French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to Germany for a state visit with Chancellor Olaf Scholz earlier this week where, among other things, he made the case for why Ukraine should be allowed to use Western weapons to strike into Russian territory. In addition to this escalatory announcement and his even more insane proposal to send French troops into Ukraine, Macron made another provocative move by flouting France’s nuclear weapons.
In response to a question about France’s approving of Ukraine’s request to strike Russian territory, Macron began by mentioning the “very different” situation France is in “because we have nuclear weapons that enable us to deter.” “We must take these differences into account,” he said. Coming back to the question of Ukraine striking Russian positions outside of Ukraine, he again referenced the nuclear deterrent, and asked: “How can they be integrated into the European approach? There is the deterrent force of Great Britain and France. There are different capabilities in different European countries.”
Surely it will not be missed by the Russians that Macron is using the nuclear potential of France as a de facto threat to back up Ukraine’s ability to escalate its attacks against Russia. Does anyone still believe this isn’t NATO’s war against Russia?
This kind of recklessness was described by Daniel Ellsberg in his book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner: “Contrary to the cliché that ‘no nuclear weapons have been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ U.S. presidents have used our nuclear weapons dozens of times in ‘crises,’ mostly in secret from the American public (though not from adversaries). They have used them in the precise way that a gun is used when it is pointed at someone in a confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled. To get one’s way without pulling the trigger is a major purpose for owning the gun.”
