That irritating feeling that France was right

Europe | Charlemagne
Donald Trump’s America makes Gaullism respectable again
Feb 18th 2026

European leaders who gathered at the Munich Security Conference last weekend found some solace in the less caustic note struck by America. Whereas last year J.D. Vance, its vice-president, had wounded and dismayed, this year Marco Rubio, its secretary of state, was a more gracious critic. But a critic he was, and the Europeans left with the sense that, in Trumpworld, they are on their own. This is disconcerting enough. But while Donald Trump’s capriciousness inspires deep anxiety among Europeans, they are also troubled by another uncomfortable idea: a scratchy sense that perhaps France was right after all.

No other European country has been so consistently sceptical about the dependability of its transatlantic ally nor displayed such a pesky determination to go it alone. Shortly after Charles de Gaulle became France’s leader in 1958 he warned Konrad Adenauer, then German chancellor, that the Americans were “not reliable, not very solid and understand nothing about history or Europe”. Musing about the shifting balance of world power, le général told an adviser: “Any day the most extraordinary events could happen…America could…become a threat to peace.” By 1966 de Gaulle had built a bomb, pulled out of NATO’s integrated military command and booted American soldiers off French soil.

Emmanuel Macron misses no occasion to channel his inner de Gaulle. For nearly a decade the president has badgered European leaders with his call for “strategic autonomy”. They have responded with eye-rolling or indifference. When Mr Macron told The Economist in 2019 that NATO was experiencing “brain death”, his friends accused him of an attempt to shatter the transatlantic alliance. Last week he declared that Europe faces an “openly hostile” America that wants nothing less than its “dismemberment”, and that the moment is “a profound geopolitical rupture”.

In more Atlantic-leaning European capitals, the prospect of standing alone without America has prompted distress. In Paris—which maintains a fully independent nuclear deterrent, sends its own satellites into space, supplies itself with nuclear energy and builds its own fighter jets—it feels like vindication. Yet if France has had a point all along about greater European strategic independence, why did it not happen? The answers might loosely be grouped into three: France was right, but too soon; it was right, but not credible; and it was right, but got on everyone’s nerves.

If France made the call too early for its friends, it was because they correctly viewed the post-war Pax Americana not as a risk or an indignity, but as the guarantee that bound the West together. De Gaulle concluded, particularly after the Suez crisis in 1956, that America could not be fully trusted. Britain, France’s ally during Suez, drew the opposite conclusion: judging it could not act without the Americans’ backing, it hugged them closer still. Distrust of America pushed France to diversify its alliances long before Mark Carney made it fashionable. But Britain saw America as an extension of itself, while Germany was unable to assert its own power after the war. They and other Europeans were most at ease snuggling under the American wing, and treated France’s bid for independence as not only misguided but dangerous: a move that could hasten American disengagement.

Had France fully followed its own logic, it might have pre-empted some scepticism. Yet for decades France (like others in Europe) pursued social policies that weakened its ability to build up strategic muscle. Even today it spends over six times more on pensions each year than on defence—and borrows heavily to do so. How is it possible, critics ask, to assert strategic autonomy if you depend on the bond markets to pay your pensioners? Moreover, France’s “Buy European” strategy has long been regarded by its American-equipped friends as a sales pitch for French kit. When France calls for more joint borrowing to rearm Europe, its friends hear: get somebody else to pay. When France urges more spending on European defence, its friends hear: more contracts for French makers of fighter jets, missiles and engines.

And then there is—how to put it?—the tone. France considers itself a serious ally in Europe and NATO, and does not understand why its ideas meet such resistance. Others find the haughty manner in which it tries to impose them insupportable. De Gaulle left his European chair in Brussels empty for six months, boycotting meetings in order to get his way in a spat over decision-making rules. Central and eastern Europeans have not forgotten how Jacques Chirac, then president, told them that in backing America’s war in Iraq they had “missed a good opportunity to shut up”. When Mr Macron donned aviator shades for a speech in Davos, to mask a bloody eye, it was vintage France: defiant, chic, perhaps ridiculous, indisputably show-stopping. Some loved it. Some didn’t.

 Sometimes it’s too slow 

France has made its share of mistakes, for sure. De Gaulle’s grandstanding towards America was in part an attempt to preserve the country’s great-power status despite its often brutal mishandling of the retreat from empire. Its pretensions to post-imperial influence can go awry, as in the Sahel, where Russia has exploited resentment of France. France happily backs strengthening Europe when it suits, and breezily opposes it (on the Mercosur trade deal, for example) when it does not.

Prickly, proud, exasperating, it is so often the country that maddens others. France, wrote the general, “cannot be France without grandeur”. As European leaders grapple with the implications of the transatlantic rift, a few still hope this is a passing moment. Others are daunted by the costs of going it alone. Mocked, dismissed, disparaged, France has long thought differently about the world, and seldom been afraid to say so. Do not expect fellow Europeans to give it credit, even when they agree. ■