Soldiers cross the Wistula river with Abrams tanks as they take part in the NATO DRAGON-24 military exercise in Korzeniewo, northern Poland, on March 4. Poland is hosting armed forces of other countries for the national exercise DRAGON-24 that is part of the Steadfast Defender exercise, NATO's biggest military exercise since the Cold War.WOJTEK RADWANSKI/Getty Images
Western leaders have learned to brace themselves for the worst whenever Emmanuel Macron decides to weigh in publicly on geopolitics. The French President inevitably seems to get carried away and makes some provocative utterance that sends his allies into conniptions.
Remember when, in 2019, Mr. Macron bemoaned NATO’s “brain death” and called for European countries to take control of their collective security? His comments amounted to kicking the Western alliance when it was already down amid uncertainty about its future.
Who can forget Mr. Macron’s quixotic efforts to talk Russian President Vladimir Putin out of invading Ukraine? Western allies were not sure what exasperated them most about the French leader’s early 2022 trip to Moscow – his self-aggrandizing belief in his own abilities to persuade the Russian leader to stand down, or his end run around a common strategy to contain Mr. Putin.
A few months later, with the Ukraine conflict raging and NATO rediscovering its raison d’être, Mr. Macron lectured allies about the need to avoid “humiliating” Mr. Putin – as if to nudge Ukraine into negotiating a peace deal that would allow the Russian leader to save face by conceding some territory to him. It was important, he insisted, to prevent Russia’s isolation after the war.
Not even Mr. Macron seems to believe that is possible now. After more than two years of war, amid a Russian-led information war aimed at buttressing Mr. Macron’s Russia-friendly political opposition at home, the French President has become Western Europe’s most unapologetic Putin foe as he seeks to mobilize allies to ramp up military aid to Ukraine.
Mr. Macron last week upset NATO allies by saying Western countries must not rule out sending troops into Ukraine. At a meeting of European leaders in Paris, he warned against allowing Mr. Putin to think NATO allies would never risk the war’s escalation by putting Western boots on the ground in Ukraine. Rather, NATO should maintain “strategic ambiguity” about that possibility.
“Nothing should be excluded in the pursuit of our goal: Russia cannot and must not win this war,” he said. “Many people who say today: ‘Never, never,’ were the same people who said two years ago: ‘Never, never tanks, never planes, never long-range missiles.’ I remind you that two years ago, many around this table said: ‘We are going to offer sleeping bags and helmets.’ ”
Within minutes, President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, among several others, issued statements rejecting Mr. Macron’s comments in the strongest possible terms. After all, at the outset of the war, Mr. Biden had explicitly ruled out sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, warning that, “a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must prevent.”
The folly of Mr. Macron’s comments only seemed to have been confirmed a few days later when Mr. Putin himself fired back by threatening – once again – the use of nuclear weapons against “potential interventionists” in the Ukraine war. Countless commentators on both sides of the Atlantic accused the French President of needlessly sowing divisions within NATO.
Truth be told, the angry reactions from allies to Mr. Macron’s comments were mainly driven by domestic politics, as Western leaders confront Ukraine fatigue among voters at home. But most acknowledge privately that the possibility of a Western military presence in Ukraine is no longer a hypothetical question.
While Western troops could be deployed in a non-combat role to train Ukrainian soldiers or in de-mining, the use of increasingly sophisticated weaponry in Ukraine would require Western troops to participate directly in targeting exercises. Mr. Scholz himself recently revealed, possibly inadvertently, that French and British soldiers are already in Ukraine to aid in the targeting of missiles provided by their countries.
The German Chancellor has stalled on sending long-range missiles to Ukraine because doing so would also require sending troops. German air force officials made similar comments in a conversation that was intercepted by Russian sources.
For his part, Mr. Macron is not backing down from his comments. On Tuesday, in Prague, he doubled down on the need to keep Mr. Putin guessing about what NATO will do next and called on European allies “not to be cowards” at a critical juncture in the continent’s history.
“Is it our war or isn’t it?” he said in French in a clip of his comments that was subtitled in English and posted on X. “You should ask President Putin what he’s not prepared to do … If every day we explain our limits to someone who has none, and who started this war, I can already tell you that the spirit of defeat is lurking.”
Such talk makes France’s NATO allies nervous. But Mr. Macron may be doing them a favour by forcing them to face up to the inevitable before it is too late.