Macron Says France Didn’t Choose This War. The Bill Says Otherwise.

On Friday, September 18, Emmanuel Macron convened the leaders of every party represented in Parliament, along with their presidential candidates, at the Élysée for a briefing. The heads of the foreign and domestic intelligence services, of military intelligence, of the national defense secretariat and of the energy directorate were in the room. The press conference that followed, published in full by the presidency, produced three announcements and one refrain: a plan to protect critical infrastructure against Russian hybrid attacks, a G7 on energy to be convened within weeks, a formal request to the European Commission, and, stated three separate times, the claim that soaring prices are not the result of government decisions but of the international situation.

The first surprise in reading the transcript is that the president names names. He says the war in Iran was launched by the United States and Israel, that France neither chose it nor took part in it. He says Russia is waging a war of aggression and escalating its hybrid operations. On the immediate facts, there is little to contest. The disagreement begins one level down, with a word that recurs like a refrain: enduring. A situation, he says, that we endure and that we import. That is the whole question. You endure an earthquake. You do not endure four years of choices, each defensible on its own terms, whose accumulation produced an energy and military dependency whose bill now arrives by the liter.

This Is Not a Conspiracy, It Is a Trajectory

Let me be clear at the outset, because this subject invites shortcuts. There is no coordinated plan in which Washington engineered the destruction of Nord Stream, the closure of Hormuz and the rise in our utility bills in order to sell us its gas. Every actor in this sequence has its own agenda, often at odds with the others, and several of them have acted directly against American interests.

What can be read instead is a trajectory. At every fork in the road since 2022, Europe chose the option that deepened its dependence on an ally that has become, under the Trump administration, an openly transactional partner. Abandoning Russian gas without securing an affordable substitute. Financing a war effort by buying American hardware. Preserving an electricity market that indexes our nuclear fleet to the price of imported gas. None of these decisions is a betrayal, and none requires an architect. Their sum is an accumulated dependency, the product of alignment without negotiated compensation. That is less dramatic than a conspiracy and harder to undo, because a conspiracy can be exposed while a trajectory has to be corrected.

What Moscow, Tehran and Kyiv Are Actually Doing

Before weighing the American share of this, each actor deserves its own accounting, or we end up producing nothing more than the mirror image of the official narrative.

Russia is waging war and waging it brutally. It is methodically destroying Ukraine’s power grid, targeting civilian infrastructure, and running a hybrid campaign in Europe that is anything but imaginary: a drone rigged with explosives at Leipzig airport this summer, attributed by German services to the GRU, a flare fired near a Danish frigate, drone incursions into several national airspaces. None of this is a press officer’s invention. I have written repeatedly that NATO bears part of the responsibility for the escalation between 2014 and 2022, and I stand by that. It does not absolve Moscow of what it is doing now, and a country that probes its adversaries with drones should expect them to start defending themselves.

Iran is no bit player either. It was Tehran that closed Hormuz after the February 28 strikes, and Tehran that keeps it closed as an openly acknowledged instrument of pressure. Its own fire has hit some twenty merchant vessels, with sailors killed. The strait is not blockaded by Washington. It is blockaded by Iran’s response to Washington, which is a different thing and changes what a solution would even look like.

As for Kyiv, its interests are not ours and never have been. On July 1, 2026, German federal prosecutors indicted a Ukrainian officer, identified as Serhii K., for the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2, and stated that the operation was planned at the request of Ukrainian authorities. A second suspect was arrested in Croatia in August. It is worth being precise about what this amounts to: an accusation brought by a prosecutor’s office, denied by the defendant and by Kyiv, and not yet tested at trial. German investigators describe the evidence as overwhelming, which is not the same thing as an established judicial finding. But the motive ascribed to the operation, shutting off the tap for good to deprive Moscow of the revenue, is entirely plausible. From a Ukrainian standpoint, that is a rational act of war. From a European standpoint, it is the destruction of our own supply infrastructure by the country we are funding. Add the Energoatom scandal and the fall of Pokrovsk, and what emerges is a partner whose decisions cost us a great deal and are never submitted to us first.

Three actors, three agendas, no coordination. France has an agenda too, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise: the nuclear fleet, storage filled ahead of winter, a supplier tour running from Riyadh to Ottawa, the deliberate refusal to join PURL, channels to Moscow kept open at the intelligence level. The complaint, then, is not the absence of a policy but its nature. Each piece answers an emergency, none follows from a doctrine, and nothing is ever consolidated into a position our partners would have to weigh before acting. Tactical diplomacy secures cargoes. It does not secure being consulted before someone closes a strait.

Gas: An Alternative Destroyed, Then Outlawed

On Nord Stream, the official French response can be summarized in a word: nothing. No statement, no public demand for an explanation, no connection drawn between the Karlsruhe indictment and our support policy. Brussels, meanwhile, adopted a regulation in January 2026 phasing out Russian gas, with a full ban on LNG by the end of 2026 and on pipeline gas by autumn 2027.

The result is arithmetic. LNG now accounts for close to half of Europe’s supply, against 22 percent in 2021, and the United States provided roughly 60 percent of it in the first quarter of 2026, after American deliveries rose more than 300 percent since 2022. LNG is structurally more expensive than pipeline gas: liquefaction, shipping, regasification, and above all a price set on a global market where Asia routinely outbids us. The TTF, Europe’s benchmark, traded around 30 euros per megawatt hour before the Iran war. It now sits at close to three times that.

Macron is right that France is better positioned than its neighbors, with storage at 80 percent for the winter. But being the least exposed country on a dependent continent is not a position of strength, it is a place in line. And the energy diplomacy of recent weeks, Riyadh, Baghdad, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Abuja, and on Sunday Ottawa by way of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon for Canadian oil and LNG, says exactly that: we are permanently in search of a replacement supplier. It is the same reflex we showed on rare earths, where we discovered the dependency the day Beijing decided to use it.

Hormuz: A War We Are Not Fighting, a Bill We Are Paying

The president put it plainly: we are not a party to this conflict, we do not hold the key to Hormuz, we cannot end a war we did not start. All of that is true, and it is the heaviest admission in the entire press conference.

Since February 28, 2026, an American and Israeli operation has struck Iran, the retaliation closed the strait through which a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG passes, and the workarounds are shutting down one after another: the Saudi pipeline running to Yanbu, which had been moving the equivalent of several million barrels a day, has seen its volumes collapse following Houthi attacks. Diesel is at 2.39 euros a liter. Gas has risen nearly 40 percent since January, and more than seven million households face another increase in October. Fishermen are blockading fuel depots. Chemicals and plastics producers are cutting output.

Price is not even the whole of it. As I wrote back in April, the IMF’s models think in euros while the reality is counted in refineries offline and terminals paralyzed. Several countries already ran short of jet fuel last summer. Physical shortage is not a figure of speech, it is the scenario for this winter. And the Strait of Hormuz has been dictating our daily lives since April, without a single lesson being drawn about how we supply ourselves.

An ally that starts a war it knows will close its partners’ main energy artery, and does so without consulting them, is not treating us as allies. It is treating us as acceptable collateral damage. The president acknowledges the situation. He draws no conclusion whatsoever about the relationship itself.

Weapons: A Customer, Not a Protégé

Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has donated no military equipment to Kyiv. He has done something better: he has turned Ukraine into a customer. The mechanism is called PURL. Kyiv draws up the list, allied command approves it, the Europeans pay, Washington ships from its own stocks and replenishes them from its own manufacturers. More than 4 billion dollars in the second half of 2025, with over 90 percent of the materiel supplied through that channel coming from American arsenals, and at least 3 billion euros in European purchases from American defense firms in the first half of 2026 alone. Asked in April whether weapons paid for by Europe might be redirected to the Middle East, Marco Rubio answered that it could happen.

France does not participate in PURL, on the grounds that European money should go to European industry. The position is coherent, and that deserves acknowledgment. It is also partly circumvented by the joint European borrowing that funds Ukraine’s needs for 2026 and 2027 and ultimately feeds the same production lines. European debt, American margin, Ukrainian consumption: the arrangement is more polite than in the days when people spoke of vassalage, but it is no more favorable. It follows the same logic as the bet on FCAS and the major programs where we regulate our decline rather than fund our way out of it.

Electricity: The One Genuinely National Lever, Never Pulled

There is, however, one domain where France decides on its own, or nearly. On the European wholesale market, the price of electricity is set by the last plant called on to balance the grid, and that plant is almost always gas fired. If it supplies 1 percent of the power, its cost applies to 100 percent of the volume. The result: a fully amortized nuclear fleet, whose Flamanville EPR was a reminder of what French industry can still do, sells its electricity at the price of American LNG.

Spain and Portugal obtained a derogation from Brussels as early as May 2022, capping the price of gas used to generate electricity. By late 2022, French power was trading around 450 euros per megawatt hour while the Iberian peninsula paid a quarter of that. The derogation was temporary, justified by the weakness of Iberian interconnections, and it was not an exit from the market. It nonetheless proved that decoupling was both technically feasible and politically obtainable. France, the continent’s largest nuclear producer, has never demanded anything comparable. It opted instead for price caps funded by the state, which is to say it had the taxpayer cover the gap between an absurd market price and a controlled production cost.

On Friday, the president announced he would formally ask the Commission president for flexibility on the structure of energy prices. Four years into the crisis, and seven months before the end of his term. This is the one lever whose operation depended on neither Tehran, nor Moscow, nor Washington.

What the Hybrid Threat Is Also Being Used For

That leaves the question of political use. Asking it requires denying neither the drones, nor the cyberattacks, nor the genuine value of France’s counter disinformation agency. The question is one of proportion and of timing.

The Ukrainian front is receding, Western aid had already fallen 43 percent by the summer of 2025 according to the Kiel Institute, and the prospect of a Russian American settlement negotiated over European heads has never looked more plausible. The day the front gives way, one question will be hard to dodge: four years, hundreds of billions, for what outcome? The closer that answer comes, the louder the alarm gets. I have written elsewhere about shock as a method of government, and about foreign interference as the standing excuse whenever a government wants to reclassify criticism as vulnerability. On Friday the machinery was visible to the naked eye: five intelligence chiefs to frame the meeting, and a president explaining moments later that protest movements aimed at causes outside government control express suffering but do not produce solutions.

Translation: the anger is legitimate, but it has no address. That is an elegant way of disarming dissent before it forms, and it is precisely what General Mandon was doing a year earlier when he asked French mayors to find the fortitude to accept losing their children. The diagnosis is sound. What is being done with it is a good deal less so.

A President as Guarantor, a Country Without a Course

Asked about his role seven months out from an election he cannot contest, Macron described himself as a guarantor, declining the posture of commentator on national life. The formulation is deft. What it mostly describes is an executive with no parliamentary majority, whose prime minister had proposed 54 billion euros in savings the previous day for a 2027 budget that may never pass, and whose principal remaining instrument is the act of convening: a G7, a formal request, a cabinet retreat, a transparency briefing. This is late-stage Macronism in its purest form, a carefully calibrated gravity deployed to occupy an institutional vacuum that no one in that room on Friday morning knows how to fill come spring.

What a Policy of National Interest Would Look Like

Nothing that follows is unrealistic, and nothing in it requires switching to the other camp.

Draw the public consequences of the Karlsruhe indictment, and make the Nord Stream file an explicit condition of the relationship with Kyiv. The price has to be owned: a France that conditions its aid finds itself isolated in Brussels precisely when the next funding package is being negotiated, hands Moscow a free propaganda line, and runs the risk that a Russian American settlement is concluded without it and at its expense. That price is real. It should be measured against the price of unconditional support whose endpoint no one, four years on, is able to name.

Next, assess what sanctions and the freezing of assets have actually achieved, rather than stacking up a twentieth package out of habit. Demand for French nuclear power the treatment Madrid and Lisbon extracted for their gas plants, and put withdrawal from marginal pricing on the table as a credible option if Brussels refuses. Here too the domestic cost is immediate: a standoff over the electricity market exposes France to infringement proceedings, weakens EDF’s export contracts with its neighbors, and consumes political capital a president without a majority no longer has, for a benefit that would show up on household bills only after the presidential election. Which is precisely why this work should have begun in 2022. Finally, tie every euro of joint debt to a verifiable European industrial return. And say to Washington, publicly, what the president said on Friday only by implication: a war launched without consultation whose cost our citizens pay at the pump is an alliance problem, not a weather event.

The question is not whether France is enduring this. It is, and that is true. The question is how long a country can declare itself the victim of a situation it did not choose while stubbornly refusing to revisit the choices that left it exposed. Seven months remain in this presidential term. Parts of our industry may not have seven months.