French President Nicholas Sarkozy Announced Last Week That France Was Cutting Its Nuclear

A New French Strategy

French President Nicholas Sarkozy announced last week that France was cutting its nuclear arsenal to less than 300 hundred missiles, which he said was less than half the number that France had during the Cold War. He said this while attending the launching of a new French nuclear powered submarine in Cherbourg. He also stated that none of France’s nuclear weapons were currently targeted at anyone. During the same appearance he said that “All those who threaten to attack our vital interests expose themselves to a severe riposte by France.” This was said in the context of discussions of Iran, whom he said was among those countries in the process of developing nuclear weapons.

France is simultaneously calling attention to its nuclear capability and adopting an increasingly hostile posture toward Iran. The media focus is on President Sarkozy, but it would seem to us that this goes deeper than personalities. There are certain processes underway that are shifting French foreign policy. It is not a dramatic shift as yet. There is more continuity than discontinuity in French foreign policy. Like all French leaders for the last half century, Sarkozy is focusing on its strategic independence, particularly on its own nuclear capabilities. Yet, at the same time, France is aligning itself more closely with the American view of Iran and to some extent, the rest of the Middle East. In so doing, France is also creating stresses within the European Union and reshaping its relationship to Germany. There are small changes underway with broad implications that need to be understood.

Since 1871 France has had two foreign policies. 1871 was the date of German unification. Prior to 1871, the fragmentation of German into numerous mini-states secured France’s eastern frontier. France concerned itself with the rest of Atlantic Europe—Spain and England particularly. German re-unification redefined French geopolitics by creating a major power to its east—one which was insecure because of being caught between France, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Germany’s insecurity made it a threat to France. A reunited Germany had to deal with the causes of that insecurity, and France was one of those causes. German unification effectively coincided with the defeat of France by Prussia, and drove home the significance of a unified Germany.

From German unification and the Franco-Prussian war until 1945, the essence of French foreign policy was managing Germany. That meant that France had to change its relationship with its historical rival. Great Britain and keep Russia aligned with the Anglo-French alliance. For over eighty years, French foreign policy could be boiled down to containing Germany. It was a successful strategy, assuming that you accept the losses of World War I, and five years of occupation in World War II. But in the end, France survived.

This set in place France’s next strategy, which evolved over the 1950s until institutionalized by Charles de Gaulle. It consisted of two parts. The first was embedding France into multinational institutions, particularly the European Economic Community (that evolved into the European Union) and NATO. The second was to use these institutions to preserve French sovereignty and independence. Or put differently, France’s strategy was to take advantage of multinational structures while using them for their own ends, or defining a limited relationship.

For France, the overriding concern was not to be caught in World War III, having been devastated by the first two wars. One part of this strategy was to take advantage of the partition of Germany—its disunification in effect, to end France’s primordial fear of Germany. It did this in two ways. The first was drawing close to West Germany economically, creating a system of relationships that would make conflict with Germany impossible. The second was block the Soviet threat by participating in NATO.

France’s problem was that the deeper that it went into European institutions and NATO, the more tenuous its sovereignty was. It needed the economic and military relationship with Germany, but had to retain its room for maneuver. More precisely, it wanted to draw closer to Germany, take advantage of a collective security scheme, but not become a client state of the United States. It therefore was part of NATO but never fully integrated into its military structure. That military structure made certain responses to a Soviet invasion automatic. France refused to allow its response to be automatic, while remaining committed to a collective defense.

France was concerned with maximizing its autonomy, but it had a deeper fear as well. It had experienced occupation in World War II. The defense of Western Europe was predicated on U.S. intervention in the event of a Soviet Union. The doctrine of massive response held that in the event of an invasion which could not be contained conventionally, the United States would use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. In other words, the U.S. position was that it would initiate a nuclear war that would potentially decimate American cities, in order to protect Europe.

The French problem was that they would not know whether the United States would honor this commitment until after the initiation of hostilities. From the French point of view, it would not be rational for the Americans to invite devastation of its homeland in order to protect Europe. Therefore, the American commitment was at best untestable and at worst, an implausible and transparent attempt to place Europe at risk to deter a Soviet attack, without the United States risking anything fundamental.

The need to protect French sovereignty intersected with what it saw as a genuine requirement to maintain a military capability outside the framework of NATO—while remaining in NATO and in the EEC. It wanted NATO to function. It wanted to be close to Germany. It wanted a set of options outside the context of NATO that would guarantee that France would not be re-occupied, this time by the Soviets.

The decision to construct an independent French nuclear deterrent was based on this reasoning. As De Gaulle put it, France wanted to retain the ability to tear off an arm if the Soviets attacked France through Germany. It was not sure that the U.S. would act to deter the Soviets, but even a small nuclear force that was very likely to be used would deter them, if it was in the hands of a power that was likely to suffer occupation. Therefore, the French developed and retain the nuclear force that Sarkozy decided to cut, but not eliminate.

This issue was at the hear to U.S.-French tensions during the Cold War and after. The American view was that all of Western Europe and the United States (plus some Mediterranean countries) had a vested interest in resisting the Soviets and could do so most effectively by joining in multilateral economic and military organizations, so that they could operate in concert. The Americans viewed the French reluctance to do so as getting a free ride. From the American point of view, the U.S. bore the brunt of the cost of defending Europe, as well as in the early years underwriting Europe’s economic recovery. France benefited from both, and would benefit as long as the United States defended Germany. It wanted the benefits of the American presence without committing itself to burden sharing. Or, put another way, how could the Americans be certain that in the event of war, France would protect Germany, Italy or Turkey? Perhaps it would stay out of the war unless France was attacked.

The French mistrust of the credibility of American commitment to Europe collided with American mistrust of French reasons for being part of NATO, without committing itself to automatically collaborate in NATO’s response to the Soviets. France was comfortable with this ambiguity. It needed it. It needed to integrate economically with the Germans, to be part of NATO, but to retain its own options for national defense. If the price of this was to increase American distrust, and even a sense of betrayal, that was something France would have to tolerate to achieve its strategic goals.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, France entered a new strategic phase. The French response to the collapse of the Soviets and the re-unification of Germany was to maintain its core policy and extending it. It remained ambiguously part of NATO, participating as it saw fit. What it really concentrated on was the transformation of the European Union into a multi-national federation, with its own integrated foreign policy and defense policy.

There appears to be a paradox in this position. On the one hand France wanted to maintain its national sovereignty and freedom of action. At the same time, it wanted to be a counter-balance to the United States and draw ever closer to Germany, to permanently eliminate the historic danger, however distant it might appear to be under current circumstances. France could not resist the United States alone. It could do so only in the context of a European federation, which would, of course, include the critical relationship with Germany.

France therefore had to make a choice between a wholly independent foreign policy and federation with Europe. It tried to have its cake and eat it too. It supported the principle of federation, and within this federation it sought a particularly close relationship with Germany. But its view of this new federation was that while France would abandon a degree of sovereignty in a formal sense, in practical terms, so long as France could be the senior partner to Germany, the French would dominate a European federation. In effect, federation would open the door to a Europe directed, if not dominated, by Paris.

This is why the Eastern European countries revolted against French President Jacques Chirac on the even of the American invasion of Iraq. They were not particularly enthusiastic about the war, but they were far less enthusiastic about what Chirac was doing. From their point of view, he was using the Iraq issue to create a European bloc, led by France, in opposition to the United States. For a country like Poland, who had depended on French (and English) guarantees prior to World War II, the idea that France should lead a Europe in opposition to the United States was unacceptable. Chirac gave a famous press conference where he condemned the Eastern European rejection of French opposition to the invasion as representing nations that were “not well bought up.” This was the moment where French frustration welled over.

France was not going to get the federation it hoped for. Too many countries of Europe wanted to retain their freedom of action, this time from France. They were not opposed to economic union, but the creation of a federation with a joint foreign and defense policy was not enthusiastically greeted by smaller European nations (including not so small nations like Britain, Spain and Italy). As anti-federation grew, it swept forward to include France as well, which rejected the European constitution in a plebiscite.

This moment was the existential crisis that created the Sarkozy presidency. Sarkozy has raised two questions that have been fundamental to France. The first is France’s relationship to Germany. France has been obsessed with Germany since 1871, at first hostile, later nearly married, but always obsessed. Second, what is France’s relationship to the United States? Chirac represented post-War Gaullism’s view in its most extreme form: convert European institutions into a French dominated multi-national force to balance American power. The attempt collapsed. So Sarkozy had to define the relationship a France might have with the United States if it could not counter-balance it.

The question of Germany and of the United States were addressed in the French idea of a Mediterranean Union. Since German reunification, France has obsessed about the north German plain. But France is also a Mediterranean power, with long term interests in North Africa and the Middle East, in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon and Syria. Where Germany is entirely a northern European power, France is not. Therefore Chirac propose that in addition to being a member of the European Union, it create a separate and distinct Mediterranean Europe, extending as far as Turkey and Israel and including the rest of the Mediterranean basin, but excluding non-Mediterranean powers like Germany and Britain.

France had no intention of withdrawing from the EU, but saw this as a supplemental relationship and argued that it would allow the EU to expand without including new members. The Germans saw this as the French attempting to become the a strategic pivot, leading both Unions and serving as the only member that was both a northern European and Mediterranean power. The Germans didn’t like it one bit. The French backed off, but the idea is not abandoned.

If the French are going to be a Mediterranean power, they must also be a Middle Eastern power, and if they are playing in the Middle East, they must define their relationship with the United States. Sarkozy has done that by drawing systematically closer to American views on Iran, as well as American views on Syria and Lebanon. In other words, to pursue this new course, they have drawn away from the Germans and closer to the United States.

This is all very early and the steps very small. But the French have slightly backed off from their German obsession and their fear of the United States. The collapse of European federation has set of a reconsideration of France’s global role, a reconsideration that will—if continued—radically redefine Frances core relationships. What the French are doing is what they have done for years—look for maximum freedom of action for France, without undue risk. They are consistent but the new application is different. It appears to be pulling away from Germany and seeking power in the Mediterranean. And that means working with the Americans.