More recently, under Macron, there hasn’t been a “sustained effort from France to put its money where its mouth was, spend on [military] capability and equipment and put a diplomatic effort to convince others.” France only reached NATO’s target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense last year; a goal which is expected to grow this summer.
One key reason for the lack of enthusiasm for France’s strategic autonomy push is the sheer size of America’s military might — including its nuclear weapons — and near trillion-dollar defense budget.
According to a study by Defense News, Europeans would need five years to build up some of the so-called critical enablers that the U.S. currently provides, such as battlefield command and control (C2), military satellites for intelligence gathering and deep strike capabilities.
Countries such as Germany and Poland — major buyers of American weapons — have built their entire foreign and defense policy on strong transatlantic bonds, said Gesine Weber, a Paris-based fellow at transatlantic think tank German Marshall Fund. Turning to Paris instead to anticipate a potential U.S. withdrawal from Europe, they feared, risked turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But while France’s approach to pushing the subject of European defense often didn’t help — and countries such as Poland are not yet ready to let go of Washington — the time for niceties is now, definitively, over.
As Weber put it: “Europeans must break the intellectual taboo of thinking about the security order without the U.S.
“It’s quite the ‘I told you so’ moment for France, everyone in Paris knows it, and everyone at the Elysée knows it,” she added.
