, they might also be inclined to ignore edicts from a Washington that, however sternly it may speak, would carry a much smaller stick.
After the Cold War, France rejoined NATO’s integrated commands in 2007, and the question of its operational autonomy appeared settled for good until Trump sent Europe scrambling with his warnings about the extent of America’s nuclear umbrella.
After a few weeks of sheer panic, proposals for the new paradigm are emerging. One comes from Emmanuel Macron, France’s center-right president, an Atlanticist in his heart as much as for practical reasons.
In March, he suggested moving on two fronts: calming the anxiety nourished by the Trump administration’s scorn and admonition toward the European Union, while providing a viable alternative if Washington were to rescind its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5, according to which all NATO partners pledge to jointly protect any one attacked.
Trump’s recent hints that he would let Europe fend for itself have only strengthened Macron’s proposal.
France has always had a love-hate relationship with the concept of a joint European defense mechanism. In 1954, French politicians torpedoed a proposed treaty for a European Defense Community (ECD), designed to develop Western Europe’s military capacities during the Cold War, because they considered it to be an American ploy to re-arm Germany. In the 1990s, France touted the Western European Union (WEU), which was never taken seriously by the Americans, British and Germans because it was supposed to operate in cooperation with but outside of NATO.
Now defunct, WEU has been replaced by the pompously named Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), which, for all its lip service to defending world peace, lacks military teeth, thereby falling short of the Roman motto “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you want peace, get ready for war).
The idea of an autonomous, if not independent, European defense arm of the transatlantic alliance was in the doldrums until Trump breathed new life into it. But if he wants Europeans to take care of their own defense, he may get more than what he wishes for.
While Trump’s first-term threats about his waning commitment to Europe’s security nudged NATO members to at most slightly increase their defense spending (even if most of them still fall short of the target of 2 percent of GDP), his new threats are taken far more seriously. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent decisions by Finland and Sweden to join NATO in hopes that the US nuclear umbrella would help them confront Russian threats to their Baltic neighbors have made the issue starkly more urgent.
Now Macron not only sees an opening for France’s long-cherished dream of European military autonomy from the United States, but he has also received a surprisingly positive response to his idea of extending French nuclear protection to European countries wary of Washington’s wobbling. Most unexpected was the hearty support from the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz.
Since its inception in the decade after World War II, the European Community (now the European Union) has been propelled by its Franco-German “engine.” Any new proposal has needed the blessing of both France and Germany to have any hope of moving forward.
But the engine has been spluttering for 20 years now and needs a new impetus. A joint European defense strategy under the umbrella of French nukes with the means and might of German industry might provide such a push while bringing France and Germany closer. Combined with political will from the EU Commission in Brussels, it could help Europe distance itself from American leaders’ mood swings.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who happens to be a former German defense minister, is all in for beefing up member countries’ armies. She’s proposed a 150-billion euro lending program for that purpose and given her blessing to allowing member countries to run bigger deficits in order to increase their defense spending.
That presents a two-pronged risk for the United States. If EU member states feel less need for the American umbrella, they might also be inclined to ignore edicts from a Washington that, however sternly it may speak, would carry a much smaller stick.
Second, if France offers others its nuclear protection, it will also surely require its partners to return the favor by buying weapons Made in France rather than Made in the USA. Most NATO members currently buy more than half their weapons from the United States.
But those pesky French build nuclear submarines as well as fighter jets, missiles, tanks, heavy guns and radar systems. Rafale fighter jets have helped French arms exports to European partners soar since 2020 and contributed to France being the world’s second-largest arms exporter after the US.
For several years now, Macron has called on EU partners to shift their procurement policies to buy local. “My intention is to convince European states that have become accustomed to buying American,” he recently told reporters. He has also pushed French arms manufacturers to become more attractive to buyers by reducing red tape along with price tags.
Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and other US industrial giants are unlikely to welcome the prospect of European governments starting to buy, or acquire licenses to build, French-made weapons in place of American ones.
Those armaments behemoths must already be anxiously watching as a flurry of European summits has resulted in decisions to invest billions of euros in local defense production.
Whether or not Europe’s nuclear security architecture fundamentally changes, Trump may have already opened a Pandora’s box he will be unable to close. Wherever he is now, de Gaulle must be feeling some schadenfreude.
Jean-Louis Doublet was a US correspondent for French media and a White House reporter during the George W. Bush administration.
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