By Professor Manlio Graziano

When Israel and the United States began firing missiles at Iran late last month, European countries limited themselves to “cautious warnings — almost whispered — and no explicit condemnation of the offensive,” as Le Monde summarized matters on February 28. In a joint statement, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Keir Starmer affirmed their “commitment to regional stability and the protection of civilian lives,” without further comment or even the usual — and futile — call for “restraint.”

Let us set aside, for now, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s explicit support for Washington. According to him, the attack was intended to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to stop its regime “from continuing to threaten international peace and security.” We will return to Carney the next time he issues a clear and comprehensive call to “middle powers” (or anyone else) to create an alternative to the United States.

It is evident that Carney and major European officials still suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome — that is, from their condition as willing hostages of the United States. Once again, they have demonstrated that they cannot even imagine how to live without their captors, and their distress grows more acute as those captors show an increasing inclination to abandon them unprotected by the roadside.

The only complaint voiced by Europeans after the attack on Iran was that they received no advance warning from the United States. It is unclear why Washington should have provided such warning: indeed, their deferential reaction to the attack on Venezuela could only reinforce Americans’ conviction of their irrelevance and, therefore, of the futility of involving them in any future initiative – unless they are desperate.

Across the Old Continent, those who need only a few drops of water to declare the glass “half full” have already identified Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and even French President Emmanuel Macron, as the champions of what remains of European honor.

But Sánchez’s position is essentially driven by domestic considerations; moreover, it would be the height of naivete to think that Spain could take the lead in a “strategically autonomous” Europe.

What about Macron?

It is fair to assume that he also acted with strong domestic political motivations: a martial posture on the international stage tends to bolster any French president’s stature — something Macron desperately needs.

Hower, besides internal factors, the French president never misses an opportunity to sprinkle a little of the salt of his “strategic autonomy” onto whatever dish he happens to be serving. The paradox is that the more he insists on this refrain, the more reality disproves him: with each passing day, Europe demonstrates that it possesses neither autonomy nor strategy — indeed, that it is not even truly “Europe”. Politically speaking, “Europe” simply does not exist. Moreover, as we will see, Macron himself recently dealt the coup de grâce to the project of European unification — at least in words.

Die-hard Euro-optimists claim that the French president, in his address to the nation on March 3, partially redeemed himself from the weak statement issued three days earlier with Merz and Starmer. Macron stated that the “military operations” carried out by the United States and Israel were conducted – surprise, surprise – “in violation of international law.” Yet at the same time he argued that “the Islamic Republic of Iran bears the primary responsibility for this situation”: an assertion that echoes the American and Israeli justifications and which — precisely regarding “this situation” — is simply false.

(Lest anyone mistake my meaning, I would remind them that the Islamic Republic of Iran bears grave responsibility in many situations — first and foremost regarding the plight of its own people — but it certainly does not in “this situation.”)

We should also note that, among the 1,063 words of Macron’s televised address, he did not find a way to include the word “war” even once, effectively adopting a form of newspeak — first associated with Putin and now also with the Americans — which employs the miraculous power of euphemism to create the appearance of good faith. Through this technique, wars are conveniently transformed into “military operations” or even, as Trump has said, “excursions.”

Macron is the latest of France’s Fifth Republic presidents to champion the notion of Europe’s “strategic autonomy,” even before the Fifth Republic existed. The reason is simple: from Charles de Gaulle onward, French heads of state — with greater or less conviction — have consistently viewed “Europe” as a continuation of France by other means. When they speak of Europe’s “strategic autonomy,” therefore, they are effectively thinking of the “strategic autonomy” of a France extended to the borders of what is now the European Union (if not farther).

Let us summarize.

In 1943, when Germany’s eventual defeat had become evident, de Gaulle called for a revision of the Treaty of Verdun (843 CE) and the “reunification of the Western Franks with the Eastern Franks.” To do so – to join a France that de Gaulle envisioned as victorious in the conflict to a Germany already de facto defeated – meant establishing from the outset a relationship in the future reunification of the “Franks” that was clearly skewed in Paris’s favor.

Later, de Gaulle described the European process as being led by the Franco-German partnership, but with a specific division of roles between Paris and Bonn (then the West German capital), in which “Germany would be the horse and France the coachman.”

De Gaulle’s decision to make France a nuclear power, at the very moment he was vetoing British membership in the European Common Market, meant not only endowing “strategic autonomy” with a powerful bargaining chip, but also further elevating France’s status as the sole “coachman” of the Six-Nation Europe.

In 1969, just six years after the Franco-German treaty of perpetual friendship was signed at the Élysée Palace, Henry Kissinger asked how France could prevent Germany from one day dominating Europe. De Gaulle, as Kissinger himself recalled, “did not consider this query to merit an extensive reply. ‘Par la guerre’, he replied curtly.”

Twenty years later, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, François Mitterrand strongly opposed German reunification, though he later conceded that the only way to prevent it would have been “through the application of force.”

French Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande did not hesitate to launch operations in Africa while automatically counting on European support — and German support in particular — clearly assuming that, even after German reunification, Berlin could not refuse lest it offend Paris, the second indispensable pillar of Europe’s fragile framework.

The conviction — well-founded, moreover — that France is too big to fail has driven every European policy in Paris for decades; governments of both the right and the left (as well as Macron’s supposed “center”) have shamelessly drained public coffers to sustain a system of electoral patronage for an electorate compulsively attached to the teat of the state, knowing full well that Germany and the other “frugal” Europeans would foot the bill.

Most agreements with Italy, including the ethereal “Quirinale Treaty,” have had the not-so-hidden aim of uniting the group of chronic debtors in order to force creditors to loosen the purse strings and, if possible, to sign formal commitments to continue doing so ad libitum. The recurring proposal to begin the federalization of Europe by first federalizing debt is a ploy that everyone — including “sovereigntists,” who are fiercely protective of national prerogatives in other matters — enthusiastically supports in France (and in Italy).

That is for the past. Returning to the present – and setting aside for the moment the nonetheless important issue of the EU’s free-trade pact with the South American countries in Mercosur – we come to Emmanuel Macron’s “muscle-flexing” moves over the war in Iran, including the rapid redeployment of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle from the Baltic to the eastern Mediterranean.

Now transformed into a chef de guerre, Macron has delivered a series of speeches with a distinctly warlike tone, starting with the one that concerns us here, given before Keir Starmer at the Île Longue base at the tip of Brittany, where France’s four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines are stationed. On that occasion, Macron revisited a proposal for “advanced nuclear deterrence,” that is, the sharing of strategic air forces and nuclear weapons with other European countries (including the United Kingdom).

The Financial Times, among others, enthusiastically welcomed the “novelty” of this: France’s proposal “exceeds all expectations,” it said; it is “a nuclear offer never seen before.” Adding significance was Macron’s simultaneous announcement of an increase in the number of nuclear warheads Paris plans to add to its arsenal. Courrier international, a weekly publication of the Le Monde group, reported with ill-concealed pride on many other positive reactions across half of Europe.

For those who find satisfaction in even a few drops of water, this is the glass half full.

The glass half empty, which worries the rest of Europe, is Macron’s repetition in that very speech of a concept — or rather, a principle — that the French president has made clear every time the question of “advanced nuclear deterrence” has been raised: “There will be no sharing of the ultimate decision, nor of its planning, nor of its execution.”

In other words, the finger on the button will be French, and Paris alone will decide if, how, when, and against whom to deploy its atomic weapons stationed in Germany, Denmark, Poland, Greece, and elsewhere. Put even more simply: Paris is positioning itself to have the final say over German, Danish, Polish, Greek, and other foreign policies — essentially, over the foreign policy of all Europe.

The “nuclear umbrella” — the guarantee by a nuclear-weapons state to defend a non-nuclear allied state — is an American invention that served a dual purpose: to deter potential nuclear powers from attacking a country under U.S. protection, while also constraining that country’s foreign policy so that it not exceed the limits set by the provider of the umbrella — in this case, the United States. What the current administration in Washington and the overwhelming majority of American voters fail to understand is that the “protection” offered under the umbrella is also a means of control — one that helps guide strategic choices of the so-called “allies”, and maintain U.S. supremacy.

Macron’s proposal has exactly the same characteristics. Except that — and this is no small difference — France in 2026 is very different from the United States of the post-1945 years, when Washington’s nuclear arsenal began to be deployed on European soil. The Americans claimed their right to “protect” Europeans because they had won the war, and could therefore dispose of them as they pleased, establishing not only nuclear deployments but also a dense network of military bases — always, of course, in the name of “protection.”

Not only has France not won any war that would entitle it to impose itself in a similar way; not only is the France of 2026, economically and politically, no longer the dynamic France of the Gaullist 1960s; but, above all, France is not considered reliable by many — if not all — of its European partners.

It is considered unreliable because of its history, its persistent ambitions for a form of hostile takeover, whether monarchical, Napoleonic, or pan-European; but above all because of its unsettled present and its even less alarming future. Indeed, who might have their finger on the nuclear button after the 2027 presidential election?

It is true that the French sovereigntist camp — from Marine Le Pen to Jean-Luc Mélenchon — opposes nuclear sharing (recall the principle of sovereignism: sharing others’ assets is acceptable, but sharing one’s own is not); but it is equally clear that a nuclear button potentially under the control of Europe’s adversaries or Russia’s friends is a risk no one is willing to take.

If Macron’s speech had been limited to the possibility of sharing nuclear deterrence while retaining exclusive control of its use, one might at most have spoken of an attempted hegemonic move. But that is not the case.

In that same speech at Île Longue, after ruling out any sharing of decision-making, planning, or execution, the French president continued: “There will also be no sharing of the definition of our vital interests, which will remain a matter of sovereign assessment for our country.”

This sentence brings us to the heart of the matter. Because without a definition of its vital interests, Europe cannot have a foreign policy, nor, consequently, a defense policy, nor, obviously, that “common army” that many have long fantasized about. If one believes that European foreign and defense policy should in fact coincide with French foreign and defense policy, then there is nothing surprising in Macron’s words. But if one believes that the vital interests of Germany, first and foremost, but also of Denmark, Poland, Greece, and others, must be taken into account, then it becomes clear that something doesn’t add up.

In an interview with France 24, Dutch politician Sophie in ’t Veld, a former MEP from Macron’s group, denounced Europe’s irrelevance on the international stage, attributing it to the persistence of twenty-seven separate foreign policies instead of a single one. Her criticism was sharp and difficult to dispute, but her proposed solution traps Europe in a familiar vicious circle (and has been repeated ad nauseam): we must reform the institutions.

The history of the formation of so-called “nation-states” shows that institutions are shaped by a prior definition of “vital interests,” not the other way around. If you know where you want to go and what you want to achieve, you create the tools — including institutional ones — to reach those goals.

Of course, the definition of a country’s “vital interests” is always the result of a confrontation among many, often conflicting, particular interests, with the aim of finding a “general” or “national” interest from which all, or nearly all, can benefit. But that synthesis — of which the state should be both the product and the guarantor — can only be achieved if particular interests are willing, whether by conviction or coercion, to give something up.

Why should they do so? Because, by uniting under the protective umbrella of the state, they are strengthened and defended in international competition against the general and particular interests of other states.

A small example: the Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri’s attempt to acquire 51% (or more) of the French shipyards STX Saint-Nazaire in 2017 was blocked by the French government for “strategic reasons.” The Italians protested France’s unfairness and arrogance, the violation of commercial norms, and the asymmetry allowing French companies to operate freely in Italy, and so on; but in that dispute, what was actually being measured, quite simply, was France’s international political strength against Italy’s international political strength.

France’s superior strength stemmed, among other factors, from its greater internal cohesion — that is, from the greater willingness of particular interests to subordinate themselves to the general interest. This, in turn, gave rise to a stronger institutional framework.

The vision of a united Europe — with a single foreign and defense policy, championed with genuine enthusiasm by Sophie in ’t Veld and many others — cannot, therefore, stem from institutional reform, but rather from the definition of a general European interest. If such an interest were identified, it could consequently give rise to an institutional framework shaped in its image and likeness. But to achieve this, all twenty-seven actors — including France — would have to be willing to give something up.

By asserting instead that Paris will never agree to share the definition of vital European interests, Macron is sinking the continental project and condemning France to a future of sailing alone through the increasingly stormy seas of international politics.

The United States, which at least since 1917 has opposed any notion of European integration not guided and controlled by them, should be celebrating. The only reason it does not do so is because what is said and happens in Europe now is seen as so irrelevant to Americans.

Few, indeed, would even have noticed Macron’s Île Longue speech and the jubilant reactions across half of Europe, of which Courrier international vainly takes pride.

Manlio Graziano, PhD, taught Geopolitics and Geopolitics of Religions at Sciences Po Paris, at la Sorbonne, and at the Geneva Institute of Geopolitics. He collaborates with the Corriere della Sera and with the geopolitical journals Limes and Gnosis. He founded  the Nicholas Spykman International Center for Geopolitical Analysis. He published several books in the US, with Stanford UP, Columbia UP and Palgrave. His latest book is Disordine mondiale: Perché viviamo in un'epoca di crescente caos.