French President Emmanuel Macron is aggressively chasing a deal that would sell four years of Rafale fighter production to India even as Russia menaces the rest of Europe, Ethan B. Kapstein and Jonathan Caverley have pointed out in Foreign Affairs. The authors call the move "telling": a sign that Paris is still running its defense industry on export logic rather than continental solidarity.
As "Hvylya" has reported, the Foreign Affairs analysis by Princeton's Kapstein and the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Caverley argues that France's long-standing refusal to depend on other countries for weapons now comes with an uncomfortable price tag. The French defense industry has grown hooked on non-EU exports, mainly to India and the Middle East.
Despite Macron's call for a "wartime economy," the authors write, "France's precarious politics and tattered public finances leave little room for large defense spending increases." Paris can still supply critical capabilities the rest of Europe lacks: the EU's only sovereign nuclear deterrent, an experienced expeditionary army, nuclear-powered submarines and an aircraft carrier. What it cannot easily do is spend more to build on them.
The Rafale-to-India deal captures the contradiction. "If Germany is unlikely to purchase many weapons from the rest of Europe, France almost certainly will not," Kapstein and Caverley write. New Delhi's order pulls valuable production away from any potential European customer and locks in France's export-first industrial model for years.
The authors still see Paris as indispensable to continental defense. French forces are, after the small EU Rapid Deployment Capacity, the army most able to reach the eastern front quickly, and parts of the French air and naval fleet have already deployed to Mediterranean and Gulf bases in response to the Iran war. "Hvylya" earlier reported that Ukraine risks running out of defense funds within two months as Western aid stalls, a warning that underscores just how little slack Europe has if Paris keeps exporting its best hardware abroad.