Macron’s told-you-so moment

PARIS — France wasn’t wrong. It was just early.

In 1956, as U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower dramatically forced Britain and France to back down from a military intervention to regain control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, French distrust of America started to simmer. 

While Eisenhower had helped lead the 1944 liberation of France from Nazi Germany, during Suez he worked with the United Nations behind European countries’ backs to impose a ceasefire, leaving Paris feeling humiliated and betrayed. 

Almost 70 years later, Eisenhower’s Suez maneuvering is inextricably linked to current French President Emmanuel Macron’s long-running, so-far unsuccessful push to wean Europe off the American military support that has underwritten the continent’s security since World War II ended. 

“The leaders of the Fourth Republic deduced that the Americans could not be counted on, and decided to start developing France’s own nuclear deterrent,” said Yannick Pincé, a historian at the Ecole Normale Supérieure’s Interdisciplinary Center for Strategic Issues in Paris. 

“It was a traumatic experience for the French elite, that our allies could abandon us,” Pincé added.

The cornerstone Macronian concept of “strategic autonomy” — investment in a credible, self-sufficient European defense so the continent can militarily take care of itself without America — is now set for its moment under the microscope. Disruptive U.S. President Donald Trump has seriously undermined the transatlantic relationship and the NATO military alliance, while aligning with a bellicose Russia.

Though most of France’s European allies rely on America’s almighty military and nuclear umbrella, Vladimir Putin’s menacing specter on the EU border and Trump’s warmth toward the Russian dictator are sparking questions about U.S. dependability — and eliciting new answers.

A new era

Macron’s insistence that Europe learn to stand up for itself was not always, to put it mildly, well received. 

Neither were French warnings that America could one day turn away from Europe. “Nobody likes a Cassandra,” said a French official, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Undermined by a series of clumsy diplomatic moves and what critics say are unrealistic assumptions about the potential of France’s nuclear deterrent to be used to protect Europe, the French president has struggled to gain traction for his idea of an independent European defense apparatus. 

France has also long faced accusations of arrogance and shameless promotion of its own industrial interests under the guise of caring about European defense. 

That changed with head-spinning velocity as Trump returned to the White House in January and promptly began negotiating directly with Russia about an end to its war on Ukraine, while cutting Europe and Kyiv out of the talks and triggering fears that the U.S. is set for a stunning diplomatic realignment with Moscow. 

Just minutes after winning Germany’s vital snap election last weekend, the country’s conservative incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed “independence” from Trump’s America and warned NATO may soon be dead. Two days before, he had suggested exploring nuclear cooperation with France and the U.K. to replace the American nuclear umbrella — a startling shift away from his country’s historic pro-American position. 

On Wednesday, Merz traveled to Paris to speak with Macron — as the most powerful figures in the EU’s most influential countries seek to get on the same page about how best to combat the potential Russian threat and how to handle Trump.

Germany’s historic about-face was immediately noted in Paris.

“We’ve changed eras, that’s very clear. We’re wondering if the United States are still allies or adversaries,” said Valérie Hayer, one of Macron’s top lieutenants in Brussels and president of the Renew Group in the European Parliament. “With Merz, we are getting one step closer to a European defense.”

‘Messianic complex’

Trump’s bombastic return arguably vindicated long-standing Gallic warnings — dating back to the legendary General Charles de Gaulle — about the risks, and strings, attached to U.S. dominance.

France’s most revered politician, de Gaulle led the French resistance against Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in World War II, then became the father of France’s Fifth Republic upon his return to power in the late 1950s. 

De Gaulle’s relationship with the U.S. was complex, characterized by loyalty in key moments but also a lack of trust dating back to World War II as allies struggled to agree on the architecture of France’s liberation and even mulled an occupation.

The Suez episode “was a major factor in [his] thinking” about the U.S., according to Pincé, the historian.

When Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser on July 26, 1956 nationalized the Suez Canal — which was previously under French and British control, and key to the two nations’ commercial, colonial and political interests — it sparked a combined military intervention by French, British and Israeli forces to reclaim the strategic waterway. 

But with the U.S. focused on its Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, Washington pressured London and Paris into a vehemently unwanted ceasefire as Moscow threatened to back Egypt and escalate the threat of a catastrophic nuclear confrontation.

A decade later, in one of Paris’ most dramatic standoffs with Washington, de Gaulle famously withdrew France from NATO’s integrated command, leading to the removal of U.S. military bases and troops from French soil. Paris continued to ramp up its atomic program, gaining its own nuclear weapons and developing a powerful defense industry with few ties to the U.S.

The high-level distrust, though, was never just a one-way street.

“De Gaulle may be an honest fellow but he has the Messianic complex,” then-U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt wrote in a 1943 memo to U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill while discussing plans for the liberation of France.

Roosevelt and Churchill’s annoyance with de Gaulle 80 years ago echoes some of the irritation directed at Macron in recent years, as he repeatedly pushed for Europe to become more independent from Washington — including in terms of weaponry.

Few are rolling their eyes now. 

Acknowledging past skepticism toward France, Macron’s right-hand woman in Brussels Hayer said she was confident European leaders would put past differences behind them.

“There was a form of mistrust, it’s true, with everyone thinking that France was pushing its pawns. We have differences of opinion and sensitivities, because we have a different history, a different relationship with the United States,” the European lawmaker said.

“But now we’re all going to move forward, pulling in the same direction because, to be honest, Trump leaves us no other choice,” she added.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Paris should, however, hesitate before crowing too loudly, as most of Europe had valid reasons to be wary of following France’s lead, said Benjamin Tallis, a director at the Berlin-based Democratic Strategy Initiative think tank.

For all their grandiose rhetoric in the 1960s, “the French were never a credible alternative” to the Americans, he said. “Europeans in the decision-making elites understood they would be safer, more backed up by the kind of power the U.S. could provide.”

More recently, under Macron, there hasn’t been a “sustained effort from France to put its money where its mouth was, spend on [military] capability and equipment and put a diplomatic effort to convince others.” France only reached NATO’s target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense last year; a goal which is expected to grow this summer. 

One key reason for the lack of enthusiasm for France’s strategic autonomy push is the sheer size of America’s military might — including its nuclear weapons — and near trillion-dollar defense budget.

According to a study by Defense News, Europeans would need five years to build up some of the so-called critical enablers that the U.S. currently provides, such as battlefield command and control (C2), military satellites for intelligence gathering and deep strike capabilities.

Countries such as Germany and Poland — major buyers of American weapons — have built their entire foreign and defense policy on strong transatlantic bonds, said Gesine Weber, a Paris-based fellow at transatlantic think tank German Marshall Fund. Turning to Paris instead to anticipate a potential U.S. withdrawal from Europe, they feared, risked turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But while France’s approach to pushing the subject of European defense often didn’t help — and countries such as Poland are not yet ready to let go of Washington — the time for niceties is now, definitively, over. 

As Weber put it: “Europeans must break the intellectual taboo of thinking about the security order without the U.S.

“It’s quite the ‘I told you so’ moment for France, everyone in Paris knows it, and everyone at the Elysée knows it,” she added.