This is the Way: Macron’s Embrace of Strategic Ambiguity
French President Emmanuel Macron, with his unfailing ability to generate controversy every time he speaks, in the past few weeks has been causing a commotion on both sides of the Atlantic by hinting that French troops are or soon will be deployed to Ukraine. Macron’s words, as is often the case, were in many instances misconstrued, with many reports claiming falsely that he in fact planned to send French combat troops to Ukraine. The confusion might have been intended. Regardless, a measure of the impact of Macron’s words is the panic it caused in Germany: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz thought it necessary to go out of his way to assert that NATO troops were not going to be deployed to Ukraine. Almost with the same breath, Scholz reiterated his refusal to allow the transfer of German Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.
What is Macron playing at?
Macron, as many French commentators have noted, has embraced the venerable concept of strategic uncertainty. The purpose is to deter an adversary by complicating its risk assessment. If Russia knows for sure if French or other NATO troops are or will be deployed, it can calculate accordingly. Russia can make its next move knowing where NATO’s chess pieces are or how they will be moved next. But if Russia does not know, calculations become more difficult.
The idea of incertitude is at the core of French thinking on deterrence. One of the architects of French deterrence theory, General André Beaufre, writing in the 1960s put the matter succinctly. Of all the things a country like France—which lacks America’s giant arsenal—can do to deter an adversary, there only was “one single factor of certain value: incertitude.” Incertitude was “the essential factor of deterrence.”
Beaufre, of course, was writing about nuclear deterrence, not the question of whether to deploy ground forces in a conflict on Europe’s periphery, but the principle holds. Besides, France is a nuclear power, meaning that deploying French troops anywhere is not unrelated to nuclear policy. It would be tantamount to a step on the escalatory ladder that ends with nuclear war.
Macron’s gambit contrasts with the far more problematic practice of issuing “red lines.” Red lines usually are clearly stated conditionalities: If an adversary does X, we will do Y. Such an approach makes it easier for the adversary to calculate risk. It can easily figure out how to act in ways that come close to X without necessarily triggering an unwanted action. That places the burden on the power that issues the red line. It must decide if the adversary’s actions are close enough to X. It also must decide how serious it really is about the threat. President Barack Obama infamously issued a red line threat to Syria against its use of chemical weapons. Then, when it became clear that Syria had disregarded the threat, Obama prevaricated, doing harm to American credibility, and signaling to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad that he need not fear American intervention. Macron’s approach leaves options open and does not oblige him to do anything; he has not put France’s credibility at risk.
The next step of course might be to go ahead and deploy French troops. They may very well already be there, albeit in small numbers, and possibly limited to Special Forces or specialists such as de-miners, or trainers. Their presence necessarily will complicate life for Russia, which might not know where they are, and won’t know what might happen if Russian attacks hurt them. Macron, if he sticks to his approach, will abstain from giving any clues as to how he might react. The uncertainty is the point. If it works, Macron’s gambit will limit, even if moderately, Russia’s liberty of action. That, in strategic terms, would be a win for France, and for Ukraine.
Will Macron deploy troops? Probably not. But what makes Macron’s policy all the more potent is that he could, easily. France reportedly has been deploying a large armed force—the equivalent of a full brigade equipped with dozens of Leclerc tanks—to Romania to participate in exercises. A French armored brigade is no joke: It probably is the most lethal force of its size Western Europeans can muster and probably could cut the Russian army to pieces (until it ran out of ammunition, which might happen quickly, but that’s another matter). Of course, its engagement would significantly raise the stakes of the Ukraine war. It would mean jumping more than a few rungs up the escalatory ladder. Again, the point is not that Macron will do this—I think it a safe bet that he won’t—but he could. As he keeps saying and will keep saying, nothing has been ruled out.
Isn’t Macron Dragging the Rest of us into Danger?
Yes, sort of. But this, too, has a strategic sense from the French point of view. Again, we return to Beaufre: A smaller nuclear power allied to a much larger one invariably will have interests it regards as vital that the larger one only sees as marginal or at best secondary. The risk then is that the smaller ally might see its interests disregarded. What it can do, in effect, is blackmail the larger power into caring about the smaller ally’s interests. Beaufre of course bristled at the suggestion of blackmail, insisting that this was the wrong way to look at things. The truth, Beaufre wrote, is that in international relations “each seeks to promote its interests with the means at its disposal.” In other words, all’s fair in love and war.
For Beaufre, this logic helped justify France’s choice to develop nuclear weapons, as it wanted to hedge against the possibility that the United States might prevaricate when it came to wielding its nuclear umbrella to protect French national interests. The idea is to force the United States to care. In the current context, France is both hedging against the threat of American disinterest (Europeans are very much aware of Trump’s comments about NATO and his fondness for Putin) and working to oblige another ally, Germany, to back France’s interpretation of French and therefore European interests. This goes a long way to explain Scholz’s reaction: He does not want to play along. The reality, however, is that he might not have a choice.
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This is Beaufre’s classic, in French. https://amzn.to/3vgFjZg