The choice of Paris as the venue for a summit of the European “coalition of the willing” to discuss a “reassurance force” for Ukraine this week has turned out to be deeply unfortunate; for five days after the summit, France may well not have a government. Then again, it’s not clear that any other European capital would have made for a better choice.
France has been plunged into a renewed political crisis by the decision of the prime minister, Francois Bayrou, to hold a parliamentary vote of confidence on September 8 over his plans for steep cuts in public spending in order to reduce France’s public debt while greatly increasing its military spending. French trades unions have promised a general strike on September 18 to block these moves.
Unless a deal can be stitched up with the parties of the right and left that have vowed to oppose the budget, Bayrou will be defeated in parliament and forced to resign, and France will enter its third governmental crisis in barely a year. President Emmanuel Macron will be left with a choice of bad and risky alternatives: choose a new prime minister and try to gain a parliamentary majority by abandoning most of the budget cuts — leaving Macron to struggle on till the next presidential elections in the Spring of 2027 as even more of a lame duck than he is now — or call new parliamentary elections and risk another electoral defeat that might leave him with no realistic option but to resign.
How can a country in this political and fiscal situation be seriously planning a very risky and expensive military deployment far from France’s own borders? Britain, the co-sponsor of the Paris summit and would-be joint leader of any European force for Ukraine, is in only relatively better shape. Unlike Bayrou, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has a large parliamentary majority (though with only one third of the popular vote). Much good it has done him.
He has suffered two humiliating climb-downs over cuts to social welfare in the face of revolts from within his own Labour Party. The last one saw his chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, burst into tears in Parliament as her spending plans collapsed. Now Reeves has been virtually sidelined in the last in a series of government reshuffles intended to give a sense of new policies and restore Labour’s crumbling popularity. In the view of the former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, writing in FT:
“The Chancellor has now ended up in the worst of all possible worlds. Trapped by negative [economic] expectations, tax rises and/or deep spending cuts are deemed inevitable. The first is a confidence killer; the second anathema to the Labour Party…”
According to a new opinion poll, only 27 percent of voters now have a favorable opinion of Labour (and only 24 percent of Starmer), while the right-wing populist Reform Party led by Nigel Farage exceeds both Labour and the Conservatives with 34 percent, largely on the strength of a surge in public concern about illegal migration.
In these circumstances, for Britain to raise the money radically to increase its armed forces would seem impossible. As for the “reassurance force” for Ukraine — as now revealed by the Wall Street Journal — the proposed British contribution is not nearly as large as previously imagined. Rather than the ground troops previously envisaged, it will be “focused on maritime and air domains,” and the combined French and British contingents will be only 6,000 - 10,000 strong.
Previous estimates for the necessary size of a credible European reassurance force were in the region of 50,000-100,000 troops. Where are the rest to come from? So far, only Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and the Baltic States have indicated — in very vague terms — a possible willingness to contribute to a reassurance force; of these, only Sweden and Spain can be considered remotely serious military powers.
Moreover, it is not clear that they even mean that their contribution will include actual troops. The Spanish Defense Ministry has said that the Spanish contribution could consist only of observers and trainers. The Spanish government is facing strong opposition to this plan and to higher military spending from within its own coalition — and Spain opted out of NATO’s commitment to spend five percent of GDP on defense, and its military spending relative to GDP is the lowest of all NATO members.
Germany has already indicated its refusal to contribute troops to such a force (as has Poland, supposedly Ukraine’s greatest major supporter in Europe). This week, in a highly unusual move, the German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (widely regarded as a hawk on Ukraine) sharply rebuked the (German) EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who had told the Financial Times on August 31 that European governments are working on “pretty precise plans” for troop deployments to Ukraine and have a “clear road map” for this. Pistorius responded that discussing this publicly at present is “completely wrong,” adding,
"Apart from the fact that the European Union has no jurisdiction or competence whatsoever when it comes to the deployment of troops - regardless of for whom or for what — I would be very cautious about confirming or commenting on such considerations in any way."
This unprecedented and immediate rebuke may be partly due to German government uneasiness about another of von der Leyen’s claims to the FT, that, “President Trump reassured us that there will be an American presence as part of the backstop. …That was very clear and repeatedly affirmed.”
Maybe. But Trump has also reportedly suggested Chinese peacekeepers for Ukraine (something that the Chinese have never proposed and that was immediately rejected by Kyiv). What Trump is also actually reported to have said to European leaders was also very significantly different from von der Leyen’s account. According to Politico:
“[The sources for Trump’s private remarks] — a European diplomat, a British official and a person briefed on the call — all said the U.S. was willing to play some sort of role [emphasis added] in providing Kyiv with the means to deter future Russian aggression if a ceasefire is reached. The person briefed on the call said that Trump said he would only make such a commitment if the effort is not part of NATO. …Trump did not specify what he meant by security guarantees and only discussed the broader concept, the person briefed on the call said.”
And in the words of an alarmed German former diplomat, “Surely we know by now not automatically to take everything Trump says seriously?”
Admittedly, some statements from members of the European security elite raise questions as to whether they seriously believe in this force, or are in fact using the proposal to block any peace agreement with Russia.
Thus former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has written that a “well armed European deterrence force in Ukraine should be ready to fight if Ukraine is attacked again, should signal NATO’s willingness to go to war with Russia (something that NATO governments have consistently refused to do), should be based on NATO structures and modeled on NATO forward deployments in the Baltic States.” Moreover, he says, this force should be deployed not as part of a final peace settlement but in advance of one.
It is very unlikely that Trump would ever agree to back up such a force. It is certain that it would make any peace settlement with Russia impossible and that the war would go on indefinitely. And if one risk of a prolonged war is that the Ukrainian army will collapse, another is that the European governments that have backed Ukraine will be voted out of office. Maybe Bayrou will get lucky next week and the French government will survive.
Maybe Macron will be succeeded by another centrist in 2027. Maybe the rise of the far right AfD in Germany can be checked. Maybe the British Labour government will pull itself together — with or without Starmer — and prevent a victory of Reform at the next elections. But existing European establishments would be very lucky indeed to dodge all these political bullets.
So the question hawkish European officials need to ask themselves is the one famously asked by Clint Eastwood in his role as Detective Harry Callahan, "do you feel lucky?"
