Foreign Policy: "Strategic autonomy" is a French pipe dream

05 July 2023 09:00

According to Anchal Vohra, Emmanuel Macron is pushing a European policy that flatters France and annoys everyone else.

Caliber.Az reprints her article from Foreign Policy.

In April, French President Emmanuel Macron sparked a controversy when he warned Europe against being drawn into a conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan. Being the United States’ allies, he said, didn’t require being its “vassals.”

The comments reignited the debate about France’s project of seeking “strategic autonomy” for Europe—that is, independence from the United States in strategic matters. That idea rattles Central and Eastern European states that trust the United States to be their prime security guarantor in a conflict with Russia. They suspect France of falsely presenting ideas that enhance its stature, while vexing the United States, as the product of collective European thinking.

Even among European nations that principally agree with the need for Europe to do more for its security, Macron’s jibe at the United States was seen as in bad taste and poorly timed. The United States has been the strongest partner in the defense alliance of NATO, and for more than a year has been actively involved in aiding Ukraine, a European country that many believe must be held if Russia is to be dissuaded from expanding. The United States has spent nearly $47 billion in military aid to embattled Ukraine since the war began while France contributed $486 million, a relatively small part of even the overall European contribution of $15 billion.

The term strategic autonomy in the context of European security has been a part of official French foreign-policy discourse since at least 1994, but Macron injected it into the modern European debate in 2017 at a speech at Sorbonne University. Macron argued that Europe must build its defense capabilities to be able to defend itself in the context of then-U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to cut off NATO’s U.S. funding.

But it’s always been ambiguous whether France’s proposed policy is meant to be a primarily defensive posture toward the traditional military alliance with the United States—that is, preparing for a worst-case scenario in which Washington turns its back—or rather a more assertive turn away from trans-Atlantic ties initiated by Europe itself. At its most extreme, it suggests that Europe should enhance defense capabilities, not to complement but rather to compete with NATO, beginning with the expansion of a European defense industry that would make the continent less reliant on U.S. defense manufacturers and security guarantees from the U.S. military.

Experts say U.S. officials tend to roll their eyes at Macron’s comments and dismiss them as rhetoric emanating from an inherited French strategic culture that envisages a bigger role for France in global affairs, even if it can’t always support its ambitions. They say Paris intends to use the European Union as a vehicle to realize its vision, and while it is not necessarily wrong in asking the EU to be self-sufficient, especially as the United States’ focus shifts to the Indo-Pacific, it has a long way to go in building and harmonizing its defense-industrial architecture. They say that consensus from 27 EU nations on aspects of collective defense is a huge ask.

“It is not enough to aspire, but can the EU defend itself without the U.S.?,” asked Ian Lesser, the vice president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Can the EU have a predictable deterrent without the U.S.? Not at the moment,’’ he added. “The sources of American anxiety are twofold—one is a long-standing concern that this will somehow compete with or displace NATO’s role in EU security, and second, it would somehow push the U.S. out of defense-industrial cooperation.’’

Lesser added that Macron has provoked the debate on strategic autonomy at a time of rising economic nationalism, and that for some factions in the United States, the “price the EU pays for American commitment [to its security] is to show its willingness to spend and to act and to buy American.”

Most Central and Eastern European nations prefer to purchase U.S. military equipment as “an insurance” to keep the United States involved in their security, said Marie Dumoulin, the director of the Wider Europe program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, with expertise in Europe’s eastern neighborhood and Russia.

France, too, is trying to push its domestic defense industry. Three European diplomats told Foreign Policy that France has not forgotten the loss of the lucrative submarine deal with Australia and is still peeved at the Germans spending a part of their $100 billion defense investment fund on U.S. F-35 fighter jets instead of collaborating with the French. The counterargument to French protectionism is efficiency and speed. Why duplicate what a major ally, the United States, is already producing?

An example of real-life manifestation of such quarrels and competing interests was visible when Ukraine desperately appealed for more ammunition, and yet France blocked the EU from procuring it from the United Kingdom and the United States, arguing that European money should be spent on EU companies.

FP’s conversations with several European diplomats, including those from the eastern flank, revealed that while they welcome the EU enhancing its military capacities, they are still skeptical of European politicians and their worldview, which is often pacifist, if not selfish, and focused on defending their national interests. They have strong doubts over how France and Germany would have acted after Russian tanks neared Kyiv, had the United States not unequivocally pushed back against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some of them suspect that France and Germany would have sat and let Putin take more Ukrainian territory, just as they had in 2014 after the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea.

“Macron prioritizes European unity, not so much trans-Atlantic—there have been ups and downs there,” Dumoulin said. Perhaps that is why the French president tried to set the record straight on French foreign policy at a recent summit in Bratislava, Slovakia, aiming to build trust.

For the first time, Macron backed a membership plan for Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO and said it was not a matter of if or when, but “how we should do it.” The declaration was widely noticed as a huge shift in France’s foreign policy, previously seen as too cautious on the question of Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and instead mindful of Putin’s sensitivities. Security guarantees for Russia were essential for any peace talks, Macron had said in December, more than nine months into Ukraine’s invasion.

“It’s a real shift,” Dumoulin told FP. “There will be no going back to what the relations were before February last year, no in-between, no gray zone where Ukraine comes close to the EU and NATO but is not made a part [of these institutions].”

Among a slew of clarifications, Macron also admitted that he hadn’t paid attention to warnings from Eastern and Central European countries on Putin’s designs and said he was now listening. “I believe we sometimes missed opportunities to listen,” he said. “That time is over, and today, these voices must be all our voices.”

Furthermore, he said victory in Ukraine would be defined by Ukrainians, and that all his talk on strategic autonomy is intended to strengthen European defense as a pillar of NATO, not to cause a split with its biggest ally across the Atlantic, as suspected.

Former Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev said that while Macron did not undo the damage done to the French reputation, his Bratislava speech did assuage some concerns. “The positive surprise in this speech is that the word that he used probably most now is NATO.”

Benjamin Tallis, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told FP that Macron may have understood that “NATO is the only game in town when it comes to hard security—that it’s about strategic ability, not strategic autonomy,” and that Macron has come a “long way from 2019, when he said NATO was brain-dead.”

French analysts say Macron never intended to create an alternative to NATO and that suspicion arose only because former French President Charles de Gaulle left NATO’s militarized command in 1966. (France rejoined in 2009.) Often at pains to explain their president’s comments, they believe that the debate over strategic autonomy, while caricatured, had brought France and Central and Eastern European nations closer and improved their understanding.

“Poland, for instance, sees the trans-Atlantic alliance as the best way for its security, or Europe’s security, even if it means relinquishing a bit of sovereignty to the U.S.,” said Célia Belin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and an expert in trans-Atlantic relations and U.S. and French foreign policy.

“The French believe [that] to defend France and others is to have competitive capabilities, and a degree of autonomy. But the French and Poles have moved toward each other. France has realized the need for integration and strengthening NATO, while Poles have also realized how important it is to have some form of higher European integration.”

A senior European diplomat from the eastern flank told FP that the region wants a “stronger European defense and a strong United States as an ally in a strong NATO as our pillars of security,’’ he said. “Not one, both.”

Caliber.Az

Views: 115

Liked the story? Share it on social media!