For the French political elite, this is a moment of scarcely concealed glee. The Trump administration’s deep hostility toward Europe—including the imposition of steep new tariffs, verbal attacks on European values, open support for far-right parties, and threats to invade Greenland—vindicates the vision of a strategically autonomous continent held by generations of French leaders. It was French President Charles de Gaulle, after all, who repeatedly expressed his belief in the 1960s that it was France’s mission to liberate Western Europe from its role as a de-facto U.S. protectorate after World War II.
For President Emmanuel Macron, “this concept of sovereignty, which just seven years ago may have seemed very French, has gradually become European.” French policymakers see it as the realization of a long-held dream, one of a European Union in France’s image—no longer aligned with Washington, fiercely protective of its companies, and unconstrained in its government spending. In this reimagining, Paris is working under the guise of strategic autonomy to make the EU a greater France.
Exhibit A is the fight within the EU over how the continent’s rearmament should proceed now that Washington has finally cajoled NATO allies to spend a minimum of 5 percent of GDP on defense. Most of Europe—from Germany, to the Nordic countries, to the eastern frontier states—sees an urgent need to fill their arsenals to ward off the growing threat of war with Russia. That makes them willing to buy from whoever can deliver the required weapons the fastest, regardless of whether those weapons are manufactured in the EU, Britain, South Korea, or the United States.
France, on the other hand, sees the new spending targets—and the joint EU fund that has been instituted to help finance them—as a giant pot of money that it can use to nurture its defense companies. The launch of the Security Action for Europe fund—a 150 billion euro (around $173 billion) program financed by EU borrowing to enable joint procurement by member states—was marred by France’s fierce resistance to allowing any of the funds to be used for buying weapons from non-EU companies. At France’s behest, even the U.K.’s world-class arms makers are excluded from the funding.
Similarly, France held the even more important European Defence Industrial Programme (EDIP) hostage by seeking to exclude all non-EU companies—even if their production is based in the EU and employs European workers. The final compromise was that, in order for a purchase to be eligible for EDIP financing, at least 65 percent of the components by value must originate in the EU or certain associated countries. Even this compromise drew dissent from 10 member states that sought greater flexibility to buy non-European weapons immediately.
Paris has argued that Europe needs its defense industry to be completely independent from the United States. This is not unreasonable, given the example of the Biden and Trump administrations severely restricting Kyiv’s permitted use of U.S. weapons, at the cost of the lives of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. What if Russia attacks an EU country while a Kremlin-friendly U.S. president sits in the White House and, say, turns off the software running on U.S.-made weapons? The problem is that building up Europe’s atrophied defense industry to deliver at the required speed and scale is a long-term project. Outside France, just about every EU country envisions doing both—building up local production capacity while also buying what’s needed from other suppliers now. While some countries are certainly nervous about buying U.S. weapons, few outside France see a need to boycott the U.K.’s world-class arms makers, as Macron would like Europe to do.
For Paris, rearmament has become the Trojan horse to finally realize its goal of massive joint borrowing, which it has spent decades advocating for—and, ultimately, the removal of constraints on French state spending not only on defense but in all other areas, as well.
After all, France is a country where the largest parties in parliament want to lower the retirement age to 62, at the cost of immense new outlays for the public pension and health care systems—and where Macron is busy reassuring voters that defense spending can meet the new NATO target of 5 percent of GDP without any need to raise French taxes.
Macron’s needs are vast and urgent. France’s public debt relative to GDP is on track to hit an astonishing 118 percent in 2026 and to exceed that of crisis-ridden Greece by the end of this decade. The last time Paris ran a budget surplus was 1974. With the highest tax burden in the EU, it is simply not possible to “raise taxes since they are already very high,” as former French Transport Minister Clément Beaune delicately put it last June. To add insult to injury, the financial markets now view France as a worse credit risk than Greece or Spain, which were close to default during the Eurozone debt crisis in the early 2010s.
Instead of acknowledging spending constraints, French proposals invariably focus on avoiding political choices, preferably with the help of “a large EU debt fund.” Of course, all European governments face the problem of having to tell voters accustomed to perpetual peace and growing welfare states how rising defense outlays will be financed. But the French attempt to avoid difficult choices by free riding on the grandest of scales is unique.
And therein lies the heart of Macron’s vision for Europe: exporting French economic weakness and overspending to the rest of the EU under the guise of European integration. For French leaders, “strategic autonomy” in defense has thus become a euphemism for a whole basket of policies they’ve been advocating for years: excluding global competition, subsidizing industry, and forcing other EU members to accept joint borrowing so that France doesn’t have to raise taxes. It’s the old Paris playbook recharged by Trumpism and updated for an age of war.
Few—if any—of the EU’s other 26 members share Paris’ enthusiasm for a French-style, highly subsidized, and walled-off Europe. Rather than ushering in an era of French-led integration, Macron’s relentless push for an independent Europe is deepening the continent’s divisions.
Central and Eastern European countries find French protectionism particularly aggravating. These states have long seen purchases of U.S.-made fighter jets and other weapons as an insurance policy that helps keep Washington on their side. Lately, South Korea has emerged as another critical military supplier for Poland, Romania, and other countries in the region.
That has not kept Macron from pushing ahead. His latest tactic is an attempt to strike a grand bargain with Germany to win support for his agenda. Specifically, this involves the extension of France’s nuclear umbrella over Germany—although it is unclear what that will mean in practice—in return for Berlin’s assent to more joint EU borrowing and a substantial loosening of Eurozone limits on debt and deficits. By exchanging France’s nuclear deterrent for Germany’s deep pockets, this bomb-for-debt deal would paper over France’s economic weakness.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has his own reasons for facilitating France’s strategy. He faces a stagnating German economy hit especially hard by U.S. tariffs and Chinese overproduction; surging support for far-right populists; and a desire for bold action after two decades of malaise during the Scholz and Merkel eras. The French plan involves tying Germany into a series of centralizing initiatives wrapped in a European flag. Paris views everything from telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing to aerospace and defense as being ripe for the creation of European champions—ideally French or French-controlled. By counting on Merz’s need to act, France seeks to sideline other EU member states that might oppose its agenda.
A grand Franco-German bargain that hurt just about everyone else has a historical precedent, of course. The last great Franco-German trade-off was French President Francois Mitterrand’s acquiescence to Germany’s 1990 reunification in return for German Chancellor Helmut Kohl accepting the creation of the euro to replace the strong German mark and other European currencies. Mitterrand believed that “without a common currency we are all already subordinate to the Germans’ will.” That currency union remains a key driver of political discord and economic stagnation in Europe. Despite circulating for more than 20 years, the euro is part of an unfinished and structurally unstable monetary union, whose crises have imposed profound economic and social costs on countries from Ireland to Greece.
Just like it did in 1990, France is now seeking to export its economic weakness to the rest of Europe. The future result will likely be similar: a half-finished, inherently unstable, Europeanized security infrastructure mirroring the EU’s incomplete currency framework.
Whether or not Macron can get Merz to come on board, France’s persistent belief that its own priorities should be Europe’s has alienated most of its EU partners. Lacking economic credibility, France has become just another mismanaged member state seeking an EU bailout to avoid a looming debt crisis.
Unwilling or unable to build the required relationships with EU partners—particularly the eastern front-line states—and shape the subsequent compromises, France is keeping Europe weak and split by its divisions. Europe’s foes in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington will be all too happy to exploit them in the coming years.