France has made itself irrelevant on the world stage

By Bret Stephens

There’s an old joke about papal pronouncements on premarital sex: If you don’t play the game, you don’t make the rules. Something similar might be said about France’s foreign policy.

Last week, President Emmanuel Macron told a radio show that “countries should stop shipping weapons to Israel for use in Gaza.” Though he insists he’s committed to ensuring Israel’s security, what he’s really asking for is an arms embargo: You can’t deny Israel weapons for potential use in one conflict while not also denying it those weapons for use in the others.

There was a time when such a call would have mattered. In the Jewish state’s early years, France supplied it with some of its most significant weaponry, including advanced jets and, according to many accounts, vital support for its nascent nuclear weapons program.

That changed on the eve of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, when President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East that mainly hit Israel. He also accused “the Jews” of being “at all times, an elite people, sure of itself and dominating.”

Since then, France’s contribution to Israel’s security has essentially been zero. France reportedly still sells Israel about $20 million worth of components of weapons systems, an insignificant fraction of the country’s overall military procurement budget. But the French government did supply Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with a nuclear reactor, which the Israeli air force destroyed in 1981. France has also been notably remiss in trying to enforce the terms of the U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, which was supposed to disarm Hezbollah and keep it away from Lebanon’s border with Israel.

One result of that nonfeasance is the war now raging in Lebanon. Another is that pronouncements on the Middle East conflict by the president of France just don’t matter, other than as feckless virtue-signaling toward segments of the French public and the Francophone world. As for Paris’ once-considerable influence on public opinion in Israel, consider that Macron’s comments came days after Iran tried to hit it with a barrage of nearly 200 ballistic missiles and on the eve of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 pogrom.

Whatever else one thinks about Israel, it remains an example of how a small country can make a big difference in world affairs, not least by confronting the threat Iran poses to the entire free world. Under Macron, France has become the opposite: a big country that makes no difference.