President Emmanuel Macron has raised the nuclear card. He has offered to provide nuclear cover for Europe as fears intensify that President Trump is moving further away from Nato and from America’s historic obligations towards European allies.
The idea of France, the fourth largest nuclear weapons power in the world, extending its nuclear deterrence is not new. Macron is just one of many French presidents who have contemplated providing a European dimension to France’s force de frappe.
However, today the context is dramatically different. For the first time in Nato’s history, the US sided with Russia and not its European allies when the Trump administration refused to condemn Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine at the UN.
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