The French mantra is strategic autonomy. We are allies with the USA, we are not vassals of the USA and we do not want to depend on anybody else to defend our own interests or our own agenda. This is why the French army has independent expeditionary and nuclear deterrent capabilities and why nearly all of our military kit is designed and produced either locally or in partnership with nearby European countries.

It's not that we don't trust the Americans per se (although opinions may differ on that topic), but we don't want to have to.

ArianeGroup also manufactures the M51 missile that goes inside our SSBNs and unlike the Brits we do not accept depending on Americans supplying us with the missiles for our nuclear deterrent.

It seems just a ton of money and R&D down the drain developing something already obsolete for some tiny and very theoretical advantage. It seems more sensible to lose a tiny bit of independence for a small window of time and instead use the money to develop an actual state of the art rocket.

De Gaulle would be rolling in his grave hearing this. The point is not about economic efficiency. The point is that we're not one embargo on foreign components or systems away from crippling our capabilities and surrendering our ability to act independently.

The Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier almost got immobilized back in the early 2000s due to withholding of spare parts from the USA because they were pissed we called bullshit on their Iraq WMD claims. The USA routinely uses ITAR as a pressuring tactic to stop European weapon sales to foreign countries, which is why we're actively scrubbing every last ITAR component from all of our weapon systems.

Just because we're allies doesn't mean that the other party has or will have our best interests at heart. The Americans have proven to be quite temperamental and under-handed when our strategic objectives aren't aligned with theirs.

It is absolutely not a "theoretical advantage". America is not an altruistic partner when it comes to strategic products.

Wish more NATO members had that attitude.

>we are not vassals of the USA

Aren't you? In 2003 Russia, Germany and France were strongly against illegal American invasion of Iraq. The US invaded anyway, ruining the country. What have France and Germany done about that?

France among many nations called bullshit on the WMD claims, we threatened to veto the UN Security Council resolution authorizing a military intervention and we refused to get involved in that mess.

The fact that the US government decided to unilaterally invade Iraq anyway is not our responsibility to bear. What could France have done more, try and enact economic sanctions or wage war against the USA over this?

"What could France have done more"

Everything it is doing now towards Russia.

Giving weapons and ammo to Saddam Hussein?

Besides the logistical, economical and industrial challenge of supplying enough kit to even make a dent against the expeditionary forces of the USA, which were still doped sky-high on Cold War hand-me-downs, that sounds like a terrible idea.

Hussein's Iraq was not Zelensky's Ukraine and not just because of strategic reasons. The Gulf War happened because Hussein wasn't a friendly neighbor to Kuwait.

You are confusing the Gulf War, which was in defense of Kuwait, with the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on false pretenses.

"Giving weapons and ammo to Saddam Hussein?"

The US is giving weapons to Azov [0], Ukrainian neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade

They did not participate?

That was very brave

Not very but look at the countries participating. Weaker or intertwined (UK)

"Weaker"

Poland, being Poland, was after Iraqi oil [0].

France kept doing business as usual with the US despite American illegal war.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3043330.stm

Yeah, so ? Did you expect France to fight the US ?

France is a nuclear power. But you are right, a vassal can't fight his suzerain.

Simple solution - get a decent launcher instead & deploy your nukes in orbit. Problem solved! :)

Sometimes nation states might disagree on what should be done in certain circumstances. An example of this is 39 years ago on this day the French government blew up a civilian boat in New Zealand [0]. Crazy but true. Having independent capabilities is part of being a sovereign rather than vassal state.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

The US has been an unreliable partner since Bush Jr. became the president. Every 4 years, there is a real risk that things will go wrong.

It's more complicated than that. Even before W Bush, the United States didn't hesitate to twist the arm of its partners in economic matters.

France and the USA may be allies, but economic relations have been complicated for over 40 years. The USA has no hesitation in interfering with or sabotaging the French economy (aukus subs, alstom, airbus defense, galileo), claiming that its law is extraterritorial in order to condemn company directors, and all the drity tricks imaginable.

This is what led many European companies and gouv in the 90's and 00's to prefer partnerships with Chinese and Russsian companies.

Even the British, with their special relationship, have completely isolated their nuclear industry from all US companies for fear of being screwed and at the same time signed partnership with CGN in China.

That's what happens when your group of nations freeloads on a superpower for their defense.

> Are the Europeans wworried that "between now and 2030s" the US will cut off their access to space?

Ariane Group is first and foremost a defense company owned by the French state, Germany and several other European countries.

Ariane group designs and manufactures French ICBMs. This is a significant part of its business.

The French government wants a sovereign means of putting heavy military satellites into orbit (twice the weight of the Hubble telescope).

The French state will never let its intelligence, early warning and nuclear deterrent depend on the United States.

Looking at the geopolitical situation both next door and across the pond the answer is a yes.

Also keeping the expertise and the people is a critical factor.

Not really, but European countries launch military payloads and other strategic stuff like Galileo satellites and communication satellites.

All are friends with NATO, but that does not exclude spying and all kinds of shenanigans. US spies non-Five Eye countries mercilessly. They get caught sometimes. Like the systematic wiretapping trough Danish cables from 2012-2014.

In the event of another Trump presidency (or a successor in spirit) getting cut off for military purposes is probably more like expected, and in a post-NATO world Russia might get a lot more aggressive towards western Europe. That's probably what is behind most such time horizons right now, but even in the mid to long term, rocket tech will remain highly strategic (e.g. for nuclear weapon delivery), and capabilities like that need to be built up well before any conflict escalates.

>in a post-NATO world Russia might get a lot more aggressive towards western Europe

Why not the opposite? NATO is a threat to Russia, Western Europe alone -- not as much.

If your dream is to restore Russia to its imperial greatness, there's an awful lot of EU countries that need to be gobbled up along the way, so France is quite likely to be willing to help a Russian-Estonia war even without NATO.

NATO is only a threat to Russia insofar as it poses an obstacle to Russia gobbling up its neighbors.

If.

NATO is purely defensive, it won't invade Russia. It only threatens Putin's empire rebuilding dreams. Without NATO he is free to rebuild and expand Russia's empire.

"NATO is purely defensive"

And from whom it was defending itself in Serbia and Libya?

The point is it was never going to launch an attack on that certain very large country to the East. All the rhetorical moaning and puffing of its current incredibly thin-skinned and backward-looking regime notwithstanding.

So why lie about NATO being "purely defensive"?

Beats me, it wasn't my post.

The main thing is that Russia needs to pull its troops out of all of Ukraine; return those 20,000 abducted kids; set and adhere to a timetable for paying full reparations; and re-affirm its commitment to respecting the inviolable sovereignty of all of its neighbors, permanently and irrevocably.

After that we can dissect past NATO transgressions, and fix all the poorly thought / ahistorical comments on HN.

That's clearly is not what Russia needs.

And Germany once thought it "needed" to regain its colonies, and France once thought its very survival would be threatened if it didn't hold onto Algeria, and so on.

The US once thought it needed to prevent Soviet nukes from appearing on Cuba, almost started WW3 over it and got what it needed.

That's what I mean by backward-looking. Putin is so obsessed with his perceived stature and "correcting" past humiliations that he's willing to create a completely fictional crisis and drive his country into a never-ending meatgrinder war just to prove some abstract geopolitical point.

Perhaps you don't know that the US in turn had to remove its nukes from Turkey and Italy.

This just goes to show how incomparable the situation is with the Cuban missile crisis. The US has nothing to remove, because their nuclear weapons stand where they stood 40 years ago.

>Are the Europeans wworried that "between now and 2030s" the US will cut off their access to space?

Both US presidential candidates are not mentally well. Who knows what they might do.