There are — or were — three great powers in Europe: France, the UK, and Germany. We should add Poland now as a fourth. Both the UK and Germany are constrained from acting in Ukraine by domestic politics, which leaves France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, enjoys unusual warmaking authority for a western democracy.
Known as the domaine réservé, this power comes with a bureaucratic culture of silence around strategic decision-making (grande muette) as well as a strategic nuclear deterrent. Charles de Gaulle expected that the future United States would not always be willing to intervene in Europe, so he planned ahead.
Recently, Macron indicated his willingness to send French troops to Ukraine, and the world lost its mind. Two weeks later, however, Russia has still not started World War III and European capitols are coming around to Macron’s view. Czech president Peter Pavel met with Macron last week and endorsed his approach. Poland’s foreign minister also agreed that European NATO partner forces might be deployed to Ukraine.
Despite the protestations of a western commentariat that is terrified of nuclear Armageddon if the west does too much to help Ukraine, the European consensus is shifting to collective defense of their eastern flank against Russian aggression. The changes are not that dramatic, or sudden, but they are happening.
To be clear, what Macron proposes does not necessarily involve front-line fighting by French forces. Instead, French troops would participate in logistics, intelligence, training, staffing, air defense, military engineering, as well as aviation and space warfare roles. While this would still expose French forces to potential attack, nothing on the list requires a Verdun-style bayonet charge. Mick Ryan has a good write-up here explaining the risks, but of course raising risks is exactly the strategic point.
As Ferdinand Foch told his British interlocutors on the eve of war with Germany, London only needed to send one soldier to France: “And we will make sure he is killed.” British blood would provoke British intervention, ultimately to the benefit of France. Russian targeting of French forces in Ukraine could likewise invoke French reprisals and bring further NATO involvement. Vladimir Putin does not want either outcome and will not be inclined to take the risk. Macron intends to create new risks for Putin.
Furthermore, the war in Ukraine is an aggregate, attritional affair. If French formations provided security along the quieter northern border of the country, for example, they would free up Ukrainian units for the battlefront in the east and south. Still, this is not really what Ukraine needs, and it would require NATO authorization, which takes time and political will.
The war in Ukraine will be won by the side with superior macroeconomics, and Europe has a far larger economy than Russia. During the last two years, however, Europe has been slower to raise production of war material than Russia, even slower than the United States. If Europeans take up the slack in 2024, and Ukraine re-establishes artillery parity against Russian forces with European help, Putin has little room to respond. The Russian economy is close to overheating because of the wartime wages being pumped into the economy.
That is of course a big “if.” Protectionist at normal times, the European Union has favored EU providers during the last two years, sacrificing time and increased production capacity to ensure the results of their supply chain expansion efforts remain in Europe.
Now the EU has decided on a defense industrial policy that looks like the same plan, but at a larger scale. “The strategy aims to increase European defense industrial readiness through collaborative EU-based investment, research, development, production, procurement, and ownership,” the Carnegie Endowment explains. “In short, the EC wants member states to buy weapons together, and to buy them in Europe.”
Ukraine is explicitly included in the proposed program to “buy at least 40% of the defence equipment by working together,” “spend at least half of their defence procurement budget on products made in Europe,” and “trade at least 35% of defence goods between EU countries instead of with other countries.”
Von der Leyen named the first-ever defense commissioner of the EU at the Munich Security Conference last month. Still, the transformation will not be fast because plant infrastructure does not happen quickly. Companies will not invest in construction without long-term contracts, either.
As the engineering rule says, Europe can build this project cheap, or fast, or correctly. Because the EU governs through consensus, “correctly” is the default option. Europe will spend more, less efficiently, than the United States could. They have been outpaced so far by Russian centralization.
So while achieving production parity is possible, it will require time and consistent spending.
The program is subject to negotiations between EU member states and the European Parliament and would likely not come into effect before 2025. EU officials know that this is not nearly enough money to fulfill the strategy’s ambitions, and hope for a significant increase in EU defense spending in the next seven-year budget, starting in 2028.
Funding, or more specifically the political will to spend EU funds on an industrial policy consistent with wartime needs, is the final hurdle. These measures are unpopular with European farmers, who have taken the budgetary hit to their subsidy funding, and anti-statist politicians of both the pacifist left and the penny-pinching right. Western civilization has preferred just-in-time supply chains and eschewed long-term industrial contracts for decades. Proposals for “ever-warm” defense factories and repurposed civilian production lines are almost unheard-of, anymore.
In the shorter term, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has proposed using windfall revenue from Russian assets frozen in Europe to purchase ammunition for Ukraine. A consortium of EU countries announced last week they are purchasing 800,000 artillery shells for Ukraine. It is not going to be enough, but it is better than nothing.
Putin started invading Ukraine because of Europe. NATO defends Europe, but the EU and NATO are two different organizations, one military and the other governmental, with two different memberships. Turkey and the United Kingdom are in NATO, but not member states of the EU. Conveniently for Putin, between the Russian invasion of 2014 and the Russian invasion of 2022, “Brexit” eliminated the UK from future participation in strategic EU ammunition and arms supply planning.
France, on the other hand, has always been “the leading Europeanist nation,” Jeffrey Larsen notes in the Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture. French policy has pursued “a stronger EU, one with its own European military and foreign policy establishemnt that could supplement or one day perhaps even supplant NATO” because the United States could not be expected to defend Europe indefinitely against Russian aggression. What we see now is not something unique to Macron or his politics, rather it is the default orientation of French strategic culture.
Putin has relied on a Potemkin image of infinite Russian capacity for war to deter the West from helping Ukraine. In fact, Russian government income from wartime spending has now surpassed oil and gas revenue, so that if the war ended tomorrow, the Russian economy would likely crash. Europe has decoupled from Russian energy supplies, and now oil sanctions are shutting down the remaining Russian trade in petroleum products with Turkey, which wants to be part of Europe. India is getting cautious about oil sanctions. No one is taking rubles anymore — not China, nor Iran, nor North Korea.
If the flow of ammunition and weaponry into Ukraine was restored today, like magic, at the full capacity that Europe is potentially capable of achieving, the war would end in 2024. That will of course not happen, for Europe is slow to agree on anything, and de Gaulle was right about the United States of America being a fickle ally, in the long-term.
Donald Trump represents a very old strain of isolationist politics. After winning the Revolutionary War and independence, the US Army was little more than a frontier police force, and mostly bad at the job. Whereas European powers kept ever-larger, ever more-expensive standing navies in the 19th century, the US Navy was slow to adopt steam power. Peacetime forces were small and underfunded. Following both World Wars in the 20th century, War Department funding crashed as millions were mustered out of service. Americans did not see the point of the First World War and would have been happy to forget the point of the Second.
In succession, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Cold War, and then our 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan each drew Americans out to fight again, against their ancient isolationist tendencies. Post-War on Terror, there is little political appetite on left or right for sending Americans to Ukraine, while the Trump faction would like to stop spending any money or material support to Ukraine at all. In the long view of American history, this kind of dispute is actually normal. Winston Churchill was correct when he observed that Americans will do the right thing once they have exhausted all other options. One might even call it a cultural value.
France, however, has a long history of acting as a strategic counterweight to Russian power on the continent. Macron is not doing something new or unusual by his leadership. Europeans are justifiably worried about Russian aggression. Strategic deterrence requires building up their defense industrial base, anwyay, with Ukraine as the beneficiary. If it works, then it won’t matter so much who the president of the United States is, next year. The legacy of Charles de Gaulle will matter more.
Thank God for France.