President Emmanuel Macron said he’ll enter into talks to use France’s nuclear capabilities to defend European allies, in the latest push by a European country to establish strategic security as the US reduces its footprint on the continent.
“Our nuclear deterrent protects us,” Macron said in a televised address Wednesday. “I have decided to open the strategic debate on the protection, through our deterrent, of our allies on the European continent.”
The French president’s remarks came ahead of an emergency meeting of EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday for talks on Ukraine and the continent’s wider security. Macron said his decision follows a request from the German chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz.
The EU and its member states are rushing to mobilize trillions of euros in additional defense funds to counter the threat of Russian aggression and to compensate for President Donald Trump’s dramatic pullback from America’s commitment to European security. The US nuclear security umbrella has been a core deterrence policy for Europe.
Macron has been pushing for France’s nuclear weapons capacity to be considered as a regional deterrent for months. In an interview with local media last year, he said France’s nuclear deterrent capability “can be used when our vital interests are threatened,” adding that “there is a European dimension to these vital interests.”
France is estimated to have the fourth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, according to a report by the Federation of American Scientists, with 290 warheads in its inventory. Russia, the US and China have the three largest inventories.
Germany announced this week that it will unleash hundreds of billions of euros for defense and infrastructure investments in a dramatic shift that rips up its ironclad controls on government borrowing. Germany has also called for the EU to reform its fiscal rules to allow countries to make bigger defense expenditures.
Berlin’s shifts throw down a challenge to the EU’s other 26 members before they gather on Thursday to discuss how to ramp up military spending across the bloc.
Thursday’s EU summit is expected to endorse the activation of a mechanism that would allow for additional defense spending over the next four years. The EU separately announced a plan Tuesday that could mobilize as much as €800 billion ($863 billion) in additional national spending, including €150 billion of EU loans to member states for defense investment.
Macron also called for France to immediately boost its defense spending to help step up Europe’s preparedness to be able to respond to the threat of Russian aggression.
“I’ve asked the government to get to work on it as quickly as possible,” the French president said. “This will require reforms, choices and courage.”
Macron said that the new investments will include both public and private financing and shouldn’t be done through tax increases.
Watch the speech:
