With his jolting statement that sending Western troops to Ukraine “should not be ruled out,” President Emmanuel Macron of France spread dismay among allies and forced a reckoning on Europe’s future.
By lurching forward without building consensus, Macron may have done more to illustrate Western divisions than to achieve the “strategic ambiguity” he says is needed to keep President Vladimir Putin of Russia guessing.
Countries from the U.S. to Sweden rejected the deployment of troops, and Macron’s statement underlined Franco-German differences on the war when Chancellor Olaf Scholz ruled out not only the deployment of German forces but of any “ground troops from European countries or NATO.”
At home, where Macron’s popularity has fallen and he does not command an absolute majority in Parliament, he faced an outcry over an apparent policy shift decided on without any national debate, a recurrent issue throughout a highly centralized, top-down presidency.
