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French President Macron is aiming a nuclear missile at Russia and probably only wants to hit his own right-wing populists – as Europe’s strong man.
Paris – “France now recognizes that its Russia policy has failed,” writes Sven Arnold. The political scientist cites the basis of the new French determination German Foundation for International and Security Affairs (SWP) a speech by French President Emmanuel Macron from May 2023. In view of the war in Ukraine, which had already lasted a year at the time, “he apologized for the previous misjudgments and ruled out a quick return to normality with Russia,” as Arnold writes. Macron may have thereby lit the fuse for the course of military developments – this is what the newspaper speculates Friday.
“One wonders about the political sanity of Europe’s top politicians and sees how frayed their nerves are right now,” writes the paper. In the meantime, Macron had openly philosophized, NATO-ground troops to Ukraine, whereupon Vladimir Putin mobilized his nuclear forces for a maneuver. Now France has also tested a nuclear cruise missile – a flashback to the Cold War of the 1980s: The arms spiral is slowly starting to pick up speed again. Or as Friday-Author Lutz Herden fears: “The madness is taking its course.”
Signal to the inside and outside: France’s missile test shortly after Russia’s nuclear maneuver
According to reports from various media outlets, Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu announced that France had “carried out its first test launch of a modernized nuclear-capable missile, the ASMPA-R. The missile was reportedly launched from a Rafale fighter jet. This came a day after Russia announced that it had begun nuclear exercises in its southern military district, which stretches from Russia to occupied Ukrainian territory,” according to the British Guardian writes. According to the media, the test itself and its announcement are a signal both internally and externally.
“One wonders about the political sanity of Europe’s top politicians and sees how frayed their nerves are right now”
According to Lecornu, the Rafale fired its missile without a warhead during a flight over national territory. The flight was intended to simulate a nuclear air attack and had been planned for a long time, as the Guardian According to the report, France plans to invest 13 percent of its military spending in nuclear armament and also purchase a new generation of missiles. ASAMP-R is already one of these projects, with the “R” standing for “renovated” and representing a further development of the Air-sol moyenne portée (ASMP; “medium-range air-to-surface missile”) introduced in the mid-1980s, according to the magazine Army Recognition reported.
The development was apparently initiated in 2016 and is intended to increase the range and the payload to a thermonuclear warhead with an explosive force of 300 kilotons. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War is said to have had an explosive force of 16 kilotons of TNT. “A lot is happening on the French side,” said Sven Arnold in a lecture at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation claims; he sees this in the person of President Emmanuel Macron Macron has developed from a brakeman to a driver in French foreign policy.
Ukraine war divides Europe: Partners doubt Macron’s pan-European goals
Long before the war in Ukraine and long after the illegal annexation of Crimea, France had sounded different, almost anti-European, as analyst Lydia Wachs has summed up: According to her, Paris’ Russia policy of recent years had fuelled “fundamental doubts” among the countries in the EU and NATO that were in principle allies that the country would “put national interests behind pan-European goals”.
At the latest by the time of the presidential election in the USA in November, Europeans will fear that a change of government will mean they will have to ensure their own security. France would then be the only nuclear power in continental Europe and the nuclear shield against the nuclear threat from Russia. Great Britain would be able to control nuclear deterrence from the sea. Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimates France’s nuclear warheads this year at 290, while Britain is said to have FAS have 225 warheads, the USA has a total of 5,044, and Russia has 5,580 warheads.
Dangerous rhetoric: Macron’s speeches became increasingly harsher over time
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) expects there to be around 150 additional US nuclear warheads under NATO command on European soil, i.e. in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey. Great Britain and France maintain their nuclear weapons primarily due to a national security need. Has Great Britain “defined its nuclear capabilities from the outset as part of the joint NATO deterrence”, as the taz writes, France decides autonomously on the use of weapons and also refuses to participate in the European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI) – precisely because both nuclear and conventional missiles are their own developments.
The president alone decides on the use of France’s nuclear weapons – currently Emmanuel Macron. Political scientist Sven Arnold recently traced the change in Macron’s rhetoric: “From ‘Russia must not be humiliated’ (June 2022) to ‘Russia must not win’ (February 2023) to ‘Russia’s defeat is essential’ (February 2024).” Arnold notes Macron’s call for a ‘strategic jolt’ in Europe for early 2024. There is evidently fear in France, and Macron is also lashing out at his neighbors.
The political scientist with a German-French background speaks of a “disruptive turning point” and observes that Paris and Berlin are slowly but surely drifting apart in terms of security policy. However, the neighboring nations seem to assess the situation in a similar way – similarly pessimistic. Only one in ten Europeans still believes that Ukraine can win against Russia; just under 20 percent of Germans and French now expect Vladimir Putin’s troops to win; this was the result of a survey of almost 20,000 people in twelve countries published in February by the Berlin-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR)France and Germany are slightly below average, with nine percent each expressing confidence in a Ukrainian victory. Both countries are slightly above the average of 31 percent in their approval ratings for even stronger support for Ukraine.
Turbo for the defense budget: France wants to invest five percent more in nuclear armament
Under these circumstances, Macron’s turbo boost for the nuclear defense budget may perhaps become more understandable; taz speaks of one eighth of the military budget that has so far flowed into the nuclear forces. daily News reports that 400 billion euros are to be invested in the entire military by 2030 – of which five percent more than before will be invested in nuclear armament.
Either way, experts expect French nuclear weapons to have little deterrent effect. Lydia Wachs explains the French doctrine by saying that Paris could inflict ‘unacceptable damage’ on an enemy state with a first or counterattack. France’s nuclear weapons are therefore not aimed at the nuclear forces of a potential opponent or perhaps approaching tank armies, but at its “political, economic and military nerve centers,” as the analyst of the SWP claimed.
In the current situation, however, Russia’s first nuclear strike against the Baltic states appears to be a tactical weapon, perhaps to deter NATO from intervening and to make a small profit from the Baltics. France would then perhaps only have a response with strategic weapons, as Lydia Wachs speculates: “This would mean that Paris would have to accept a Russian nuclear retaliatory strike against French territory,” she writes, and recommends: “Even in a world in which the United States no longer guarantees nuclear deterrence for Europe, it is unlikely that France’s allies would entrust their security to Paris without any ifs or buts.”
The daily News Macron is therefore rather assuming a rhetorical first strike in domestic politics – against the right-wing populist Rassemblement National (RN); the party of right-wing populist Marine Le Pen is more than ten percent ahead of Macron’s pro-European renaissance with 30 percent approval in polls ahead of the European elections in early June, as Euronews reported. Macron could also just play the strong man, the daily News: “Being perceived as a European leader on the Ukraine issue can’t do any harm.”
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