FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE -ÂWhile the 2027 presidential election is fast approaching, the French political debate remains totally disconnected from the real challenges our country faces on the international scene, believes Arié Bensemhoun, director of ELNET France.
Arié Bensemhoun has been the general director of ELNET France (European Leadership Network) since 2011. He led his career in the private sector as a consultant in strategic communications, public affairs and international relations.
One year before the 2027 presidential election, the French public debate is illustrated by a tragic disconnection in the face of the major strategic divides which are reshaping the world. While a high-intensity war rages on European soil, the Middle East burns, and the International of Tyrannies – this heterogeneous arc, uniting the implacable hegemonism of Beijing, the bloody irredentism of Moscow, the apocalyptic fanaticism of Tehran and the militarized paranoia of Pyongyang – is strengthening and weaving its web on all continents, our country seems paralyzed.
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We have collectively – through laziness, cowardice, or both – become accustomed to treating the symptoms by stubbornly refusing to look at the root of our problems. Political debates continue to dodge the question of the sustainability of the nation to focus only on the internal manifestations of our weakness: the price of gasoline, stifling inflation, the shortages that threaten our daily lives. Our leaders, who have become simple managers of decline, no longer have the courage to explain to the sovereign people that these economic torments find their source first and foremost in our geopolitical abdication. If our wallet is empty, it is because hostile actors are holding our sea lanes, our supply chains and our strategic interests hostage. Inflation is very often only the monetary translation of our small capitulations and our assumed dependence on those who despise us and aspire to our downfall.
Faced with the shaking of the world, the French political landscape is exposing the extent of its geopolitical and strategic deculturation. The contenders for power no longer behave as strategists, nor as protectors of the Nation, but as simple electoral entrepreneurs, blinded and manipulated by their own ideological biases. Everyone locks themselves into a dogma, fleeing the responsibilities of power.
In 2027, France will have to make a sovereign choice between resignation and audacity, between assumed downgrading and a return to power.
On the war in the Middle East, the far left is locked into a Pavlovian anti-American-Israeliism which goes so far as to make the totalitarian and bloodthirsty nature of the Tehran regime invisible. Socialists and ecologists delight in a penal angelism, imagining themselves able to contain and neutralize a ballistic power with genocidal designs through the simple slow and powerless cogs of international justice. The government bloc suffers from a profound avoidance syndrome. Rather than accepting the harshness of a civilizational conflict, he reduces crises to miserable accounting equations and multiplies the incantatory and disconnected calls for “de-escalation”, refusing to see that this softness feeds tyrannies. As for the national right, it displays a superficial intransigence towards the Islamic Republic of Iran which struggles to mask its historical connections with other anti-Western revisionist powers allied with the mullahs.
This intellectual shipwreck of the entire political class contributes with disastrous consistency to the process of psychological disarmament of France. However, this atony is less a failure of men and women than the consequence of an institutional anomaly that has become deadly. The sanctification of diplomacy and defense within the sacrosanct “reserved domain” of the head of state ended up atrophying our democracy. Forged under the aegis of General de Gaulle and frozen during cohabitation, this customary practice granted the President of the Republic almost absolute preeminence, systematically keeping aside the national representation of Elysian decisions.
This hypercentralization has given rise to the institutional irresponsibility of our political class. Deprived of real counter-power on diplomatic action and military strategy, it turns away from the complexity of the world and refuses to train its executives in geopolitics, thus delivering to voters programs of distressing vacuity. But above all, this system cuts the nation off from the inherent violence of the world. Without ever being seriously involved in the definition of the use of our forces, French citizens suffer this foreign policy more than they support it, or even understand it. In the absence of state education on the exercise of legitimate force, a growing part of our public opinion remains vulnerable to falsely pacifist propaganda. She becomes incapable of understanding that the use of force, far from being a failure, is sometimes the only shield to prevent infinitely greater chaos. Today it is vital to parliamentize the definition of our major strategy and to put an end to this anesthetic myth of the “reserved domain”, the only way to finally force our elected officials to look at the horizon.
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But even more, it is the very soul of French diplomacy which must be refounded, and with it, our visceral incapacity to conceive and assume the use of force. Narcotized by the illusion of peace dividends, by the illusion of pacification through sweet trade and UN treaties, we have forgotten the implacable lesson, offered by Vladimir Putin’s Russia in 2022, that economic interdependence never disarms imperialism. Messianic theocracies and revanchist empires see in our pacifist hesitations only the admission of our moral weakness and our civilizational decadence.
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The reality, however harsh it may be, is that totalitarianism only retreats when it collides with the steel of weapons and the determination of courageous leaders. The coercive military tool remains, in dark hours, the ultimate argument for ensuring respect for law and human dignity. It is imperative for the survival of France and Europe to rehabilitate, without complexes or false modesty, the use of just force. Having an advanced army and the ultimate life insurance that is the nuclear umbrella is of absolutely no use if the panicked fear of media criticism, or the irrational cult of sclerotic international organizations, prohibits us from brandishing the threat and assuming its use.
In 2027, France will have to make a sovereign choice between resignation and audacity, between assumed downgrading and a return to power. The nation cannot hope to survive on the margins of History by simply deploring the misfortunes of a world that it no longer tries to shape. Our start will only come if an implacable doctrinal revolution takes place within us. We have strategic assets that very few nations on this earth possess: our autonomous nuclear deterrent, our centuries-old diplomacy, our elite professional army, our seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. But these instruments of greatness are in vain if they sleep in the setting of our reluctance; they depreciate themselves in each crisis in which they are not engaged.
It is time to embrace this ethical realism, the only compass capable of preparing us for the globalized war which is taking shape more and more each year between the democratic bloc and the bloc of tyrannies. This existential surge will require a massive mobilization of our resources to rebuild the critical mass essential to our armies, and a complete overhaul of our thought software. At the dawn of 2027, it will be up to the sovereign people to demand of those who aspire to lead them that they stop being sorry spectators of our decline, and once again become the resolute architects of our destiny.
