As America retreats, Paris dreams of bringing the once-great nation out of retirement. But France always has a gap between ambition and the means at its disposal, writes the Financial Times,
“France cannot be France without grandeur,” Charles de Gaulle once wrote, but even without it, the country somehow managed to move forward for decades. As its power waned, only its grandeur remained. Many French officials (including the president) today work in former palaces or grand castles.
The annual Bastille Day military parades are worthy of a superpower. Paris has always nurtured the fantasy that the Americans would one day return home, and at that moment the great French nation would come out of retirement and return to power.
And in a frightening way, Donald Trump is making that fantasy a reality. Today, France aspires to lead what you might call the “Little West.” Will it really be able to? I recently spoke to French officials, some of whom work in 18th-century rooms with carved ceilings, about this issue.
The French are congratulating themselves on having been right all along about “strategic autonomy,” their doctrine that Europe should no longer rely on the U.S. for its security. However, they have had to rethink in a panic because they were wrong about something equally big: their friendship with Vladimir Putin.
The treatment of Moscow as a counterweight to Washington dates back to the time of De Gaulle. Although he disliked the USSR as a country (“the cooking there is unimaginable”), he turned to the Kremlin for an alliance.
So did Emmanuel Macron, with the approval of the conservative, pro-Putin French army officers. Days before Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, French intelligence was still saying he would not take that step.
And the day he did, Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Macron and asked him to tell him to say “Stop!” to his friend. Now France hopes to lead the anti-Putin West. But it cannot do so through military force.
“France always has a gap between ambition and the means at its disposal,” says Guillaume Lagane of Sciences Po University. It ranks ninth in the world for military spending. It spends just 2.1 percent of GDP on defense, or 1.6 percent if military pensions are not included.
It is indeed proud to have the only army in Europe with recent combat experience, but this is mainly in the Sahel. It was forced to withdraw from there too in 2023, just as it has failed in most wars since 1940.
France has a full-fledged army, equipped for all types of warfare, but in miniature. For example, it could muster perhaps 5.000 combat troops against Russia, hardly enough to impress Putin.
Its navy, funded in part to subsidize the defense industry, would be of little use in a European land war. France says it will offer its neighbors its “nuclear umbrella,” but it has roughly 300 nuclear bombs, compared to Russia’s 5580.
It wants to double defense spending, but is currently mired in a budget crisis. France knows it cannot be the “fist” of the West. Instead, it aspires to be the “brains” and the “mouth.”
Paris thinks it has the most sophisticated strategic culture in Europe. Its president can speak, in English (unlike some of his predecessors), to almost any foreign leader, from Benjamin Netanyahu to the mullahs of Iran and Xi Jinping of China.
French officials say Macron speaks every other day with Donald Trump. They are outraged when France’s only rival as leader of the “little West,” Britain, reveals its conversations with Kiev. They don’t think it’s the place for a “beauty contest.”
But France can only lead if others follow. Eastern Europe’s response to Macron’s new hostility toward Russia is roughly this: “You and whose army?”
Countries like Poland cannot wait years to see if Europe can build its own defenses. They need defense now, and they hope Trump will continue to provide it. Eastern Europeans also remember that France left NATO’s integrated military command from 1966 to 2009, and flirted with Putin well beyond February 2022.
Europeans are distrustful of the priorities of a country that until recently fought in Africa and called itself an “Indo-Pacific power.” A French colonel told me that France is still not sure whether the war over Ukraine is in its national interest. French officials are more concerned about the resurgence of ISIS in Syria, or the fallout from the war in Gaza in a country with the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe. The next French president may worry even less about Ukraine.
Putin’s one-time admirer, Marine Le Pen, a far-right leader, could succeed Macron in 2027. In 2022, she ran for president advocating closer ties between NATO and Russia, and promising to withdraw from NATO’s military command, although her party now says this does not apply in times of war.
Only in 2023 did her party manage to repay a loan from Russian banks brokered by the Kremlin. You can’t lead the West if you can abandon it. The US is not the only country that can suddenly change its mind about Putin. After all, France has done this once.
