The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why Would Europe Trust France with ALL the Nukes? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Macron is proposing that France expand its nuclear deterrent to help shield the entire European Union. This comes at a time when Europe is losing confidence in the United States' security guarantees. But there are major obstacles in the way.Join the Analyst Tier on Patreon to access Peter's daily coverage of the Iran War: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4cDYaB4

Hey all, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado, and today we're going to talk about nukes in the European context, specifically the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, wants to expand the French nuclear deterrent in order to provide a missile shield for everybody in the European Union. Right now, because the Brits left the EU several years ago, France is the only country in the EU that currently has nuclear weapons. Now, what's going on here is that the French just trying to make a power play to make themselves sound important? You can answer that yes to anything that the French say. That doesn't mean that there's not something here. What is going on is that, well, to make it perfectly blunt, the Europeans have lost confidence in the United States.

When the Greenland fiasco happened earlier this year, the Europeans realized that 75 years of alliance was functionally over. and if the United States was willing to threaten its most loyal allies directly with military intervention in order to get a piece of property that is useless, what will the Americans do when something that's actually important is on the line, like say a threat that requires a nuclear strike? And so the conversations that are going around Europe are what do we do, what do we do? Part of this means building much bigger militaries that are independent of the United States. Part of this means fusing their defense establishments with the Ukrainian ones. to put Ukrainian tech and European capital manufacturing capacity to generate an entirely new style of war that leaves both the United States and the Russians out in the cold.

And a third legger of it is a nuclear shield. The problem here, what the French are going to run into is that third one is the least feasible of the three because, well, a couple things. Number one, the technology is not new. Any country that has a nuclear power plant, there's a dozen European countries like that, could relatively easy build a nuke with what they have on hand. A one gigawatt nuclear power plant, which is, you know, medium to large size, generates enough waste plutonium every year to make a dozen or so weapons quite easily

with technology that was developed in the 1940s. So there's not a technical obstacle at all. And since the United States is basically no longer enforcing any of its weapons treaties, the non-proliferation treaty is one of those. and there's really nothing standing in the Europeans' way except for the European sense of propriety, which means that nobody has to rely on the French. They could build their own.

The second problem in the French are going to have is the issue of thresholds. So let's say, for example, that Estonia, a country with less than a million and a half people way up in northeastern Europe, was under attack by the Russians, and the prime minister was dead, and the cabinet had been strung up in the streets,

and the deputy education minister, because that's all that's left, calls up. The French president says, you've got to nuke Moscow. What's the French response going to be? Like, maybe? No, that's not very convincing. So what is more likely to happen is just a mass proliferation process throughout all of Europe.

They might coordinate on fighter jets and tanks and drones and the rest. But nukes, every country is going to want their own deterrent. Every country is going to want to be able to say yes and no for their own reasons. And that means we should be looking in the next few years for a number of countries. that are already very close technically, Finland, Sweden, Romania, Poland, Germany, all getting their own deterrent and probably some smaller countries as well. Because one of the things that the Europeans like to forget that those of us who know our history, remember, is that historically speaking, while almost all of the Europeans have been at odds

and at the throats of the Russians and vice versa, they also have been at odds with themselves and at the throats of one another. Historically speaking, Europe is the most blood-drenched chunk of terror. on this planet. And it's only with the post-World War II settlements where the Americans basically occupied the place for 40 years that all of these countries were forced to be on the same side. And then when the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain came down, Central Europe kind of rejoined that group under the ages of NATO. And if NATO doesn't mean anything anymore, then the Europeans have to start making decisions for themselves. And a lot of Europeans

are going to make decisions that not only the Americans don't like, but other Europeans don't like either.