Less US, more France: Can Paris become the center of a "new NATO" in Europe?

30.04.2026, 16:31 eurointegration.com.ua

It has become a habit. When things do not go his way on foreign policy, Donald Trump turns on NATO, lashes out at allied leaders and often singles out Emmanuel Macron. Those repeated clashes are forcing Europe to imagine its security with less America than before.

Even with the United States still inside the alliance, its current posture could profoundly alter Europe’s security situation. Fewer American troops in Europe, weaker political commitments or a reduced US role in intelligence, logistics and other key support functions would already force Europeans to rethink how the continent is defended.

Paris believes that a US withdrawal from Europe is no longer seen as a remote possibility.

It is increasingly treated as a scenario for which Europe must prepare.

France is the European country best placed to lead adaptation to a smaller American role. It has the strategic culture, the nuclear deterrent, the expeditionary reflex and the political instinct to think at continental scale.

But it still lacks the mass, the logistical ecosystem and the industrial depth to replace the United States as Europe’s military backbone.

Russia’s war has made practical action more important than strategic talk.

What will matter in the coming years is not whether France looks strategically prepared on paper, but whether it can help build a European system fast enough to keep Ukraine armed, deter Russia and prevent the widening gap between a shrinking American role and Europe’s still limited readiness.

France is closer than any other EU country to being Europe’s strategic pivot.

It is the EU’s only nuclear power, one of the few states on the continent with a defence industrial base that still aspires to a real degree of sovereignty, and one of the rare European militaries that can think at once in terms of continental deterrence, expeditionary action and high intensity war.

That does not make France sufficient. But at no doubt makes it necessary.

If Europe has to adapt to a smaller American role, no credible answer can be built around Germany alone, Britain alone or the eastern flank alone. Any European answer to a thinner American role would have to be built with France.

In Paris, dependence on Washington is not a new concern.

That conviction was formed in 1956, when NATO was recently created.

At that time, the growing Suez crisis showed Paris that close alignment with Washington could still end in humiliation when American interests diverged.

The United States forced France and Britain to back down from their intervention in Egypt, leaving behind a lesson that shaped French strategic thinking for decades: alliance is useful, but dependence is dangerous.

From there emerged the doctrine of autonomy, not as a fantasy of isolation, but as the refusal to build national security on the assumption that the United States would always see Europe’s interests as its own.

For years, many allies treated that reflex as a specifically French fixation. Now it increasingly looks like an early understanding of a problem the rest of Europe is only now being forced to confront.

Europe would need far more than rhetoric to compensate for a weaker American role. According to a Bruegel and Kiel Institute estimate, it would need around 300,000 additional troops to deter Russian aggression without effective US backing, along with roughly €250 billion more in annual defence spending in the short term. In practical terms, that means around 50 new brigades.

Although that figure is deceptive. Three hundred thousand Europeans are not the same thing as 300,000 Americans. American power comes as a system: coherent command, strategic lift, intelligence, air and missile defence, refuelling, satellite linked and other strategic enablers, and the ability to move, coordinate and sustain forces at speed. Europe’s weakness lies there.

The gap is not simply one of manpower or money. It is the gap between having soldiers on paper and being able to turn them into credible, integrated combat power in time. Rearmament is part of the answer, but not the whole of it.

The first real test of Europe’s adaptation to "less America reality" will not come at a summit table or in another speech about "strategic autonomy".

It is playing out in Ukraine.

If Europe wants to know whether it can carry more of its own security burden, the first question is simple: can it sustain Ukraine if Washington scales back? Over the past three years, Europe already allocated more aid to Ukraine per year than the United States, about €43.5 billion against €38 billion.

In purely fiscal terms, replacing the United States is possible, but replacing US military aid is much harder.

The United States has been a crucial supplier of heavy weapons and ammunition vital to Ukraine’s defence. To compensate for that, European countries would need to increase production quickly and on a broad scale. Europe’s defence industry already produces many of the systems Ukraine relies on, including howitzers, air defence systems, tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. But that is not enough to claim autonomy.

The hardest capabilities to replace remain rocket artillery such as HIMARS, long range air defence such as Patriot, and some of the ammunition those systems require.

Europe still lacks a credible substitute at sufficient scale. That leaves European governments with a difficult choice: continue buying some systems from the United States where possible, look to external alternatives where they exist or accelerate investment in European ones.

One illustration of that difficulty is the collapse of the Future Combat Air System, or FCAS. Launched in 2017 as the flagship Franco German project for European strategic autonomy, it was supposed to produce the next generation of combat air power while reducing long term dependence on US systems. Instead, it exposed the opposite problem.

French and German requirements diverged, procurement cycles moved out of sync, and industrial rivalry proved stronger than political rhetoric. France wanted an aircraft compatible with its nuclear deterrent and carrier operations. Germany did not share those requirements and, having already bought US F-35s, they no longer faced the same urgency. Control over design, technology and workshare were also disputed.

It has shown that strategic autonomy remains easier to declare than to produce, and also pointed to something more fundamental than industrial rivalry:

French air power requirements are shaped by nuclear doctrine.

On 2 March, at Île Longue, Macron gave a speech that gave French deterrence a more openly European dimension. He said France now had to think about its deterrence strategy "in the depth of the European continent" and called for a progressively more "advanced deterrence".

While Russia is using nuclear intimidation more openly, and confidence in the American guarantee is weaker than before, and Paris wants one of the few strategic assets Europe controls itself to count for more in the balance.

But Macron did not offer Europe a French version of the American umbrella.

His move is more serious than his critics admit and less revolutionary than some of his admirers suggest.

What is under consideration is a limited but real package: more warheads, less transparency over the stockpile, the possible temporary deployment of nuclear capable Rafales on allied territory, more consultations and exercises with European partners, and tighter coordination on conventional enablers such as early warning, air and missile defence, and precision strike.

What remains unchanged is just as important.

Macron did not propose NATO style nuclear sharing.

He did not offer allies a role in authorising use. The arsenal remains French, the doctrine remains French.

The final decision remains in Paris.

France is extending the political reach of its deterrent, not sharing control over it.

None of this removes the central weakness. Nuclear signalling can reinforce deterrence. It cannot compensate for conventional weakness. If Europe cannot deny Moscow a rapid gain on the ground, no refinement of French doctrine will solve the problem. The hard requirements remain the same: brigades, ammunition, mobility, command and the ability to fight early enough to make nuclear blackmail less useful.

Trump’s war exposed, in real time, how brittle the transatlantic relationship has become. European governments did not want this war. They were not officially properly consulted, they questioned both its legality and its strategic logic, and they had no desire to be dragged into another American-led escalation in the region. But they could not escape its consequences.

It also showed, again, that the United States becomes not just a less predictable strategic actor – it can even end up in blackmailing its European Allies.

That is one more reason why the debate about Europe’s ability to act with less America became more acute this spring.

All of that would be hardly possible to ignore at the forthcoming NATO leader’s meeting scheduled in July in Ankara.

The debate now stretches well beyond defence spending. It includes post-war stabilisation in the Middle East, maritime security after the Iran war, and the terms on which Europeans can assume a larger role without becoming the support structure for conflicts they neither chose nor control.

If Ankara avoids those issues, it will say a great deal about NATO’s condition.

But even if Macron has read the strategic direction correctly, there remains a second uncertainty, and it is French.

Europe is being asked not only whether France has the right answer to a weaker American commitment, but whether France itself will remain on that line after 2027.

Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally since 2022, is now widely seen as a plausible winner of the next presidential election which gives his defence positions immediate European significance.

He has reiterated his opposition to sending French troops to Ukraine, and the broader National Rall