President Emmanuel Macron has raised the nuclear card. He has offered to provide nuclear cover for Europe as fears intensify that President Trump is moving further away from Nato and from America’s historic obligations towards European allies.
The idea of France, the fourth largest nuclear weapons power in the world, extending its nuclear deterrence is not new. Macron is just one of many French presidents who have contemplated providing a European dimension to France’s force de frappe.
However, today the context is dramatically different. For the first time in Nato’s history, the US sided with Russia and not its European allies when the Trump administration refused to condemn Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine at the UN.
Trump wants to focus America’s war-planning efforts on China and, as a consequence, the rest of Nato is fearful that the US will leave the defence of Europe to the Europeans – and that could mean a less reliable American nuclear umbrella.
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