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Much ado about nothing – Macron proposed nuclear umbrella for Europe

By Uriel Araujo | March 10, 2025

France’s President Emmanuel Macron announced last week his intention to extend the French nuclear shield to its European partners, and there are now talks about French-British nuclear deterrence. Germany’s Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz has urged France and Britain to share their nuclear weapons to “supplement” (not “replace”) the American nuclear shield.

The premise here is that a “pro-Russian” Trump is going to “abandon” Europe and thus leave it vulnerable to Moscow’s “aggression” – and so it is necessary to build an alternative shield. While various analysts and journalists put on serious faces while talking about these issues, underneath the rhetoric, the whole narrative lacks any substantiality, to the point of being laughable.

Let us briefly touch the premisses:

While the situation with borders is indeed far from being a settled matter in the post-Soviet space (with a number of frozen conflicts), there is of course no Russian appetite for attacking, or much less, “conquering” portions of Europe. The whole crisis in Ukraine has in fact more to do with the ethnocratic contradictions of nation-building in the new independent state of Ukraine, and with NATO’s enlargement, a policy denounced by the likes of the late Henry Kissinger himself, George Kennan, and a number of scholars and authorities who predicted it could cause the Ukrainian war since the late nineties.

Albeit partially bent on a kind of “reverse Kissinger” strategy to stop Biden’s dangerous “dual-containment” approach” (of antagonizing both China and Russia simultaneously), Trump is hardly pro-Moscow in any sense beyond that of avoiding an escalation. Moreover, his rhetorical attacks on NATO have more to do with burden sharing than with “ending” the Alliance.

The truth is that Europe embarked on an America’s proxy attrition war, and now that an overburdened Washington is retreating from its very war, puzzled Europeans do not know what to do. Now, let us delve into the idea of European deterrence, as proposed by Macron.

Europe has stayed under Washington’s wings long enough, and Trump does have a point when he says most NATO countries fail to meet the agreed expenses’ goal of using at least 2 percent of their GDP in military spending (which overburdens the US). And now that the Atlantic superpower is really signing its intent on pivoting to the Pacific, partially withdrawing from Eastern Europe, and shifting NATO’s burden onto its European allies, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth amongst Europe and Britain’s political elites.

European powers today are simply not what they once were. Consider the United Kingdom, for instance: it might even lack the capacity to maintain its own nuclear arsenal without American help, as experts have been warning, in the context of Trump’s “burden shift” threats to “abandon” or to leave the American transatlantic allies on their own. In January last, a British “Trident” nuclear missile embarrassingly failed (for the second time) during a test launch, which led to speculations about the realities of Britain’s nuclear deterrence.

Long story short, Paris and London are the only nuclear powers in Europe – and it is unclear however to what extent they would be capable of replacing the so-called American “nuclear umbrella”.

According to Astrid Chevreuil (a visiting fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies – CSIS – in Washington, D.C.) and Doreen Horschig (a fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues at CSIS), there are “significant strategic, doctrinal, and logistical obstacles” to that. More to the point, they add: “in the current situation, the French and British nuclear forces are a complement to US extended deterrence, but they would not constitute a viable solution in the event of an abrupt withdrawal of U.S. nuclear forces.” Elaborating on it, Chevreuil and Horschig argue that:

Both the British and French arsenals are designed, in their size, to respond to attacks “based on their vital interests”: Paris counts on less than 300 nuclear warheads, and London, in turn, possesses less than 250 (Washington in contrast has “a total of 1,700 deployed warheads”).

Moreover, American nuclear weapons stored in Europe today are “airborne capabilities” (and not ground-based or seaborne systems). Only France has such an airborne nuclear component, and “replacing” the US would require enormous efforts from European allies.

Finally, the two experts conclude, Britain and France lack a nuclear doctrine compatible with the very idea of “extending their nuclear deterrence through stationing their weapons in other countries.” Paris does not even participate in NATO’s nuclear planning groups, as the French doctrine “insists on the independence of its nuclear decision making.”

I’ve written before on the challenges Europe faces when it comes to “rearming” itself – they range from de-industrialization to lack of a common legal and bureaucratic framework, or a common EU defense market – according to Sophia Besch (a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow), and Max Bergmann (a former member of the US Policy Planning Staff and Director of the Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies).

One should also keep in mind that Paris’ own relationship with NATO is historically complex, to say the least. Under De Gaulle, France withdrew from the organization’s integrated military structure in 1966, and even expelled all of its headquarters and units on French territory. It was French President Nicolas Sarkozy who finally ended Paris “estrangement” from NATO as recently as 2009 – so it took 43 years for Paris to change its course. To this day, France has not given up “nuclear independence” with regards to NATO, as mentioned. It is hard to change things overnight.

In addition, French ambition’s aside, a quick look at Africa is enough to demonstrate how much of a declining power France really is today: one just needs to consider the French failures in Chad, Niger, Mali, and elsewhere – the French military was basically kicked out of their main bases in the African continent.

Lastly, there is also an element of a power struggle going on. If the overburdened American superpower is partially retreating from a number of theaters, the outcome of it could be a local power vacuum (in Europe) and some actors might have an appetite for filling such a void. Even Poland has eyes on that, as I wrote before. Much of the French rhetoric we are now seeing has a lot to do with that.

To sum it up, Macron is offering Europe something he does not have to counter a threat that does not really exist the way he describes it. He is doing so because of something Trump will not actually do. To put it another way, it is “words, words, words”.

Uriel Araujo, PhD, is an anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

March 10, 2025 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Russophobia | European Union, France, NATO, UK, United States | Leave a comment