Translator’s Note: France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, will not say there will never be French troops — or NATO troops — on the ground in Ukraine. This is common sense, and, to take a line from commentators in the U.S. who view Russian aggression against Ukraine as a territorial dispute of no interest to us, it is foreign policy realism. The first rule of realism is that you cannot rule out any contingencies nor make promises you may regret. Woodrow Wilson never should have made a big deal of “keeping us out of the war,” nor should John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson have insisted publicly that “American boys” cannot do a job that “Asian boys” must. Our presidents’ initial intuitions may have been sensible, their later changes of mind misguided; but the point is that when faced with naked imperialistic aggression, you stay focused not on what you think people want you to do or not to do but what you may have to do to protect yourself, which can involve protecting others whose enemies, perchance, are yours as well.
Pierre Rigoulot is a French historian specializing in 20th-century political history. He contributed to the well-known Black Book of Communism. His Quand Poutine se prend pour Staline (Editions Buchet-Chastel, 2023), a study of the continuities of purpose and thought from Stalin to Putin, has been widely discussed in Europe. Rigoulot belongs to the school that views “Munich” — the 1938 British and French effort to appease Hitler by abandoning Czechoslovakia — as an event from which we must still draw lessons. The “lesson of Munich” is not that there need be a reflexive military response to every aggression by a tyrannous regime against a neighboring country. It is that aggressors are more likely to be deterred if they know free nations are prepared to defend themselves. Macron evidently thinks it safer to advise his Russian homologue, who was just reelected by a suspiciously near-unanimous vote, that choices, including military options, can be made by free men in democratic societies as well as by tyrants in unfree ones. I have translated the following column by Rigoulot from the French. Any mistakes or inaccuracies are my own. —Roger Kaplan
We may not be living in pre-war years — as the period of the Munich Agreement was, and sometimes still is, called — but it feels that way. West Europeans accustomed to decades of peace under a protective American military umbrella find themselves watching the third year of a war on their eastern flank, caused by Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine. Both countries are part of Europe by history and geography. Russia officially recognized its neighbor’s legal sovereignty in 1991.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement that saving Ukraine may require the intervention of European military forces angered several governments, notably those of Germany, Italy, and Spain, and was met with criticism and fear, notably in his own country’s public opinion and intellectual circles.
Fear is surely not unwarranted. But we should take at least some comfort from assessing our strengths, which include what we have learned about resisting aggression by totalitarian regimes. In 1938, many Europeans thought the best way to deal with Nazi aggression was to let Hitler take whatever real estate he claimed for Germany.
The great French historian Marc Bloch argued, in his Historian’s Craft, that no two historical situations are identical; yet, in writing Strange Defeat, he made the case that very specific lessons could have been taken from the Great War that might have averted defeat in 1940 — and might even have stopped Hitler before he launched total war.
Bloch — who served in the army from 1939 to 1940 and took part in the Resistance until he was arrested and shot by the Germans in 1944 — argued that rather than unimaginatively prepare for the last war, the French high military staff could have anticipated the German offensive’s combined ground-air mobility, terror bombing, and adroit use of propaganda. Making it clear the army was prepared to fight with a contemporary strategy, not one suited for 1914, might have forestalled a German attack.
This is pertinent in view of President Vladimir Putin’s warnings that Russia might respond to the presence of NATO forces on the battlefield with nuclear weapons. Macron reminds that France is armed with nukes, as is NATO.
The French high command was not alone responsible for the lack of preparedness that led to collapse and defeat in 1940. Cut off from a civilian population that sought security in the pacifism that was fashionable in the 1930s, the army had little popular or intellectual support, even as its German counterpart surfed over the wave of militarism that followed the Nazis’ 1933 electoral victory.
A consequential civil–military dialogue might have alerted the public to the threat represented by the rise of Nazism. Policy options favoring rearmament and strategic reevaluations favoring mobility (Charles de Gaulle pleaded for both in vain) might have gained support and made a difference, intellectually no less than in hard military terms. Neither the powerful CGT labor federation nor the militant teachers SNI union rose to the occasion, while influential intellectuals and writers, such as the philosopher Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier) and the popular novelist Jean Giono, felt no need to question their pacifist ideas.
Ninety years on, what lessons can or should be drawn from the attitudes that abetted what Winston Churchill called the “unnecessary war”? War may spread beyond Ukraine, for Putin’s thinking is guided by fascist thinkers like Aleksandr Dugin, Ivan Ilyin, and others for whom Russia is holy, unconstrained by international law — or, for that matter, the rule of its own laws. Russian civilization, they argue, is threatened by a decadent West led by the United States and the European Union, godless and corrupt. Russia must rescue the persecuted Russian-speakers of Ukraine just as, long ago, Germany rescued the German-speakers of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.
Preventing war requires first admitting that it can spread — and be lost. Contemporary novelties must be grasped: drones, cyber-attacks, ideological competition and influence by means of social media, to take obvious examples.
Nuclear deterrence remains a central factor in the West’s arsenal, and France and NATO ought not be shy of saying so. People in free societies should not be the only ones subjected to nuclear blackmail.
In France, no less than elsewhere in the West, closing ranks on the basics should take priority over political divisions. This should entail remembering past confrontations with totalitarianism while taking account of what is original and new today. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, but by keeping faith in the strengths, mechanical and spiritual, at our disposal, we can sustain the faith necessary to accomplish the essential task, safeguarding democratically governed free societies.