Paris runs the European hedge while the wars come closer

France spent the spring acting as Europe's first responder while trying not to look like Washington's deputy. The opening event was the war that began in late February, when American and Israeli strikes hit Iran's nuclear and missile programs and quickly drew in the wider region. Emmanuel Macron's line was that France could not approve of strikes carried out outside international law, that Iran still bore primary responsibility, and that the priority was diplomacy. Then he moved the navy. Within days the Charles de Gaulle and most of its strike group sailed for the eastern Mediterranean. Rafale fighters flew cover over French bases in the Gulf. Paris pledged a defensive escort mission for the Strait of Hormuz once the fighting cooled. Macron then flew to Cyprus after Iranian drones hit the island and warned that an attack there was an attack on all of Europe.

The doctrine caught up with the deployment. In a set-piece speech at a submarine base in early March, Macron announced the first quantitative increase in France's nuclear warhead count since 1992 and unveiled what he called forward deterrence. The new policy opens French nuclear exercises to a wider circle of European allies and offers them a place in the conversation about when the weapons might be used. The same day, he and Friedrich Merz signed a Franco-German declaration setting up a high-level nuclear steering group. The pitch to nervous European capitals was that French weapons can complement, but not replace, the American umbrella nobody trusts the way they used to. Berlin and Warsaw bought in.

Not everything went Paris's way. In late February Brussels moved to provisionally implement the long-stalled Mercosur trade deal, brushing past the objections Paris had spent months building. Macron called it a bad surprise and his farm minister vowed to keep fighting it in the courts and in the Parliament. A second front opened with Washington when Donald Trump again threatened to raise tariffs on European cars. Macron told European partners to be ready to fire what he called the trade bazooka, the bloc's anti-coercion instrument. The same theme ran through his Yerevan meeting with Mark Carney in early May, where the two governments coordinated on how to push back together.

The slower moves were the ones that paid out. France's request under the European Union's new defense loan instrument cleared in late March and got final Council sign-off in mid-April, unlocking roughly fifteen billion euros for procurement. Sébastien Lecornu's government, reappointed by Macron last October after two prime ministers fell on the budget, pushed the 2026 finance bill through using a constitutional override. The military spending boost it carries is what makes the rest of the foreign policy affordable.