Les Défis de la Dimension Européenne

Thoughts on France and "Forward Deterrence" vs. "Extended Deterrence"

Last March, just a few weeks after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the French people on “the international situation and its consequences for France and Europe.” In this address, Macron announced his decision “to launch a strategic debate on using our deterrence to protect our allies on the European continent. Whatever happens, that decision has always been, and will always be, up to the President and Commander in Chief of France.”

Today, President Macron made another speech further articulating his view of the changing requirements of French deterrence, introducing the concept of “forward deterrence” to protect France’s vital interests beyond its borders. Vipin and Pranay highlighted some of the challenges France will face in expanding the ambition of its nuclear deterrence, but I wanted to offer some thoughts as our allies grapple with this debate. To put the bottom line up front, forward deterrence is a useful elaboration of France’s role as an independent center of decision-making in the NATO alliance but is in no way a meaningful replacement for U.S. extended nuclear deterrence.

President Macron’s speech at Île Longue, March 2, 2026. Image courtesy of Toute l'Europe.

The European Dimension in Historical Perspective

The idea that the vital interests of France, which the French deterrent protects, includes a “European dimension” is not new. Nicolás Bardio admirably reviews the discourse of French presidents on Europe and French nuclear deterrence dating back to Mitterand, which Emmanuelle Maitre and Étienne Marcuz summarize:

…the Presidents of the French Republic have on several occasions referred to the ‘European dimension’ of French nuclear deterrence. In his 2015 speech at the Air Force Base in Istres, François Hollande stated unambiguously that the definition of “France’s vital interests cannot be restricted to the national scale”, that they have a European dimension, and that “the existence of a French nuclear deterrent has made a strong, essential contribution to Europe”. His remarks clarified the notion and have since been systematically echoed in official documents. Emmanuel Macron has continued in this vein, and accentuated the trend…

Indeed, in his February 2020 speech on the French defense and deterrence strategy Macron declared:

Furthermore, our nuclear forces have a deterrent effect in themselves, particularly in Europe. They strengthen the security of Europe through their very existence and they have, in this sense, a truly European dimension.

On that point, our independent decision-making is fully compatible with our unwavering solidarity with our European partners. Our commitment to their security and their defence is the natural expression of our ever-closer solidarity. Let’s be clear: France’s vital interests now have a European dimension.

Macron reiterated this view in a speech in April 2024:

Nuclear deterrence is indeed at the heart of French defense strategy. It is therefore, by its very nature, an essential element of the defense of the European continent. It is thanks to this credible defense that we will be able to build the security guarantees that all our partners expect, throughout Europe, and which will also serve to build a common security framework, a guarantee of security for everyone.

Finally, on March 2, 2026, Macron went even further:

Can we imagine that the survival of our closest partners could be jeopardized without affecting our vital interests? Or conversely, that an extreme threat in Europe could concern only ourselves? For these fundamental reasons, successive Presidents have emphasized the European dimension of France’s vital interests. In February 2020, I reiterated the offer made by all my predecessors, since President François Mitterrand, to engage in dialogue with European countries willing to explore this dimension further with us. I even proposed involving these countries in our deterrence exercises.

Six years later, we are in a different strategic landscape. We must move to a completely different stage and formulate for our time what General de Gaulle already intuited. I believe I can confidently say that our partners are ready for this…

Today, a new phase of French deterrence can therefore take shape. We are embarking on what I would call forward deterrence.

Yet this European dimension of vital interests- which is at the heart of “forward deterrence”- is in tension with the underlying rationale and origin story for the French deterrent.

“Never Again!” Deterrence, Independence, and Autonomy

France’s nuclear deterrent was profoundly influenced by those who fought Nazi occupation, as captured in the edited volume France and Nuclear Deterrence: A Spirit of Resistance. The rallying cry of “Never again!” appears from multiple contributors to that volume, perhaps best captured by François Geleznikoff, a former Director of Military Applications at the French Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique-CEA):

“Never again!” (Plus jamais ça!) had been the leitmotif of the French Resistance during the war; the same refrain accompanied the creation of the CEA by General de Gaulle in October 1945, and then the secret launch of the French nuclear defence programme nine years later by Pierre Mendès France. This spirit was all the more prevalent since the initial leaders of the military arm of the CEA often came from the French Resistance, with their experience of highly sensitive secret missions and their determination to achieve the goal set in the name of safeguarding the nation.

Cover of Résistance et Dissuasion. Image courtesy of CEA.

Beyond simply ensuring that France would never again be occupied by a foreign invader, those who built the deterrent saw it as a prime means to ensure French strategic autonomy and sovereignty. Macron’s announcement of forward deterrence, for all its discussion of dialogue, exercises, and even moving French strategic assets to allied territory, reiterates this autonomy- in definition of interests, planning, execution and above all decision- in the starkest terms:

French nuclear deterrence is designed to deter any state from attacking our vital interests. What are they? We have never defined them precisely. We have never defined them precisely, intentionally. Our red lines are not clearly visible. They cannot be… I prefer to state this clearly from the outset: there will be no sharing of the ultimate decision, nor of its planning, nor of its implementation. Under our Constitution, this rests solely with the President of the Republic, who is accountable to the French people.

This hyperfocus on autonomy and independence is thus, to use a term Vipin likes, central to French “nuclear DNA.” It is fundamental- legally, culturally, philosophically, and perhaps even spiritually- to France’s deterrence and has been since the end of World War II. For France, this nuclear essence preceded nuclear existence by nearly twenty years- it is unlikely to change. This has implications for the efficacy of forward deterrence (at least as a potential substitute for U.S. extended nuclear deterrence)- implications that would be very familiar to American strategists of the early Cold War.

Credibility: The Peril of Chemically-Impure Deterrence

From the beginning of the Cold War, Western Europe was clearly a vital interest of the United States and one it was clearly willing to defend with nuclear weapons in the early years of the Cold War. Through multiple crises over Berlin, U.S. nuclear superiority over nascent Soviet strategic forces meant the United States could threaten large scale nuclear use that would cripple Soviet retaliation (a story I have told elsewhere). In a prescient piece written a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis future Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger summarized the military balance and thus the efficacy of U.S. deterrence in Europe:

During the next four or five years, because of nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first strike remains high. A selective counterforce strike of soft Soviet military targets could cripple a sizable part of the Soviet military machine. The sparing of Soviet cities, in light of the increased strategic imbalance, would provide the Soviets with every incentive to avoid reprisals against NATO cities. At the same time, the possibility of a crippling American strike against [U.S.] military targets will in all probability dissuade the Soviets from very provocative moves against Western Europe. For the time being the argument is sufficiently persuasive to convince the Europeans…

The nuclear imbalance- and the possibility of counterforce strikes- thus underwrote nuclear deterrence. The Soviets did not have anything like an assured destruction capability and the outcome of crises over Berlin and Cuba showed the importance of this imbalance. In short, nuclear superiority and counterforce capability were an important part of the credibility of the U.S. extension of nuclear deterrence to Western Europe. Yet it was clear even in 1962 that this imbalance would not prevail indefinitely, as Schlesinger noted:

What about the future? Unless the Soviets are less shrewd or less technically competent than we think them to be, eventually they will provide themselves with a relatively invulnerable counter-deterrent, which, permitting a much higher percentage of Soviet military might to survive, will increase the risks to the United States of a large-scale counterforce strike. Will this be in 1965, 1968, or 1970? If massive nuclear exchanges are to be avoided—and both superpowers have a dramatic incentive to do so—the chief possibility for dissuading the Soviets from major provocations is to threaten carefully measured attacks against military targets or cities—deterrence on a tit-for tat basis.

Schlesinger was thus articulating one key U.S. response to Soviet nuclear parity- which arrived as he predicted later in the late 1960s. This was the idea of limited nuclear options- options backed by the capability to launch discrete and discriminate nuclear attacks across multiple rounds of nuclear exchanges. As Secretary of Defense, Schlesinger would direct the military to plan for such options in 1974.

James R. Schlesinger. Image courtesy of Famous Pipe Smokers.

Yet in his piece written in 1962, Schlesinger identified a potential limit to the efficacy of such options- the asymmetry of stakes and the higher tolerance for casualties of autocracies:

In a war of nerves, with limited encounters, which side will prove the stronger—especially when we have reached the city-swapping stage? How long will the American public accept a game played by these rules? Thus the final question appears: what does the decline of nuclear dominance do to the protection offered to Europe by a sophisticated deterrent [that] remains under American control?

The bulk of U.S. nuclear strategy and posture in the late Cold War was focused on answering Schlesinger’s final question- including both continued development of limited options and a renewed emphasis across U.S. presidential administrations on counterforce and damage limitation.

France in the Cold War had a debate about whether to pursue similar lines of effort and ultimately rejected them. As articulated by Corentin Brustlein, in my view contemporary France’s foremost nuclear strategist, what emerged from the debate was that:

France’s nuclear doctrine was tailored to its financial and technological capabilities while fitting in with De Gaulle’s grand strategic vision, putting independence at the center… Proportional deterrence was thus crafted as a way to deter a much more capable adversary despite France having limited resources. To achieve that objective, those limited resources were offset by a narrowly defined ambition: to protect only France’s vital interests, as identified by the president of the Republic. Even though those vital interests have been portrayed in multiple occasions since the 1970s as possibly extending beyond France’s borders, Paris has so far refrained from offering explicit security guarantees backed by its nuclear forces. This rejection of extended deterrence made it possible to adopt what is sometimes qualified by French experts as a “chemically-pure” form of nuclear policy that focuses only on so-called “central” deterrence and has, for that reason, rejected the wide diversity of concepts which spawned over the decades from U.S. strategic community out of the need to deal with the risk of extended deterrence failure—flexible or graduated response, of course, as well as escalation control, damage limitation, limited nuclear war, nuclear warfighting, and protracted nuclear war, among other examples.

Forward deterrence is an articulation of a more robust connection between France’s nuclear deterrent and the European dimension of France’s vital interests- without fundamentally changing doctrine. Macron specifically reiterated the rejection of U.S. concepts that Brustlein notes were developed for extended deterrence:

With forward deterrence, our doctrine will retain its original foundations: its strictly defensive character, the rejection of nuclear warfare, and the complete and deliberate separation between conventional and nuclear forces. The same applies to the option of a single, non-renewable nuclear warning. This warning will always be issued, at France’s sole discretion, to signal very concretely that the nature of the conflict has changed and that France intends, by this means, to preserve a final chance of restoring deterrence.

Macron today seeks to retain a “chemically-pure” doctrine while introducing impurity in the form of a more ambitious role for its nuclear deterrent. Forward deterrence (at least as a potential replacement for U.S. extended deterrence) is thus an anomaly that strains credibility.

Yet some may argue that the asymmetry of stakes that the United States faced over Western Europe in the Cold War is fundamentally different than the stakes of the European dimension. France is after all geographically and economically anchored in Europe in a way the United States never was- therefore the credibility of forward deterrence is high even without the elaborate nuclear apparatus the United States developed for extended deterrence. While this argument is plausible, upon scrutiny it has many challenges.

Credibility Redux: Le Bleus du Général Mandon

For this argument of the inherent credibility of forward deterrence as a meaningful substitute for extended deterrence to be true, the French president (and by extension the French people) would have to see Europe as just as vital to the survival of the metropole as the metropole itself. Otherwise, one is running existential risks for vital but non-existential interests- and without the options the United States developed for this exact problem. In short, are the French people willing to issue the “single, non-renewable warning” on behalf of Poles or Greeks or Swedes? This step would be to the brink, risking the prompt end of French existence much less independence- the sine qua non of French nuclear DNA. There are at least three related reasons to question this level of French commitment to the rest of the continent- or at least the continent far from French borders.

The first is the political reaction to recent remarks by Général Fabien Mandon, the current chief of defense staff and previous chief of the military staff of President Macron (a uniquely important position for French nuclear issues). In November 2025, Mandon remarked in a speech to French mayors:

We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime from trying its luck by going further. What we lack, and this is where you have a major role to play, is the strength of spirit to accept suffering in order to protect who we are. If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children, to suffer economically because defense production will take precedence, then we are at risk.

Général Fabien Mandon. Image courtesy of Anopex.

The reaction from across the French political spectrum was prompt and critical. According to France24:

The left-wing France Unbowed‘s Jean-Luc Mélenchon said that he was in “complete disagreement” with Mandon.

“It is not his place to invite mayors or anyone else to participate in war preparations decided by no one: not the President, not the government, not Parliament,” he wrote on X. “Nor is it his place to anticipate sacrifices that would result from our diplomatic failures, on which his public opinion has not been sought! Where is President Macron? Why is he allowing this?”

Louis Aliot, deputy leader of the far-right National Rally, said: “One must be prepared to die for one’s country ... but the war being waged must be just, or understood, or the necessity must dictate that the very survival of the nation is at stake…”

“It’s a NO! 51,000 war memorials in our towns and villages are not enough?,” said French Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel, referring to the number of memorials nationwide to those who fell in war…

“It’s shocking,” said Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice and a member of the centre-right Horizons party which is part of Macron’s ruling coalition.

“Is it the role of the chief of staff of the army to worry the country in this way? It’s an act of weakness…”

While the context for Mandon’s remarks was Ukraine, it is not clear nuclear exchange for Poland or Greece or Sweden would merit substantially different political responses. As France24 concludes “the message is struggling to make inroads among a polarised population that feels far from the frontline and protected by a nuclear deterrent”- a nuclear deterrent clearly focused on the borders of the metropole.

This skepticism of political commitment is not just the view of a jaundiced American. In an excellent report released at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, a pan-European nuclear study group concluded:

Absent a counterforce posture and damage-limitation capacity, neither France nor the UK could seamlessly replace the United States as a provider of extended nuclear deterrence. In addition, French and British political resolve to assume the substantial nuclear risks on behalf of all European Allies – risks generally associated with a countervalue posture – is widely seen as insufficient.

This question of resolve leads to the second reason for questioning the credibility of forward deterrence- the overall state of French politics. The French parliament is deeply divided and only avoided a government shutdown with an emergency budget in December 2025. In early February 2026, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu finally forced through a 2026 budget without a vote after multiple no-confidence votes from the parliament. This is not the sort of legislative politics that readily yields credibility (and to be fair is not just a French problem, as any observer of U.S. politics would note).

Further, President Macron has just over a year left in his second and final term. While that is a long time in political terms, Jordan Bardella of the National Rally is probably the leading candidate to replace Macron. Bardella is, by the standards of the far right, relatively open to the European dimension of French vital interests, remarking recently "The defense of French interests does not stop at [French] borders. Since de Gaulle, the French nuclear umbrella protects, by definition, certain neighbors and certain European partners." Yet the National Rally as a whole is skeptical of both Europe and the threat posed by Russia. It is thus hard to imagine Macron’s speech today as anything other than the political high-water mark of forward deterrence- even if his successor does not repudiate it, he or she is unlikely to advance it further.

Even while Macron remains in office there are signs that France’s vital interests in Europe are, to put it mildly, less than existential. The furor over the fate of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS or SCAF), the Franco-Spanish-German project to develop a sixth-generation system of systems for air combat, underscores the limits of European common interests. Two of the titans of European aerospace- France’s Dassault and the more pan-European Airbus- are at seemingly intractable loggerheads on the future of the fighter component of FCAS. The government of France and Germany have to date been unable to resolve this defense industrial dispute- despite FCAS having previously been identified as the future platform for the air leg of France’s nuclear deterrent.

The requirement for FCAS to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons is important for the choice of prime contractor- a choice that would likely favor Dassault and a requirement that Germany is questioning. This has led some reporters to claim there “is palpable unease at the Élysée Palace regarding Germany… Emmanuel Macron is making progress on nuclear deterrence conditional on ‘the continuation of the SCAF [future combat aircraft] program as initially defined.’ According to a source close to the matter, ‘the Germans consider this to be blackmail.” Even if this is overstated, the dispute underscores that France’s vital interests in Germany may taper off where French defense industrial concerns begin. Conversely, Germany’s faith in the credibility of forward deterrence seems insufficient to lead it to give ground on industrial questions.

A Useful Complement but No Substitute

The foregoing may seem entirely dismissive of forward deterrence, but this is true only in the sense of forward deterrence as substitute for U.S. extended nuclear deterrence. As an enhancement of France’s existing role in the trans-Atlantic alliance, forward deterrence is all to the good- expanding French collaboration with allies while preserving the unique nature of French nuclear deterrence and nuclear DNA. Potential alignment of France’s Poker exercise of its nuclear aviation with other allies (and allied exercises like NATO’s Steadfast Noon) is particularly valuable. Yet it is important that neither Americans nor European allies conflate forward deterrence with extended deterrence. The requirements of the latter will remain uniquely met by the doctrine, capabilities, and posture of the United States.