by Rym Momtaz
France is leaning into its status as a great middle power. Just don’t say that to French officials.
Lost imperial glory and the strong sense of grandeur instilled by former president Charles de Gaulle still prevent most French officials from openly embracing this status. But the foreign and defense policies Paris has pursued over the past few years tell another story.
The shift has been subtle in that it hasn’t been announced in the typical manner of French President Emmanuel Macron: a landmark long speech and punchline to match. Rather, it has been built through a series of actions since 2023 that, taken together, amount to a profound shift in the country’s positioning on the world stage. But while it has been a savvy change, it cannot succeed if France doesn’t whip its fiscal situation into shape.
The transformation has undoubtedly been driven by the need to find a way of preserving the country’s place in the world and margins of maneuver. These have been severely curtailed by Russia’s revanchism and U.S. President Donald Trump tearing up the rules-based international order, all despite Paris having the third biggest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Regardless of Macron’s talk of a third way, France has implicitly recognized its dwindling ability to impose its will on others or shape its strategic environment on its own. As such, it has softened its obsession with constantly leading and instead now seeks coalition-building and partnership, focusing on what it can do. Just as middle powers must.
Paris has thus worked, at its scale, on being a force of stability, predictability, and reassurance to its European partners, the countries of the BRICS trading bloc, and others. As the United States has abandoned multilateral fora, France has tried—though not always effectively—to build new linkages on specific global issues such as biodiversity, tech regulation, and debt relief with other middle powers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
And in a major reversal, France has tried to position itself—thanks to its nuclear deterrent—as a force multiplier for Europe, instead of using Europe to magnify its own reach. This change has been most visible through its role in the coalition of the willing for Ukraine. Despite their public protests, French officials know their stocks and finances haven’t allowed them to provide as much weaponry, as a percentage of GDP, to Ukraine as others. But Macron has used his political chutzpah, as well as France’s military experience and nuclear deterrent, to supercharge the important material support others have provided and try to give the European hand a more strategic dimension. Although it isn’t a success yet, it marks notable and useful progress.
Macron has put in practice what former president Valery Giscard d’Estaing laid out as the path forward as early as 1975. At the time, he drew the ire of his compatriots, but was actually the first to state the obvious: France was a second-tier power, behind the United States and Soviet Union.
He affirmed that France’s defense objective must be to be the head of a group of powers—like the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany—that follow the superpowers, and to remain anchored in its own nuclear capabilities. France’s influence, he identified, was based in its autonomy and military power. A sort of great middle power.
Macron denounced this idea in a 2020 interview saying “the day it was said to France that it was a middle power … it wasn’t true, and the French could not conceive of themselves that way.” But in practice, Giscard d’Estaing’s words remarkably foretold the playbook the current president is now using.
Though less bullish than claiming equal status with the United States, positioning France as the great middle power might just be the best strategy to remain an essential player in international relations.
Whatever emerges from the ashes of the U.S.-mediated rules-based international order, it looks unlikely to be one unitary order. This will give outsized leverage to middle powers. They will no longer need to hitch themselves fully to one hegemon, as they had to after the Second World War. Instead, through diversification, mitigation, and hedging, middle power support could become what the United States and China will have to jockey for.
This isn’t without its complications. In such a world, the temptation for middle powers to compete against each other instead of cooperating risks being strong. While some competition is inevitable or even desirable, in areas like defense, intra-European cooperation should prevail.
The saga of the Future Combat Air System between France and Germany shows that both of these middle powers still have a lot to learn in this regard. Germany continues to be torn between wanting to preserve whatever crumbs of its defense relationship with the United States are left, and a still-theoretical understanding that it must use its economic might to supercharge European defense. France, meanwhile, is wary that Berlin’s increasing assertiveness in strategic and defense matters is happening at Paris’s expense. As a result, it is currently more willing to consider transferring weapons technology to countries like India and the United Arab Emirates, with whom it has special strategic partnerships.
A strategic culture built independently from that of the United States combines with France’s nuclear autonomy to provide the country formidable capacity to be a decisive great middle power. But Paris also has serious financial worries, and the far right has never been closer to winning a presidential election. These are fatal threats to the new role Macron is attempting to secure on the world stage for France and Europe. These twin shadows hang over the offer of nuclear protection that Macron will doubtless make when he updates France’s nuclear doctrine. Unless he finds a way to turn these factors around in the fifteen months he has left in office, a historic opportunity for European strategic affirmation risks being squandered.
*Published first on Carnegie - Strategic Europe
By: N. Peter Kramer