In May 2017, Emmanuel Macron entered the Élysée Palace as, by some distance, the most explicitly doctrinaire French president in a long time. His ambition was not purely to govern France but to reposition it as a puissance d’équilibre, the key force behind a strategically autonomous Europe. Nearly a decade on, that ambition has produced a foreign policy record of genuine consequence and disappointment, often simultaneously. The nuclear arsenal has been expanded for the first time since 1992. French troops have been expelled from three Sahelian countries, showing how regional backlash has undercut his influence. Seven prime ministers have come and gone in under two years, weakening the domestic base behind his foreign policy. Public debt sits above 114% of GDP, a trajectory that predates Macron but that his presidency has done little to reverse. With the 2027 presidential election approaching and Macron constitutionally barred from standing again, this is the moment to take stock.
Strategic autonomy and its nuclear expression
From his 2017 Sorbonne address to the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue, Macron has consistently argued for European independence from both Washington and Beijing. Still, strategic autonomy has remained more a guiding idea than a policy, as Europe continues to depend on US military power, satellites, and energy. Central and Eastern European states back EU defense only when it supports NATO, not as a substitute for American protection. Even so, French advocacy has seldom translated into concrete outcomes.
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La Francia in crisi e l’idea della guerra
Faced with a cohesion that consensus could not produce, Macron attempted to build it through fait accompli. Speaking at the Île-Longue submarine base in Brittany on March 2, 2026, he announced the first increase in France’s nuclear arsenal since 1992 and introduced dissuasion avancée: a framework for deploying nuclear-capable Rafale aircraft to eight named European partners.
Germany announced a bilateral nuclear steering group; Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared the framework would ensure adversaries “never dare to attack”. But the gaps are telling: The Baltic states, Norway and Finland, the countries that actually border Russia, are absent, and that weakens deterrent credibility precisely where it is most needed. The domaine réservé, which enabled Macron to act without parliamentary constraint, offers no protection against a successor who disagrees, so the framework’s durability depends on political continuity.
Out of Sahel
The Sahel marked a clear failure for Macron’s foreign policy. From 2022 to 2024, military juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger expelled French troops, exploiting anti-French sentiment. In cities like Bamako, Russian flags replaced French presence, signaling a loss of both military and political legitimacy. The Russian presence has eventually turned out to be less solid than many expected or feared, but that does hardly change the overall assessment of French performance there.
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The roots of the crisis go back before Macron, stemming from fragile state institutions, jihadist violence and long-standing grievances. Yet Macron intensified the problem in his own way. In 2017, he declared in a speech in Ouagadougou a clear departure from Françafrique, but this promise clashed with the realities of Operation Barkhane. France’s later shift of focus toward anglophone Africa and Egypt made sense strategically, and at the 2026 Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, the first held outside a francophone country, those nations that had ousted France were notably absent. This new approach restores ties where France is still accepted, but does not resolve the underlying losses or reasons for its diminished role.
Russia, Ukraine and the price of ambiguity
Between 2019 and early 2022, Macron pursued a strategy of dialogue with Moscow premised on the belief that European security could not be built against Russia but only with it. His 2019 declaration that NATO was experiencing “brain death” was the logical expression of a framework that assumed Russia could be drawn into a new European security architecture rather than excluded from one – and was only partly justified by the understandable fear of US abandonment under the first Trump administration. When Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine in February 2022, that framework did not merely fail; it became an embarrassment. In retrospect, the pre-invasion diplomacy may have signaled Western hesitancy to Moscow, and the gap between Macron’s confidence and the outcome he helped shape cannot be ignored.
Afterwards, France strongly supported Ukraine as US backing wavered, even sending military instructors, a move few European leaders matched. At a June 2026 summit with Volodymyr Zelensky, Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz, Macron co-signed a joint commitment to robust security guarantees as a precondition for any ceasefire. The trajectory runs from strategic miscalculation to something that, cautiously, looks like genuine leadership. Still, the sequence matters: The credibility built since 2022 does not erase what preceded it, even if it helps explain the later turn.
China and the Middle East: the limits of visibility
France’s Indo-Pacific ambitions rest on a proposition Macron has advanced without wavering since 2019, when France became the first EU member state to articulate a formal strategy for the region: Europe should be neither Washington’s follower nor drawn into its rivalry with Beijing. In April 2026, speaking in Tokyo and Seoul, he was still making the same argument, calling on medium-sized powers to form a “coalition of independents”. The consistency is real, but the coalition is not. The 2021 AUKUS agreement, under which Australia cancelled a major submarine contract with France’s Naval Group in favor of a trilateral security pact with Washington and London, said it plainly: When it came to the moment of decision, France was not at the table. As a result, France’s influence remained visible in rhetoric but absent in the outcome.
In the Middle East, France’s recognition of Palestine in 2025 and criticism of Israel brought diplomatic friction. Because Trump publicly dismissed Palestinian recognition, and Israel moved to exclude France from regional negotiations altogether, the costs were immediate. There is a version of French Middle East policy that reads as principled and far-sighted. There is also a version that reads as a series of gestures whose effectiveness depends entirely on other actors assigning Paris a role they are under no obligation to grant. Both versions are accurate because the principle here does not guarantee leverage.
Trump and the Transatlantic relationship
Macron has now navigated two Trump administrations (although the second could still bring more surprises), and the strategy has been the same both times: Keep a direct personal channel open with the US president, absorb pressure without conceding on substance, and use the relationship to preserve multilateral outcomes that would otherwise be at risk. In 2017, the now-famous grip-and-grin handshake at the NATO summit in Brussels signaled that France would not be easily pushed around.
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In 2026, the approach was subtler and, in some ways, more revealing: Macron moved the G7 summit dates in Évian to avoid a clash with Trump’s birthday celebrations, then hosted him for a state dinner at Versailles. Trump (unilaterally) signed the famous ceasefire memorandum with Iran at the Palace of Versailles. The summit actually produced genuine results, Trump reaffirmed support for Ukraine, did not leave early, and did not blow up the communiqué. Yet for a president whose entire doctrine rests on the premise that Europe must stop depending on Washington’s mood, the transatlantic record is the dossier he would least like examined too closely.
The domestic constraint
There is a paradox at the heart of Macron’s foreign policy that his critics on both left and right have been quick to exploit: The president who has spent a decade telling Europe to stand on its own feet has spent the past two years unable to keep his own government standing. In June 2024, Macron dissolved the National Assembly in a gamble that backfired badly, producing a hung parliament and a carousel of prime ministers, seven in under two years, that has made France look ungovernable to the very allies it is asking to trust French nuclear guarantees.
The Loi de Programmation Militaire 2024-2030 allocates €413 billion for defense modernization, but every commitment must now be negotiated with a legislature that views Macron’s strategic vision with suspicion, his budget projections with skepticism, and his political future with something close to indifference. A foreign policy built so extensively around one man’s energy and authority was always going to be vulnerable once that man lost his grip on domestic politics.
The advocate without an architecture
Ten years of Macron’s foreign policy have produced something rarer than success or failure: a doctrine. Autonomie stratégique entered his presidency as a slogan and leaves it as a genuine organizing framework for European security debate. Without Macron’s persistent advocacy, the continent would not be having the conversations it now has about nuclear deterrence, the Indo-Pacific presence, or the terms on which Europe engages with Washington. He changed what is thinkable. Whether he changed what is practically possible is a different question, because doctrine has not yet become durable architecture.
The honest answer is not enough, and not in the long term. The nuclear architecture of Île-Longue depends on a successor who agrees with it. The Sahelian presence is gone. The Middle East engagement has produced visibility without purchase. The Transatlantic management has been tactically adroit and doctrinally compromised. And the domestic crisis he partly engineered has left the institutional foundations of his foreign policy weaker than he found them. What Macron leaves behind is a foreign policy shaped almost entirely by one man’s conviction, which means it is only as durable as his political survival and only as transferable as his successor’s willingness to inherit commitments they had no hand in making.
