Opinion | Why U.S. Conservatives Should Fall in Love With France

There is a certain tension in the way that American conservatism looks at Europe. On the one hand, Donald Trump and his allies insist that European countries need to step up, behave like serious world powers, and take on much more military responsibility.

On the other hand, many American right-wingers display contempt for a continent they regard as impotent, decadent and basically doomed. And they have a special contempt for the current structure through which Europeans act in concert, the bureaucratized pseudo-confederacy (see, I’m expressing contempt myself) of the European Union.

As a consequence, American conservatives tend to sympathize with European parties of the further right, because they’re ranged against the Eurocrat consensus. But these parties are often more inclined to retreat into nationalist self-preservation than to embrace concerted European action. So Europeans who recall that America has often been complicit in Europe’s strategic emasculation (starting with Franklin Roosevelt’s “friendly” push to take over from the British Empire) might reasonably suspect that when figures like Elon Musk boost parties like the Alternative for Germany, they are tacitly encouraging Europe to turn ever-more-inward and leave the global field to the U.S.A.

That means that for American conservatives who sincerely want a capable Europe, just supporting European populism is not enough. Instead, the American right should consciously support a stronger France. It 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.

In effect, we should revisit Charles de Gaulle’s bid to maintain more French independence within the Western alliance, which made him a thorn in the American side during the Cold War, and recognize that he was right. It was not actually in America’s long-term interests to make Europe our full dependent, because vassaldom encourages weakness, and weakness reduces the value of the alliance in a world that America can no longer simply bestride alone.

Of course it may be too late for a European escape from decadence: The goal of transitioning from a “welfare state” to a “warfare state,” as the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh put it, may be doomed by the expectations of an aging electorate.

But the only way for Europe to make this transition is for its great nations to reassert themselves — and the only great nation capable of that assertion right now is France. The French military is limited but still “indisputably the most capable in Western Europe,” as Michael Shurkin noted in a 2023 analysis for War on the Rocks, with a resilient capacity for expeditionary action. Its nuclear-energy strategy has granted it a degree of energy independence that contrasts sharply with the reckless folly of German “green” de-industralization. Its pro-natal policies have given it a sustained demographic advantage; it is aging, but its fertility isn’t collapsing in the style of Italy, Spain or now Poland.

Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany, and the junior-partner complex that has made Britain an unsuccessful adjunct of recent American foreign policy mistakes. It embodies two distinct forms of universalism, Roman Catholic and republican, that have more historical appeal across Europe than the Anglo-American style of empire. And the rapid renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris joined to the recent “gentle revival” of Catholic practice amid secularized conditions suggests stronger possibilities for spiritual renewal as well.

This last point is crucial for American conservatives. The current European establishment, secular and socially liberal even in its “conservative” forms, often feels like a natural ally not of the United States in full but of American progressivism alone. So the American right should wish to see a more substantial European conservatism re-emerge — more ambitious than today’s populist factions, and capable, as the right-wing Frenchman Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry put it this week, of affirming Europe’s “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian” roots in contrast to Anglo-American progressivism.

Emmanuel Macron is not such a conservative, but he clearly has impulses in the direction I’ve described. It’s not a coincidence that he’s been more successful than other European leaders in managing and relating to Donald Trump even as he reaches for greater leadership in Europe — including in a big speech this week that floated the idea of extending a French nuclear umbrella over the continent.

I don’t expect that to happen; Europe will need America militarily even if it achieves more strategic independence. But the French should be looking for a conservative leader, ideally with a certain idea of France, who can pick up where Macron (who is term-limited) leaves off, and give America what it needs from Europe now: a prickly but ambitious partner, interested in finding its own way out of decadence, and in renewing our oldest alliance for this strange new 21st-century world.