In this arms race that the European Union is involved in, I noticed, reading Euronews, that Germany and France together represented around 44% of the EU’s total defense spending in 2024. This proportion should remain the same or increase: the Germans, alone, already project defense budgets of 100 billion euros per year and the Gauls of 68 billion.
France and Germany fought three wars between 1870 and 1945. “European construction” was, to a large extent, an attempt to definitively tie these two countries together, making war between them unthinkable. But, if we look at the catalog of military purchases publicly announced by them, we read a lot of distrust.
France defines, in all its military programming laws, strategic autonomy as the central objective, not obedience to any common European strategy: the country wants to have its own nuclear deterrent capacity, it wants to have the capacity to intervene alone in Africa or the Middle East and, on top of that, it demands economic protection for its defense industry.
Germany has now launched a Turning point (a turnaround) to rearm and began by purchasing mainly “off-the-shelf” equipment: North American F-35s to guarantee NATO’s nuclear mission, Patriot batteries and the Israeli Arrow-3 anti-missile system, anchoring everything in its initiative called European Sky Shield, which brings together more than twenty countries around a basically Atlanticist air defense architecture.
Germany’s priority therefore does not seem to be autonomy, but rather to guarantee interoperability (and therefore technical dependence) with the USA and quickly show public opinion and allies that it is ready for war with Russia.
France, on the contrary, refuses the F-35 and insists on the “national” Rafale plane. The Macron regime is also investing, with Italy, in the SAMP/T anti-aircraft defense system as an alternative to the American and Israeli Patriot and Arrow-3. Furthermore, suspicious, she stayed out of Sky Shield because she considered it too dependent on North American and Israeli technology.
Theoretically, there are at least two joint military programs between France and Germany: the FCAS (with the Spanish) to manufacture a sixth generation fighter, and the MGCS, for an integrated family of land combat platforms to be created by 2040.
On paper, they are the embryo of a common military strategy; In practice, wars over quotas, intellectual property and protagonism between the companies Dassault (French) and Airbus (European consortium) and between Paris and Berlin are dragging on.
The two countries, like the rest of the EU, justify the huge increase in military spending with Europe’s global security, but the concrete design of military purchases clearly responds to different agendas: France wants to continue to be an autonomous military power, Germany wants to quickly become big in NATO and, therefore, reinforces technical dependence on the USA, which compromises the European Defense Industrial Strategy, launched last year by Von der Leyen.
Thus, the escalation of armaments in Europe also raises a parallel national rearmament, hidden in a European rhetoric that tries to deceive the traditional distrust and the prevailing competition between supposed “friendly nations”.
The France-Germany “axis” around which the European Union’s war on Russia moves is, obviously, quite fragile.
Journalist