The collapse of the FCAS fighter jet program - the most ambitious Franco-German defense collaboration in a generation - has illustrated a structural reality that European leaders have refused to confront, "Hvylya" reports, citing a new Foreign Affairs analysis.
Hugo Bromley, an Applied History Research Fellow at Cambridge's Centre for Geopolitics, argued that French unwillingness to surrender control over defense "has already wrecked" the FCAS project. The failure was not an accident or a negotiation breakdown, but the predictable result of trying to force defense integration between states with fundamentally incompatible approaches to sovereignty.
A consolidated European defense sector, Bromley wrote, would require "a common understanding across all member states of the nature of the threats that Europe faces, how those threats should shape the development of new capabilities, who would control the intellectual property behind those capabilities, and above all, a common approach to arms exports." Brussels, he argued, does not possess the capacity, expertise, or democratic legitimacy to answer any of these questions.
France, despite Macron's rhetoric about strategic autonomy, is the country most opposed to genuine consolidation. Surrendering control over its defense sector would force Paris to abandon the principles of national independence that have driven French statecraft since Charles de Gaulle's return to power in 1958. Defense consolidation would also require countries to "forsake key sources of employment and export revenue" - a demand no major European government can realistically accept.
Bromley pointed instead to international partnerships outside the EU framework as a more promising model. The GCAP fighter development program among Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, he argued, strengthens European security without requiring the kind of sovereignty transfers that killed FCAS.
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