France in the Era of Predators: Macron’s 2025 Doctrine |
On December 21, 2025, addressing French forces stationed in the United Arab Emirates, Emmanuel Macron told his soldiers that France now confronts an era of predators: “In the era of predators, we must be strong to be feared, and particularly strong on the seas”. For a liberal democratic president to identify the international system as predatory and announce his nation’s intention to be feared marks a striking departure from the vocabulary that has governed European politics since 1989. More significant is what followed. Macron announced that France would acquire a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, binding future governments to a forty-year commitment to global power projection. The question is whether this represents rhetorical provocation or systematic alignment of realist language with material policy?
Five months earlier, on July 13, 2025, Macron had addressed France’s armed forces at the Hôtel de Brienne with a different formulation. “To be free in this world you must be feared. To be feared you must be powerful”. The statement compressed into two sentences what Machiavelli argued across The Prince (1513) and the Discourses (1517). Liberty rests not on law or virtue but on the capacity to inspire fear in rivals. Fear requires power. Power requires an armed force. The chain is circular and self-reinforcing. Without power there is no fear. Without fear there is no freedom. For a liberal democratic president to articulate this logic marked conceptual rupture with liberal internationalism. Liberal theory since Kant has argued that law can replace force, that institutions can displace fear, that cooperation through norms makes deterrence obsolete. Macron’s formula eliminated institutions entirely from the causal chain linking freedom to power. He returned to classical realism’s insistence that survival depends on the capacity to threaten harm.
But July remained primarily philosophical. Macron articulated the realist principle without announcing new force structure, major operational deployments, or concrete validation that material policy would align with realist language. The formula raised the question whether France would back realist rhetoric with realist capability. The December speech provided the answer. Where July spoke philosophically of being feared, December identified the threat directly through biological metaphor. The predator metaphor carries specific theoretical weight. It positions the international system not as a competitive arena where states pursue advantage within rules, but as a Hobbesian state of nature where predation defines interaction. Predators do not compete under shared norms. They hunt. The prey cannot negotiate with predators or appeal to law. They can only achieve security through power sufficient to deter predation. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as a condition where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short precisely because no overarching authority constrains behaviour. In such conditions, security depends entirely on capability to threaten harm to potential aggressors. Biological metaphor applied to international politics eliminates any space for liberal institutionalism’s faith in normative constraint. There are no institutions in the food chain.
France’s strategic position became clear through the language. France is not a predator but potential prey that must become strong enough to avoid predation. Waltz (1979) described defensive realism in these terms. States seek security, not domination. But security in anarchic systems requires capability to inflict costs on rivals. The distinction matters. Offensive realism argues states maximize power to achieve hegemony. Defensive realism argues states seek sufficient power to deter aggression. Macron was articulating defensive realist logic. France does not aim to dominate Europe or project hegemonic power globally. France aims to make itself too dangerous to attack, too costly to coerce. The predator metaphor specifies the threat environment requiring this defensive posture. When the international system operates according to predatory logic rather than institutional constraint, security depends on demonstrated capacity for violence.
But this realist turn raises immediate questions about liberal democracy itself. If France speaks like realists, deploys forces like realists, and designs military structures on realist assumptions, what remains distinctively liberal about its international behaviour? The answer lies in the direction of coercion (Deudney, D. & Ikenberry, 2021). Liberal democracies can maintain constitutional constraints, rights protections, and rule of law internally while practicing realism externally. The critical difference from authoritarian regimes is that liberal democracies project fear and force outward to deter external threats while limiting state power internally to protect citizens. Authoritarian regimes project fear and force inward to coerce their own populations while claiming defensive posture externally. Macron’s formula that France must be feared is outward-facing. It aims to deter external predators to preserve domestic liberty. The domestic-international boundary preserves liberal character even when international behaviour follows realist logic.
That distinction faces sustained competitive pressure. Democracies facing existential threats have historically suspended liberal constraints temporarily. The durability of outward-only coercion depends on whether leaders can maintain the boundary between external deterrence and internal repression. In The Concept of the Political (1932), Carl Schmitt argued that liberalism seeks to neutralize the political system by displacing antagonism into law, economics, and morality. But the “political” cannot be neutralized because the friend-enemy distinction persists regardless of institutional design. When Macron stated that France must be feared, he acknowledged that enmity remains constitutive of international politics. Being feared........