SCAF, IRIS², AI : Why France would rather regulate its decline than build its future

This isn’t an opinion. It’s a measurement. According to the Ipsos Predictions 2026 survey, France is the world champion of pessimism: only 41% of the French believe 2026 will be better than 2025, against a global average of 71%. A full 85% even judge the past year to have been bad for the country.

Elon Musk retweets a post about rockets and the search for meaning. What thrills people elsewhere triggers in us a mix of fascination and condescending sneers. The real problem isn’t Musk. It’s why outsized ambition resonates so powerfully abroad yet provokes so much contempt here.

We have a deep cultural problem. The declinists, the guardians of the precautionary principle turned religion, the pro-regulation crowd eager to govern things that don’t even exist yet. Under the cover of prudence, they protect their rents and manufacture nihilism on an industrial scale. We’re teaching an entire generation that aiming high is naive, that dreaming big is suspect, that enthusiasm is reserved for children and Americans.

Meanwhile, China is building like mad. DeepSeek comes out of nowhere and rattles Silicon Valley with a fraction of the resources. Everyone is shipping. Nobody is asking for permission.

In France, we set up committees to determine whether we’re allowed to be enthusiastic.

A dose of unapologetic madness is precisely what gives life meaning. Nobody gets out of bed in the morning for a reasonable goal. Great things are born when someone says “let’s go” while everyone else is explaining why it can’t be done.

Yes, Musk misses deadlines. Yes, setting foot on Mars sounds insane. Yes, building a semiconductor plant in three years borders on the miraculous. We know all that. But it’s by refusing to treat the impossible as a conclusion that we eventually make it possible.

Our chronic pessimism pushes us to look for “partner-guardians.” The result: we paralyze ourselves.

Look at SCAF. This future fighter jet, meant to succeed the Rafale, has been clinically dead for years. Dassault wants to keep the lead role and the intellectual property. On the German side, Airbus is demanding more control and more technology transfers. A hundred billion euros on the table, and we’re still squabbling over slices of the cake instead of baking it. I’ve already written about this at length here.

Same story with IRIS², the European constellation of secure satellites. Germany quietly announces its own network of 100 military satellites in low orbit, with Rheinmetall, OHB, and Airbus. A purely national project estimated at 10 billion euros, running in parallel with the European program. Berlin wants its own sovereign “military Starlink.” So much for integration and pooling resources.

It’s always the same refrain: whenever France champions an ambitious project (nuclear power, a fighter jet, space), our “partners” play along… right up until the moment they can go it alone with their own national champions.

The brilliant elite we train to perfection would rather manage decline tidily. The “PowerPoint of decline” over a slightly delusional vision that might fail. We turn out first-rate analysts who can demonstrate why something won’t work, and rarely the builders willing to keep iterating even as they drive straight into a wall. This is exactly the mechanism I described in “La France des ordres.”

We lived through the Trente Glorieuses, then fifty years of relative stagnation. We bureaucratized innovation, prized institutionalized comfort over mission, preferred equality in mediocrity to inequality in prosperity (Tocqueville saw it coming long ago). And we never replaced the grand national narrative with a new one.

The common thread? We have collectively lost the cultural permission to dream big.

And yet, pockets of vitality do exist: Mistral building its sovereign cloud, nuclear power getting back on track despite Brussels, Dassault holding firm on the Rafale, entrepreneurs shipping in silence. I wrote about this in “Artificial Intelligence: National Doom and Gloom, or a New Renaissance?”

The choice is simple: keep regulating the future before it even exists, or decide to take full part in it. Willingly or not.

We don’t need to wait for Brussels or Berlin to give us permission. We can start building, iterating, and taking calculated risks, right here and right now.

Because meaning doesn’t come from reasonable caution.

It comes from boldness owned without apology.

And frankly, it’s high time we remembered that.