Right or Left, pro-Trump or anti-Trump, everybody is a Gaullist now in the Anglosphere. Ross Douthat, the conservative voice at the New York Times, recently argued that “U.S. conservatives should fall in love with France.” A distinguished liberal essayist and editorialist, Timothy Garton Ash, using the French spelling waxed bombastic in the Guardian on March 15 about “Churchillo-Gaullisme.”

Mr. Douthat’s point is that France is poised to be America’s best partner in Europe under the “America First” dispensation, thanks to Charles de Gaulle’s heritage of “national independence.” Also, that France could accordingly be co-opted as a natural leader on the continent. 

The American Right, Mr. Douthat elaborates, “should encourage a special relationship between the two republics, support French primacy on the continent, treat Paris rather than Brussels as the European capital and the French military as the keystone of Europe’s security.” No less.

Starting from diametrically opposed premises, Mr. Garton Ash reaches a startling  conclusion: Thanks to Gaullism, France is uniquely equipped to resist both Mr. Trump, “a rogue US president,” and  the Russ strongman, Vladimir Putin. As such it can provide Europe with “a real strategic autonomy,” in cooperation with a “Churchillian” Britain. 

What strikes one immediately as bizarre about Mr. Douthat’s case is that he sees the current president of France, Emmanuel Macron, as the best available Trump-compatible Gaullist leader, much more so than “parties of the further right” (a euphemism for Marine Le Pen’s populist Right) with whom “American conservatives tend to sympathize.” 

Even more bizarre is the reason why he thinks so: “These parties are often more inclined to retreat into nationalist self-preservation than to embrace concerted European action.” Is not “nationalist self-preservation” and defiance of “concerted European action” the very essence of Gaullism as de Gaulle himself practiced it? Isn’t that  in what America Firsters would primarily be interested?

Mr. Garton Ash’s “Churchillo-Gaullism” proves equally shallow. The British author insists he has always been a Euro-Atlanticist; it is a previously inconceivable situation — America appearing to edge toward NATO’s fragmentation — that now makes him value after all the existence of an independent French military force outside the Atlantic Alliance, provided it merges with other European forces. In other terms, Gaullism is only useful today to achieve an anti-Gaullist objective. 

The real issue is whether Gaullism equipped France with the material and moral resources for strategic independence, as both Messrs. Douthat and Garton Ash contend. The answer, I am afraid, is no, by a 75 percent margin. 

On the yes side, one must admit that France still qualifies as a serious geopolitical and military power when compared to most European countries. Metropolitan France is the largest national territory in Europe, covering 212,000 square miles. Its overseas territories, which span 48,000 square miles across multiple oceans and are an integral part of France under international law, grant the country the world’s second-largest maritime domain (3.9 million square miles), just behind that of the United States.

France has a top-notch nuclear industry and nuclear weapons, a diversified and sophisticated armament industry, substantial space capabilities, combat-tested armed forces, and various bases or installations abroad. Only one other European country,  the UK (an erstwhile European Union country at that), falls in the same category. However, the outlook changes completely when France’s military potential is measured against that of the leading geopolitical military powers of the 21st century: the continent-states of America, Russia and China.

France is currently deploying 280 nuclear warheads: a far cry from America and Russia, with 1,700 warheads each, or even China, with 500 warheads. Unlike America, Russia, and China, who rely on a “triad” of delivery methods — intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers — France can resort to two methods only, via submarines and strategic bombers.

The French may have insisted for decades that even a small nuclear force like theirs can provide deterrence. The repeated ballistic attacks in 2024 of Iran, a non-nuclear country so far, against Israel, a nuclear country with 90 warheads at least and a delivery triad, cast doubt on that line of reasoning. Even more so, it is doubtful the French nuclear deterrent can work against nuclear superpowers like Russia today and, perhaps, China tomorrow.

Regarding the production of conventional weapons, France is currently turning out between 15 and 25 advanced Rafale aircraft yearly, against 240 similar aircrafts yearly in the United States and China respectively and 28 to 50 in Russia. Similar scales apply to most other types of weaponry. 

In terms of active military personnel, there is a huge discrepancy between the American, Russian, and Chinese figures — 1.3 million for the United States and Russia respectively, 2 million for China — and what France and Britain can currently afford to deploy: 200,000 personnel respectively.

Finally, America operates 750 military bases and installations abroad, against 145 for Britain, 58 for Russia and 6 for China. As for France, it operates a dozen bases and installations on foreign soil, and eight additional bases in its overseas territories. One may wonder whether it can actually ensure the defense of its over-extended maritime domain, especially in the Pacific, without American support.

Indeed, it can be argued that France has the qualitative elements required to ramp up its military power if needed. However, such a quantitative shift would hardly be feasible without a wider European framework, comparable in size to the defense markets of the United States, China, Russia, or even India.

How far would Europe be willing to help France in this respect? Conversely, is France really ready to relinquish its national independence, à la Mr. Garton Ash, to strengthen Europe’s supranational independence?

There were many discussions in the past about turning the French nuclear umbrella into something multinational. They never led to anything. On the one hand, the Europeans felt more secure under the much bigger American umbrella than under a French one (even a hardened one).

On the other hand, the logic of nuclear deterrence is that the decision to strike must be made on short notice by a single decision-maker. If France provides for all or most of the European nuclear forces, this decision-maker can only be the French president — and nobody in Europe seems to agree to that.

Likewise, most European nations have tended to buy conventional American weaponry or systems or co-produce them with America, rather than resort to the French “independent” production lines. The Rafale — a high-performance fighter — has secured only two buyers in Europe, while most of its exported production goes to the Arab world and South- or South-East Asia.

In any event, the main weakness of today’s Gaullomania is that the French nation whose independence de Gaulle sought to preserve at all costs no longer exists. Between the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and today, France’s population has grown from 50 million to nearly 67 million. However, the proportion of non-European and non-Judeo-Christian immigrants (first and second generation) has risen to nearly 20 percent from less than 1 percent, largely as the result of decades of combined Gaullist and leftwing pro-Arab and pro-Islamic policies. 

Based on current trends, by 2035, a third of the French population could be of Muslim immigrant origin. After long denouncing as “racist” any studies on these ongoing demographic shifts, the left and far left now openly celebrate the substitution for the traditional France of a “Creolized” and Islamized “New France.”

Short of the “nationalist” parties shunned by Mr. Douthat or the most conservative wing of the French classic right led by Bruno Retailleau, the present minister of the Interior, nobody in the political class appears ready to react effectively. As for the Catholic revival, it is still too timid to matter. The rebuilding of  Notre-Dame Cathedral at Paris after the 2019 fire owed more to cultural considerations than to a renewed surge of faith.

It would be preposterous to expect such a transformed country to be the strategic pillar of Europe — unless Europe as whole undergoes a similar transformation, a not unlikely development — or emerge as America’s privileged partner.