The Financial Times has a piece reporting that France wants Germany to think deliberately about the escalation risks associated with Germany’s acquisition of “deep precision strike” capabilities targeting Russia. The German Ministry of Defence recently commented that:
We are developing Deep Precision Strike capabilities jointly with Great Britain and are exploring the possibility of including France.
According to a British official:
The main aim was to degrade the enemy’s “warfighting potential” by hitting sites such as command-and-control centres, logistics hubs, ammunition depots or weapons factories, but not government buildings or nuclear facilities.
“Deep precision strike” in this case refers to intermediate-range (500-2,000km), ground-launched missiles. France is not against the acquisition, but wants it aligned with its own nuclear doctrine, recognizing that “If the Russians don’t get the signal right you could get to the nuclear threshold without realising.”
This is all third-wave deterrence theory stuff. Deterrence is difficult. Signaling is difficult. In the rare instances when deterrence succeeds, it’s usually because of political factors outside of armaments and threat-making. As Alexander George and Richard Smoke concluded decades ago, the best thing you can get from deterrence is time. “Success” is using that time bought to ameliorate the conditions that gave rise to calls for deterrence in the first place.
But does anyone in Europe know this? Which voices from the world of nukes and strategy are European elites listening to? Who has been trained with sufficient humility about the risks versus benefits of what European elites probably think of as a splendid military venture? Is anyone thinking about the political consequences that result from a rearmament drive?
It all has me concerned that European elites are not realistic about power. In one respect, they romanticize American power and somehow delude themselves into mistakenly thinking it’s for their security when it’s obviously a threat to their very existence. In another respect, they perpetually discount Russian power while also assuming the worst about Russian intentions, yet also believing that the Russian monster will be cowed by their non-nuclear weapons. It all betrays pathological thinking on matters of power. The perils of liberal ideology amid a crisis of capitalism.
The march to remilitarization across Europe has everything to do with elites vibing on nationalist sentiments and exploiting Ukraine’s plight to paper over swelling domestic legitimacy problems associated with moribund economies and once solid welfare states turning to papier-mâché. Outside of Baltic nations in Russia’s shadow, no serious security analysis justifies a European bid to remilitarize at the expense of its publics.
France, as a nuclear power, is right to urge caution about conditions for use associated with the escalatory potential of a new weapons acquisition by one of its neighbors. There is at least a notion of responsibility in France’s calculations. As one French official said:
France had developed a “nuclear grammar and vocabulary”, describing this as the “unspoken” rules of engagement. “There are habits we developed over time. The Germans do not have it.”
But France too is trapped in a loser’s mindset.
France is in the process of stretching its nuclear retaliatory capability to extend across other parts of Europe—a commitment called “extended deterrence” that has been the source of much trouble for the US, including several nuclear crises and a permanent failure of credibility because of the irrational nature of the commitment to embrace nuclear war on behalf of anything other than direct self-defense. France is calling its future folly “forward deterrence,” a concept meant to justify its lack of imagination, its absence of critical thought.
European elites need to recover the doctrine of non-offensive defense, as part of a re-embrace of a common security approach. The alternative is the current path, which invokes the language of rearmament and deterrence to cloak the reality of nationalist militarisms substituting for American militarism (which itself has not even receded but instead gotten worse). It’s as if European elites learned nothing from World War One.
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“It all betrays pathological thinking on matters of power. The perils of liberal ideology amid a crisis of capitalism.
The march to remilitarization across Europe has everything to do with elites vibing on nationalist sentiments and exploiting Ukraine’s plight to paper over swelling domestic legitimacy problems associated with moribund economies and once solid welfare states turning to papier-mâché.” -- yep.🎯
I think Munich 2025 was the moment I realized just how absurd and disappointing things are gonna get.
Opening myself to accusasions of being unserious, but I would say that Western European analyst can rightly see stronger needs than impleid by "Outside of Baltic nations in Russia’s shadow, no serious security analysis justifies a European bid to remilitarize at the expense of its publics."
So obvious point, but applying here, the European Union, seperate from NATO obligations, has a mutual defence clause under the Lisbon treaty.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/mutual-defence-clause.html
At the expense of its publics is doing a lot of the work here and being smart about it, rationalizing spending across borders, and keeping a range of important competing national objectives in mind is all essential. European nations are facing real budgetary stresses, made worse by the challenges of attempting to rapidly reduce reliance on the U.S.
You might be right about this specific project, not my area of expertise. However, a larger tradeoff raised in the non-offensive defense piece you linked is that "Under current tensions, the priority should be to set aside nationalisms, pool resources, and form a truly integrated European army, working within EU institutions, ideally “borrowing” NATO’s existing infrastructure."
France and Germany talking over these issues is worthwhile and Europe should seek to figure out these problems collectively. But extended deterrence is an example of France working towards integration. As you highlight, deterrance is hard and best used to buy time to ameliorate underlying conditions. But military integration, industrial integration, and non-offensive defense are all challenging as well.
Small countries have not regularly been victimized by larger neighboring polities largely because of dumb or provactive behavior on the part of those small countries but because this is hard and peopel are going to argue and disagree in good faith.
For example, turning to the closing of the piece by Lutz Unterseher that you published:
"What about responding to nuclear threats? Since the American deterrent is not guaranteed to be available to Europe, attention turns to France. Its nuclear “minimum deterrent” is sufficient for stability—serving as an ultimate insurance policy, not as a provocative means of nuclear warfighting. Paris has already signaled that it might be willing to “Europeanize” its strategic capability. That is good enough for our period of transition."
It's perfectly reasonable to disagree about that and Unterseher was arguing against remilitarization writ large. But relying on nuclear deterrance as a way to avoid conventional miltiary spending is a trade off that goes back to Eisenhower so if extended deterrance is a bad idea then it's not surprising that non-nuclear European powers would turn more to new conventional programs.