Compared to the theatrical announcement by French President Emmanuel Macron, it was a short and rather vague note that Foreign Minister Tom Berendsen (CDA) and Defense Minister Dilan Yesilgöz (VVD) sent to the House of Representatives last Monday.
During a visit to the French naval base on the Île Longue in the Bay of Brest, standing in front of a dry dock containing a nuclear submarine from the Triumphantclass, Macron announced major changes last Monday in the field of Force the dissuasionFrance’s nuclear deterrent force. France will expand its nuclear arsenal (now less than 290 warheads), Macron said. France will also from now on cooperate with European countries – including the Netherlands – in its nuclear deterrent.
It was a historic announcement, although Macron gave few details about what French-Dutch cooperation will look like. In recent decades, the Netherlands has always counted on the enormous arsenal of the United States to deter Russia from a nuclear attack. There are still American nuclear bombs at Volkel air base, which will be dropped by Dutch F-35s in the nightmare scenario of a nuclear war.
The Netherlands is now looking at alternatives – although in its letter to the House the government preferred to speak of “a strategic dialogue” with the French. In their letter, Berendsen and Yesilgöz emphasized that, according to NATO, the agreements made with the French are “in addition to” and “not a substitute” for US protection. “The American nuclear umbrella through NATO remains the foundation of NATO’s nuclear mission,” the ministers wrote.
Acceleration
Despite all these qualifications, the importance of the agreement that France has signed with Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries (Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Greece) can hardly be overestimated, says Tim Sweijs of the Hague Center for Strategic Studies (HCCS). “When Macron proposed a year ago that Europe would be involved in the French nuclear weapon, his proposal was dismissed as yet another French test balloon. Now everything has accelerated. We live in special times.”
In its letter to the House, the cabinet does not want to provide further information about what the cooperation with the French will look like. In his speech at the base on the Île Longue, Macron mentioned a number of elements: European participation in French nuclear exercises, (temporary) stationing of French nuclear ‘assets’ (such as Rafale fighter planes with nuclear cruise missiles) in other countries, and ‘non-nuclear’ contributions from allies to the French deterrent.
With the latter, Sweijs says, one should mainly think of investments in conventional precision weapons for (medium) range. The French nuclear force – just like the British – consists exclusively of heavy strategic nuclear weapons of a few megatons, intended to destroy an entire city. France thus has one, according to current military doctrines capability gap: If Russia decides to deploy a smaller tactical nuclear weapon in the Baltic region, France’s only response will be to destroy Russian cities – which will inevitably lead to a nuclear bomb on Paris.
The ‘Paris in exchange for Talinn’ dilemma, Sweijs and his colleagues wrote in the report at the end of last year Shields and spears about the defense of Europe without the US, can be solved with European investments in the ‘deep precision strike’. “A European capacity that is independent of the US,” Sweijs explains, will require different choices from the Netherlands. For example, the Dutch Navy recently decided to purchase American Tomahawks and the Air Force opted for American ones standoff-weapons. In the longer term, that is not a good idea, says Sweijs: “If you want to take Europe’s strategic autonomy seriously, you must also dare to venture out of the American pocket.”
This does not mean that the French nuclear umbrella is immediately a full-fledged alternative to the American one. In his speech, Macron made it clear that European partners will not have a say in the deployment of the Force the dissuasion – that decision remains the prerogative of the President of the French Republic. But if France wants Poland, Germany and the Netherlands to participate in the nuclear deterrent, Paris will have to provide some insight into the French nuclear engine room, says Sweijs.
France is not currently part of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group. If Dutch fighter planes have to practice together with French Rafales on a… nuclear strike at Russian troop concentrations under Minsk, agreements will have to be made about the manner in which and the scenarios in which nuclear weapons will be deployed. “Further elaboration with the French about the use of these terrible weapons is necessary,” says Sweijs. “At the same time, we must also remember: the Netherlands now has no say in the deployment of American nuclear bombs.”
Suspicious VVD
Within the Jetten cabinet, European nuclear cooperation is a potential divisive issue. The text of the coalition agreement states that Europe must become more autonomous militarily, but it also states that America is “the superpower with which we share the most values.” Especially on the right flank of the VVD, European military integration is viewed with great suspicion. ‘Classical Liberal’, an influential right-wing lobby within the VVD, responded to X rather cynically to Macron’s announcement. “The French agenda is always: France decides, the Netherlands and Germany pay.”
That reaction reminds Sweijs of former VVD Minister of Transport, Public Works and Water Management Annemarie Jorritsma, who in 1996 called France ‘a nice country’, but thought it was a shame ‘that French people live there’.
Sweijs: “If we want to make Europe strategically autonomous, we have to get rid of that Jorritsma rhetoric.”
