Will This New Nuclear Posture Stop Russia?

If you want to stop Vladimir Putin, you need nuclear weapons. That is a lesson that you will commonly hear coming out of the Ukraine war. But for Eastern Europe, this immediately seems to raise concerns. With a widening transatlantic rift, many are calling into question the usefulness of the massive US stockpile. Thus, cue the current intrigue. Deliberate efforts from France to not only expand its nuclear coverage further east, but also build out its raw numbers. Just a couple of questions. Will it work? And will it do anything that the similar US system does not? Well, yeah, maybe it will work, and maybe it will be stickier than the US system. But the bigger deterrent effect will instead be from how nuclear sharing allows Poland to have a better conventional force. Yep, we are looking at another win for collective security. So, in today's video, we will start with a rundown of what France is actually trying to do with its new nuclear system. I will then pause to discuss how this outcome was entirely predictable months ago. Afterward, we will switch gears and contrast France's effort with the existing US system in Europe. Finally, we will investigate the credibility of the US system in the long term. But let's start our main conversation with what France is up to. Actually, the origin of the new plan dates back more than a year, to a March 2025 announcement that Macron wanted to open up debate about extending France's nuclear umbrella to eastern parts of Europe. This was, no doubt, a response to the new Trump order. The Oval Office meltdown, and the conversation about cards, was only a week earlier, and apprehension in Europe regarding the position of the US was at an all-time high. France was not the only one wondering about the White House's transatlantic commitment. The nuclear card was not a surprising response from France. It is actually baked into why the country has nuclear weapons in the first place. Way back during the Eisenhower administration, France tested its first nuclear weapon, worried that the United States would not be willing to sacrifice New York to save Paris. Bear in mind that this was during the presidency of a man who commanded the Normandy landings to liberate France. Suffice it to say that de Gaulle was always hyper worried about intra-alliance credibility. The big difference between then and now is how much farther away the threat is. During the Cold War, France was only a West Germany away from the Iron Curtain. Now you have to travel through what was once East Germany, then Poland, and then some combination of the Baltics or Belarus to reach Russia. Sorry Kaliningrad, but you do not get to play this game. For any pledge to use nuclear weapons to defend Eastern allies to be credible, France will have to drift its nuclear deployments in that direction. Well, fast forward a year to March 2026, and we started to get an idea of what that will look like. France indeed plans to forward-base nuclear weapons further east and elsewhere. Partners in the program so far include Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, and Denmark. This will require significant investment from France, not just to station nuclear forces in any of those locations, but also to build out the program itself. France only has around 300 nuclear weapons, a pittance compared to Russia's 4,400 and the United States' 3,700. Correspondingly, France will have to produce more warheads. But speaking of nuclear options, today's video is sponsored by Incogni. If you do not like the idea of your personal information just sitting on the internet, waiting for malicious actors to take advantage of it, then Incogni is the tool for you. And while Incogni is not technically the world's 10th nuclear power, they do have figurative hammers to remove your home address, employment history, and even political affiliation from websites and data broker registries, which could otherwise lead to fraudulent loans being taken out in your name or stalkers tracking you down. Plus they have a custom removal feature if you want something a little more precise than an atomic bomb. So take back your personal data by heading to incogni.com slash William Spaniel. Use coupon code William Spaniel, all one word, to get 60% off an annual plan, which works out to be just 0.0000000166% of how much the United States spent to research, develop, test, and manufacture its nuclear weapons program during the Cold War. Quite a deal! And thanks again to Incogni for sponsoring today's video. Now, I want to pause here and discuss an important point about international relations, slash take a victory lap. A recurring theme on this channel is how the vast majority of interesting geopolitical questions are unanswerable. It would be cool to confidently tell you how the Ukraine war will end, but that would require me to know information private to only the Kremlin and for me to know a separate set of information private to only Kiev. If states can keep secrets from other states, then a dude who sits at his keyboard all day is helpless. Despite that, one of the big level ups for someone who enjoys following geopolitics is realizing that it is okay to not know things. And actually, it is more interesting trying to understand the strategic incentives given that uncertainty than make woefully overconfident predictions. Still, there are times when international events are entirely predictable, and this is one such case. If you understand the economics behind NATO, nothing about Poland building nuclear weapons makes sense. France and the United Kingdom, just like every other nuclear power out there, would not be excited for another country to join the club, even if that country is an alliance partner. Meanwhile, I have no earthly idea where Poland would find the budget to squeeze in a nuclear weapons program. We need to forever dispatch the notion that nuclear weapons are as affordable as internet privacy. They are not. Warsaw would have to massively distort its budget to find an answer. That is just not practical when Poland is already spending close to 5% of its GDP to ensure that it has the strongest infantry in Europe. And how exactly would those nuclear weapons stop Russia from invading Slovakia? Better yet, how would Poland's nuclear weapons stop Russia from invading Narva? Heck, how would Estonian nuclear weapons stop Russia from invading Narva? I mean, sure, we could work up some type story where nuclear weapons do the job. But there is a tendency for the lay community to treat nuclear weapons as a magical cure-all, which they most decidedly are not. And if you are not sure about that, just ask India how well that theory has worked for it. In contrast, it is very easy to explain how another $20 billion spent on border defense would stop Russia from invading. It's literally physically stopping Russia from invading. Of course, that is not what is happening here. Rather, it is France's nuclear expansion that permits Poland to persist in purchasing Putin pacification projectiles proximate to the perimeter. And for me, that is the bigger takeaway point here. For all the trouble that comes along with making credible nuclear threats, nuclear tentacles expanding eastward will at least give the Kremlin pause. And maybe France would not actually follow through when push comes to shove. But building up a new doctrine increases the risk of some kind of accident should a crisis start. And that uncontrollable aspect of nuclear weapons is a deterrent in its own right. Nonetheless, the fact that France's umbrella expansion frees up more money for conventional defense will ultimately have the bigger deterrent effect. That is how collective security has always worked, and apparently it is how collective security will continue to work for this era of global conflict. Moving on, we should explore a bit more about what France is actually doing here, which is best learned by contrasting it to the existing nuclear sharing program that the United States runs. And this conversation provides some important background for the credibility conversation that we will have next. For one, the participants are not identical. The United States works with Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Second, France retains both the decision to use nuclear weapons and their actual firing. In contrast, the U.S. arrangement is weird. The nuclear weapons currently deployed to partner countries remain under the control of the United States. However, the U.S. allies operate dual-capable aircraft, meaning that the president could authorize U.S. nuclear weapons be put on them. At that point, the final decision and launch could fall into the hands of the allies. This creates credibility in an edge case where the United States is unwilling to be responsible for the launch, but is willing to accept any punishment for having donated the weapon. The remaining big difference is in the type of arsenal. France only has strategic bombs, the big ones intended to destroy cities. In contrast, the weapons that the United States forward deploys are tactical nuclear weapons, meaning that they can produce smaller yields intended to take out advancing columns of Once people hear the word nuclear, all nuance gets lost. But these weapons would have very different end applications. You might imagine that it is much easier to threaten to launch a nuclear weapon at a flood of Russian soldiers than it is to bomb St. Petersburg. And right alongside France, the U.S. weapons might be getting more use. There is also discussion of the United States expanding its nuclear deployment along the eastern flank. Okay, the first thing that we need to note here is that we must absolutely, positively move away from the framing of this being a Trump thing. For one, the likelihood that U.S. nuclear weapons would be relevant between now and January 2029 is low. The most salient threat to Europe cannot begin until the war in Ukraine ends. That conflict still seems as intractable as ever, though, and the clock keeps resetting every morning that we wake up to new reports of drone assaults. It is therefore better to think about this as Trump setting up the infrastructure that future presidents will inherit, and thus think less about whether Trump would follow through on nuclear use, and more about whether his successors will. The other thing that we need to change the conversation about is post-Trump revisions to security policy. There are two common perceptions about what is happening here that misunderstand the politics and geopolitical strategy happening behind the scenes. One is that Trump's threats to move on from NATO were intended to get Europe to spend more in conjunction with the United States. Hence you see anger in some online commentary that the United States is withdrawing assets from Europe, despite increased commitments from NATO partners. That is never what this was about. The entire purpose of raising European defense spending was to have Europe be primarily responsible for European security. In turn, the United States would have more assets freed up to go elsewhere, primarily to the Indo-Pacific. If the United States matched everything that Europe produced, then there would be nothing left over to ship elsewhere. This is confusing because all of the diplomacy that has gone into the decision. However, most of those conversations are to coordinate that process so that the West does not leave behind unnecessary security gaps. Secondarily, it was about discussing what to expect from Washington in the event of a crisis, given that the United States must also worry about what could happen to Taiwan simultaneously. It was never about setting up a quid pro quo. If anything, the increased European defense spending acted as a substitute for US military power. More on substitutes as a core concept in military strategy in a second. The other misconception is that Europe merely needs to bridge the gap between now and 2029, when things will revert back to normal. Yes, you will see reactionary takes about this online that go in the complete opposite direction. That the United States can never be trusted again, and Europe needs to make a clean break from the transatlantic relationship. You will note that policymakers in charge do not actually believe this, because they keep brokering long-term arrangements with a Trump White House. But even that is still missing the point. Focusing on whether Europe can trust the United States turns us into a conversation about spinning the wheel in 2028, not knowing whether the ball will land on a repeat of Trump or a return to before. This is not the right framing of the situation, and it spins the entire conversation around Trump rather than looking at US interests more broadly. Let me be blunt. There will be no return to the way things were. Every US president since NATO's birth has wanted to get Europe to spend the appropriate amount on its military. Now that this appears to finally be happening, no next president is going to undo the policies that led to it. Let's imagine that the next president, even if a democrat, comes in and effectively announces, hey, let's go back to subsidizing European security. They would take an absolute beating that new cycle. No way that they would walk themselves into that. Now, what will likely change is the civility of the transatlantic dialogue, something that will no doubt allow European diplomats to let out a sigh of relief that they had been holding for four years at that point. And the Europeans so adamant about producing weapons because they can no longer trust the United States can still keep a smile on their face. Europe's healthy military spending means that it has more negotiating power to influence the alliance's coordination strategies. Anyway, we are supposed to be talking about the Now, to be clear, these remain Pentagon discussions at the moment, but I think there is something to this despite the odd juxtaposition of the United States withdrawing conventional troops while considering whether to increase non-conventional deployments. The basic idea is to expand on the existing program where the United States works with allies through NATO to maintain dual capable aircraft, which then permit the forward deployment of nuclear weapons. Poland is at the top of the list, but unlike France's new program, the Baltic states are also part of the discussion. To give you some context of the situation, during the Cold War, the United States had as many as 7,300 nuclear weapons forward deployed to Europe. Now it is down to about 100 B61 bombs, those tactical devices that we discussed earlier. And if you know some Cold War strategic history, this might start to make sense again. At the height of the about the manpower disparity along the Iron Curtain. Tactical nuclear weapons were supposed to be the great equalizer, disrupting Soviet advances for long enough to allow the United States to balance things out. Well, if the United States intends to draw down its forces in Europe, then we are back to the same problem as before. Tactical nuclear weapons are the answer. That said, I have seen some concerns that the arsenal is only as good as the threat to use it. Well, sure. The United States withdrawing troops from the region is a costly signal in the wrong direction, perhaps invalidating the whole exercise. I think two points are worth keeping in mind here. Deploying weapons is also a costly signal. I will leave it up to US adversaries to decide whether a significant expansion of the American nuclear footprint in Europe is more or less menacing than a few thousand boots on the ground. The other point is whether boots on the ground and tactical nuclear weapons are strategic complements or strategic substitutes. These concepts do not receive as much attention as they should, probably because they ask us to think about cross-partial derivatives. But they are critical to crafting good military policy. Let's not worry about the signaling aspect for a moment by assuming everything is publicly understood about US resolve. Two types of weapons are complements if having another unit of one makes adding the next unit of the other more attractive. They are substitutes if having another unit of one makes the next unit of the other look not as attractive. Heading back to the Cold War, the United States treated troops and nukes as substitutes. The absence of boots on the ground increased the value of the forward deployed nuclear weapons. Put differently, having a strategic vulnerability in Europe made the use of tactical nuclear weapons more credible because the United States lacked a viable alternative. And so that is why this seems like a sensible policy, even if it might not be exactly what Europe is looking for. It keeps the United States involved on the continent while still moving other pieces to the Indo-Pacific. The caveat for Europe is that we are still talking about nuclear weapons, lest we already forget that credibly threatening to use nuclear weapons is always a challenge. So, what are our takeaway lines for today? France is looking to expand its nuclear umbrella into Eastern Europe. This is a reasonable choice given NATO's broad military planning. Meanwhile, U.S. military planning is looking at a time horizon well beyond the Trump administration. And an expansion to the U.S. tactical nuclear sharing program is a sensible choice given the Pentagon's global priorities. Thanks again to Incogni for sponsoring today's video. Go to incogni.com slash William Spaniel and use coupon code WILLIAMSPANIEL to save 60% on an annual plan. And if you enjoyed today's video, then please like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you tomorrow. Take care.