After the Plane, the Tank: Germany Is Handing Us Back Our Sovereignty Without Meaning To

Ten years of summits and joint communiqués, only to discover that Paris and Berlin never wanted the same tank.

Meanwhile, the Leclerc keeps aging, the Leopard 3 keeps advancing, and our two countries, which swore themselves to a common European defense, will in the end have cooperated only for the cameras.

Ten years to learn that Franco-German friendship ends exactly where market share begins.

What a waste of time. And in matters of war, lost time is never made up: it is paid for.

On October 8, before the French National Assembly, the chief of the defense staff announced that “the Germans have decided to leave the project” to build the tank of the future. Not a complete failure, he was careful to add, merely bad news “from an industrial standpoint.” This is the same General Mandon who, a year ago, asked France’s mayors to steel themselves to lose our children. One might have hoped for a little less serenity about losing our tanks.

A Bargain Turned Inside Out

Let us recall the deal struck in 2017. France would get the fighter jet of the future; Germany, the tank of the future. A balanced division of labor, we were told, with each country leading what it does best.

Berlin then spent eight years challenging Dassault’s leadership of the SCAF fighter program, invoking that very balance. Now Berlin is walking away from the program it was supposed to lead. So it was never about balance. It was about access. Rheinmetall’s arrival in the program back in 2019 had already given the game away.

I wrote it in February: Dassault was defending France better than the Élysée, and the SCAF was not an isolated case. It wasn’t. Four months after the jet fell apart, the tank follows.

It Was All There in Plain Sight

No one can pretend to be surprised. As early as February 2025, Berlin awarded the first contracts for the Leopard 3. A month later, Rheinmetall announced it would take a stake in KNDS, the Franco-German tank maker, if the group went public. A replacement program for the Leopard 2 was being put together with Italy, Spain, and Sweden, without France. And the EDIP, the EU’s new defense industry program, handed Rheinmetall a head start in Brussels.

The best part, though, is French. This spring, Paris admitted the program was running about ten years late and made the case for an “interim tank” to replace the Leclerc, whose retirement begins in 2038. France’s defense procurement agency even considered buying 200 tanks from Germany to bridge the gap. And in June, Rheinmetall’s CEO revealed that Paris was weighing cutting its contribution to less than half of the planned budget.

Buying German tanks while waiting for a joint tank that nobody really wanted anymore. Berlin simply had the candor to say so first.

Our Partner in 2035

There is one fact the official statements will never mention. On October 3, German Unity Day, a member of the executive board of Generation Deutschland, the AfD’s youth wing, posted a map of a Germany “that gathers the entire German people within a single state.” Alsace and Moselle included. The post has since been deleted.

This is not Berlin’s doctrine, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But it is not an accident either. In May, one activist was openly dreaming of an Alsace-Lorraine returned to Germany. In September, another declared that South Tyrol is not Italy. And this week, the AfD took the presidency of the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament after winning 44 percent of the vote there.

Today’s young party officials are the ministers of 2035. And 2035 is precisely the horizon for the tanks and jets we claimed we would build together.

You do not build the instruments of your own security on the assumption that your ally will always remain your ally. States have no friends, only interests, and might makes right the moment the law stops suiting someone.

A Blessing Disguised as a Slap

So yes, it is a snub. But it is also a favor.

Berlin has just freed us from a dependence our leaders lacked the courage to break. Here we are, alone for the jet and alone for the tank. Alone, which is to say sovereign, provided we are willing to pay for it.

And that is where the shoe pinches. I have already asked who will pay for the next Rafale. Now the Leclerc’s successor must be added to the bill. Two major programs, a country in debt up to its neck, and a political class that would rather regulate its decline than build its future.

Studies for the Leclerc’s successor are due to begin in 2027. In other words, tomorrow, and without a single euro earmarked.

We have KNDS France, Thales, Safran, Dassault, and the arsenals of Bourges and Roanne. We have everything except the will. Ten years of photo ops have cost us dearly. The next ten will cost us far more if we spend them waiting for another partner.

Germany has chosen its tank. Now it is our turn to choose ours.