France, European security architect by default?
In late 2025, France’s Army Chief of Staff, General Fabien Mandon, informed parliament of what few European governments were willing to say publicly: France should prepare for a major war with Russia within three to four years. The planning assumption was embedded in a National Strategic Review warning of “a new era of particularly high risk of a major high-intensity war in Europe by 2030”. The Loi de Programmation Militaire 2024-2030 allocates €413 billion for cyber, drone, and nuclear modernization in direct response to Russian hybrid campaigns.
The problem is not that France is alone in treating this threat as an immediate planning horizon (see Germany’s new defense spending plans), but that it is the only EU member state to have translated it into a claim to nuclear leadership over the continent. While Paris has made the Russian threat the organizing principle of its defense planning, Washington has reoriented toward China, relegating Europe to fourth place among American strategic priorities. This divergence, a structural misalignment that has been widening since former US President Barack Obama’s 2011 pivot to Asia, was formalized by Macron at Île Longue on March 2, 2026, when he stated, “You have to be feared if you want to be free”. The result is a France that can no longer afford to wait for consensus, not by choice, but by necessity.
Europe has become Europe’s problem
Europe has not been abandoned, but it has been priced differently. The 5% of GDP defense benchmark agreed upon at the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague is Washington’s condition for maintaining a residual military presence on the continent. When the Pentagon announced in October 2025 that the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team would return to Fort Campbell without replacement, US Army Europe and Africa described it as “a positive sign of increased European capability and responsibility”. However, for NATO allies on the eastern flank, the absence of American forces is not a vote of confidence: rather, it creates a gap in deterrence.
According to a recent estimate, Europe would require an additional 300,000 troops and 50 new combat brigades to offset the current American contribution which is greater than the combined land forces of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. France’s response to this gap is forward deterrence, not as an alternative to NATO, but as an attempt to anchor European security on a pillar independent of Washington’s strategic calendar. “I want the Europeans to reclaim control of their own destiny,” Macron declared at Île Longue. The central question that France’s strategy has yet to answer is whether it has the domestic cohesion and allied support to back that declaration with credibility.
Fragile consensus on an ambitious strategy
Whether France can sustain its ambition depends less on doctrine than on domestic politics. The domaine réservé grants the president unilateral control over nuclear doctrine and foreign policy, but requires parliamentary approval for defense budgets, mission funding and treaty ratification. Since 2022, Macron has governed without a majority, and every appropriation must be negotiated with a divided Assembly that shares neither a diagnosis of the threat nor a vision of the response. The political cost is already visible. France’s 2026 defense budget is €57 billion, funded in part by €43.8 billion in fiscal adjustments, combining spending cuts and revenue increases. This has generated widespread opposition and repeated threats of censure.
The radical left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise within the broader Nouveau Front Populaire coalition, believes that France’s military presence on NATO’s eastern flank was a mistake. Its opposition to Mission Lynx in Estonia (as part of NATO’s multinational “Battle Group” deployed there), framed as an unnecessary provocation toward Moscow, is the clearest expression of this resistance. The NFP cannot block presidential prerogatives over defense and foreign policy, but it can make every budgetary commitment politically and procedurally costly.
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The Macronist center, anchored in the Renaissance party, supports rising expenditure, extended continental solidarity, and European strategic autonomy. However, its vulnerability lies in the discrepancy between its stated ambitions, such as the May 2025 Treaty of Nancy with Poland, nuclear consultation groups with eight European partners, and the archipelago of forces concept, and what the legislature will actually fund.
The far right, represented by the Rassemblement National, has undergone tactical normalization. Le Pen visited Estonia, and the grouping’s president, Jordan Bardella, has endorsed Article 5. Yet their vision for alliances remains transactional, consisting of contracts between sovereign states, rather than a shared project, with budgetary priorities that are national rather than continental.
With Macron ineligible in 2027 and Le Pen barred following her conviction for embezzlement of EU funds, Bardella is favored over any mainstream candidate. He acknowledges that France’s deterrent “has always protected certain neighbors and European partners”, while accusing Macron of a “federalist rush” that seeks to “disarm French sovereignty”. An RN presidency would probably maintain the technical basis of the deterrent while dismantling its multilateral architecture. The tools themselves would not change. Rather, it is the purpose for which they are used.
Where France risks breaking apart and the Trump factor
France’s strategic ambitions are tested on four fronts: the war in Ukraine, the Hungarian veto, the Iran crisis and the future of nuclear deterrence. Each issue reveals a different point at which French ambition collides with the limits of domestic consensus, allied hesitation, or operational capacity.
American strategic disengagement from Europe did not begin with Donald Trump, but it has strongly intensified; it has been a trend across three administrations. Obama’s 2011 pivot to Asia was the first acknowledgment that Washington’s priorities had shifted. Biden restored alliance language after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but never reversed the underlying calculus. Trump has not added a new direction, but he has added new candor. The same logic is now stated as policy rather than wrapped in multilateral rhetoric. Rather than abandoning NATO, France plans to reshape it from within.
Starting in July 2026, France will assume command of both components of NATO’s Allied Reaction Force for the first time. The paradox is real: Paris needs American disengagement to justify its role as Europe’s nuclear guarantor, yet depends on NATO’s command structures to project the credibility that forward deterrence requires. Macron’s statement at Île Longue that forward deterrence will proceed “in full transparency with the United States” is less a diplomatic courtesy and more a structural acknowledgment. France is not yet in a position to treat Washington as a former ally.
Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine
Forward deterrence assumes that France can position itself as a credible security guarantor for Eastern Europe vis-à-vis Russia. However, the EU’s inability to provide Ukraine with basic financial support undermines this assumption. In December 2025, Hungary blocked a €90 billion loan to Kyiv, and at the March 2026 EU summit, only 25 member states signed the final communiqué on Ukraine.
If the EU cannot maintain a united position on providing financial support to a country at war on its borders, the credibility of any French military guarantee to Warsaw or Tallinn would be weakened before being tested. In response, Paris has bypassed the EU deadlock by signing the Treaty of Nancy with Poland, which includes a solidarity clause covering, including the nuclear one, according to Macron. The implicit cost is significant; it concedes that NATO is more important operationally than the EU. This is a tension that Macron’s domestic critics on both left and right are quick to exploit.
Nuclear deterrence
On July 10, 2025, during Macron’s state visit to London, the Northwood Declaration was signed, establishing a Franco-British Nuclear Steering Group. This was the first agreement between two independent nuclear powers to explicitly mention “coordination” in the field of deterrence. The Île Longue speech furthered this logic: Eight European countries — Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden and Denmark — agreed to host French Rafale aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons. These aircraft would be subject to structured mechanisms including partner participation in exercises and temporary deployments to allied bases. However, sole decision-making authority remains exclusively with Paris. This represents a shift in French strategic culture.
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Where France once jealously guarded its nuclear independence, it is now actively integrating European partners into its deterrence posture while preserving sovereign control. The limitation remains geographic. Absent from the framework are the Baltic states, Norway and Finland — the countries that border Russia directly. That gap is the sharpest unresolved tension in the entire forward deterrence project.
Iran and the Mediterranean
Following the Iranian drone attack on RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus on March 1, 2026, Macron declared that “when Cyprus is attacked, it is Europe that is attacked” and ordered the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to redirect to the eastern Mediterranean. France deployed frigates under Operation Aspides and co-signed a navigation framework for the Strait of Hormuz with the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan. This strategy allows France to assert its Mediterranean relevance without direct military exposure of the parliamentary authorization that a larger engagement would require.
Is it too late?
France has an expanding nuclear arsenal, a network of bilateral treaties that are changing the landscape of European security, and a military presence stretching from the Baltic to the Red Sea. The deeper question is not whether France has the tools, but whether Europe still has the ability to use them.
Leggi anche: La Francia di Macron: tra doxa e Termidoro
Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy formalized what three administrations had incrementally signaled and only partly pursued: a retreat from US global dominance in favor of regional spheres of influence. This leaves Europe to manage its own relationship with Russia. In this architecture, European security is not a shared interest to be negotiated; it is an issue to be assigned. If this order consolidates, Europe risks falling into Russia’s orbit not by conquest, but by default.
Macron’s answer — implicit in everything from Île Longue to Northwood to Nancy — is that the outcome depends on what Europe chooses to do in the next few years. These are not the building blocks of an idealistic project; they are France’s attempt to demonstrate that Europe need not accept the sphere Trump is assigning it. If Europe fails to act, the American strategic hierarchy that treats the continent as a secondary theater will not merely reflect reality; it will have created it.
