Emmanuel Macron’s offer to protect Europe isn’t the nuclear slam-dunk he thinks it is

As EU leaders commit to accelerating their spending on defence and to brace for conflict with Russia, is the French president also risking a rift with the UK, asks Mary Dejevsky

In his televised address to announce that Europe is “entering a new era”, Emmanuel Macron made two bold claims – that Russian aggression “knows no borders”, and that the Kremlin “feels exposed”.

For these seemingly contradictory reasons, the French president has offered to protect the entire continent with France’s nuclear arsenal, which he boasted was “complete, sovereign, French from end to end”.

But how great is his largesse – and how much of a failsafe – if he also felt compelled to call upon the entire continent to start rearming?

The impetus for his primetime speech was the conclusion of the EU’s special council on defence, called at a week’s notice in Brussels, which underlined all of the institutional, ethical and practical muddle the Europeans are now in as they anticipate the diminution, or complete withdrawal, of US security guarantees.

But it underlined something else, too: the bizarre reality that the European side of the Atlantic, give or take a few dissenters, is gearing up to continue a war that the United States, on the other side of the Atlantic, is trying to end.

For all that the European Union was originally envisaged as a peace project, it has gradually developed a foreign, defence and security dimension. And while its membership now overlaps more than it used to with that of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) – following the recent accession of Finland and Sweden – the overlap is not complete. Austria and Ireland are neutral countries remaining outside Nato. The UK and Norway, as well as Albania and several Balkan states, are in Nato but not in the EU, as is Turkey.

Any move towards more defence cohesion on the part of the EU, however, will raise two particularly awkward spectres that Europeans have, until now, tended to push into an ever more distant future. One is rearmament – a term that was bandied about in the run-up to the Brussels meeting and has now entered the public discourse, even in Germany, which has seemed allergic to the very mention of rearmament since 1945. The other is the desirability or otherwise of a European nuclear deterrent, which necessarily enters the equation if, as is quite possible, further support for Ukraine risks conflict with Russia.

The nuclear question places France front and centre as the only EU country to have a nuclear capability, and invites curiosity about whether, and on what terms, France might be willing to share it; Macron has said that this could be a possibility. The UK, now outside the EU, is the only other nuclear state in Europe, and there have been murmurings about UK-France cooperation to replace the US nuclear umbrella.

It looks like a nice idea, but it comes with many complications. The two systems are not comparable or compatible, for a start, and the UK’s deterrent – the US-supplied Trident missile system – is not quite as independent as many of those in UK political, if not military, circles like to pretend. Where would Britain find itself if Trump took Trident away?

On the matter of rearmament, various projects are being mooted, including the lifting of some EU credit constraints and efforts (not for the first time) to improve coordination and reduce duplication across the bloc. But it remains to be seen how amenable many EU states will be to tightening their budgets in other, especially social, areas – an issue that has felled several governments in the past year. If there is also to be a move towards a “so-called coalition of the willing” – sending European troops to Ukraine, whether to fight or, in theory, patrol the peace – the current level of EU support for Ukraine could be hard to sustain.

In many ways, it has long made sense for the EU to have its own defence capability, and Macron has been the standard-bearer for what he calls “strategic autonomy”, up to and including the formation of an EU army. He could well hail current developments as a vindication of what he has been saying. It was not just the UK that objected, however, but many of the newer EU states in Eastern and central Europe, which, like the UK, regarded a European venture as akin to an invitation to the US to leave. The position of the US was ambiguous: arguing on the one hand that Europe needed to contribute more to its own defence, but not so much as to fuel separatist aspirations.

Following the notice from Donald Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, that Europe was no longer a US priority, the prospects for stronger, even independent, European defence suddenly became a lot brighter. However, it also placed the UK in a potential quandary. It can hardly be coincidence that even as EU leaders talked defence in Brussels, the UK defence secretary, John Healey, was meeting Hegseth in Washington.

Even if the EU were to agree on a coordinated defence policy, a further problem would be almost bound to crop up: the centrality of Germany. The new discussion of European defence coincided with the last lap of the German election campaign, where references to matters such as rearmament and nuclear weapons – first whispered and then spoken aloud – broke many taboos, even as they prompted less resistance both inside and outside the country than might have been expected.

Even the possibility of Germany sharing France’s nuclear deterrent seemed to draw less resistance than I, for one, had imagined. Whether opinion in the UK would show quite the same equanimity towards the prospect of a rearmed and nuclear-capable Germany, however, could be another matter, given the extent to which children are still steeped in the British-centred mythology of the last world war.

Elsewhere, though, attitudes may be changing. A venerable German contributor to a discussion I viewed on the German election results expressed his alarm at what he felt was a fading of the collective memory of Nazism, war and defeat, even in his country, where a sense of shared guilt has been so assiduously kept alive. I tend to agree, though not exclusively in relation to Germany.

Europe – as many a politician, including Keir Starmer, has observed – faces a “generational challenge”. But that challenge coincides with a generational transition. Time and again, younger politicians and activists who have lived their whole lives in peace seem to have a somewhat relaxed, even cavalier, approach to the dangers of war – and even the nuclear threat – compared with their elders.

That applies across many EU countries, even where the scars of war remain. It came home to me first during the 2021 German election, watching one of the country’s most impressive campaigners, the Greens’ Annalena Baerbock, on the stump. She has shown the same utter certainty and apparent dismissal of risk as German foreign minister for the past four years.

Something similar applies even in Ukraine, where younger politicians in particular, as well as those safely abroad, often seem unduly relaxed about war, and not just war but the potential use of nuclear weapons. Nor is it just out of patriotism in the face of an existential threat. The fear that those who were aware of the Cuban missile crisis still feel is something their children and grandchildren never knew, and the change shows.

The war in Ukraine coincides with the final transition in many countries from the old Cold War establishments to those 30 and 40 years younger. Contrast the leadership lineup in Russia – Vladimir Putin, Sergei Lavrov and the others – with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and his young parliamentarians, many of them women. Invariably, the threat they see is less that of war itself, or nuclear weapons, but that of Russia.

Donald Trump, at 78, insists that his priority is to stop the killing – which places the onus for what comes next, if he fails, squarely on the Europeans.

It would make for a satisfactory realignment if the EU and the eastern pillar of Nato were to join forces as a European defence alliance with its own nuclear deterrent, ready to negotiate a pan-European security arrangement with Russia that would include guarantees for Ukraine’s survival as an independent, sovereign, and probably neutral state.

The likelihood of any of this happening soon, despite the breakneck speed of current events, cannot but be remote – which in turn leaves many untidy ends that will further complicate any resolution of the Ukraine war.