00:10He'll be speaking just days after his army chief of staff said that Russia considers France to be its number one enemy in Europe.
00:17Our international affairs commentator, Doug Herbert, is with me in the studio to tell us more.
00:21So, Doug, what can we expect to hear in this address tonight?
00:24Well, first of all, the army chief of staff that you just cited, Thierry Burckhardt, he stole Macron's thunder, right?
00:30It was quite a rare press conference, you know, for sort of a chief of staff of the French military to come out there,
00:35call the journalists together and say, I just want you all to know that France is considered to be the public enemy number one for Russia,
00:40the worst, biggest threat to Russia in Europe.
00:43So that sort of sets the groundwork.
00:45What is Macron going to talk about tonight?
00:47Essentially, if I had to give a title, if I were a speechwriter for Macron,
00:50I would call this everything, everywhere, all at once.
00:54And what I mean by that is that is now in the new military strategic review that Macron is going to lay out for the French nation.
01:01That is essentially the view of the world right now.
01:03It is a world with everywhere you turn, all at the same time, the threats just keep on coming.
01:08It's not just a single threat like during the Cold War.
01:11There's one sort of superpower seen as posing a big menace.
01:15It's everywhere.
01:15So whether we're talking about Vladimir Putin's imperialist expansionist Russia raising a war,
01:21unprovoked war of aggression against a European country, against Ukraine right now, giant threat for France,
01:27the rise, obviously, of China in the Indo-Pacific area, the recent clashes between India and Pakistan,
01:35the new technologies, the hypersonic missiles, the cyber attacks, artificial intelligence attacks on the infrastructure,
01:42the cyber infrastructure of harmonies and government infrastructure, and also, lest we forget on the other side of the Atlantic,
01:49Donald Trump in his America First, MAGA America, essentially yanking the post-World War II security umbrella away from Europe.
01:57Not entirely abandoning it, right?
01:59Not saying goodbye, guys, but basically saying, you have to look out for yourselves.
02:03You can't count on us to be there to come running to us anymore to provide your security.
02:09That's what he's going to be saying.
02:10He's basically going to say, we need to spend more.
02:12Yeah, we already do spend quite a bit on our military.
02:14I know you guys.
02:15I know that we're all under quite a lot of duress right now financially.
02:18France's economic condition is not good.
02:21We are a basket case of Europe right now trying to get our act together.
02:25But we have to put that aside because they're two completely separate issues.
02:29We have to rearm our army.
02:31We have to have more weapons, more material, more men.
02:34We have to be able to meet the threats of the 21st century, not one, not two, not three, multiple threats coming at us all at once.
02:42He says it's really a responsibility.
02:43It's a tricky sell, not an easy sell.
02:45And I'll just say what's making it harder is the French military, Jenny, has already been seriously ramping up its military budget in the past seven years.
02:53Since Macron came to power in 2017, we have had a nearly 50 percent increase in French military spending, about 46 percent increase.
03:02Last year alone in the current budget, over three billion euros added to the budget for that year.
03:09It's right now at about 47 billion euros.
03:11Now, you raise your eyes and say, wow, that's a lot, isn't it?
03:13They really need more.
03:14Just to give you a sense, the United States, yes, far larger economy, military, everything, $886 billion for their military budget last year.
03:25So by that standard, France is not even nearly a tenth.
03:28It's like, what, a twentieth, a thirtieth of France's U.S. military spending.
03:33So they need to do more.
03:34They need to do it now.
03:35Clear and present threats, clear and present dangers have to separate our economic duress from the military threats all around us.
03:41And just going back to that press conference by the French army chief, how credible is that warning from Thierry Bourquin that Russia sees France as its primary enemy in Europe?
03:51It's credible, not simply because the French army chief of staff is saying it, but essentially Vladimir Putin, if you listen to his own speeches, he has all but said he believes he sees NATO more largely as the giant existential threat to Russia.
04:07He sees NATO encroaching on Russia.
04:09NATO may be seen by the West as a defensive alliance, protecting itself from Russian incursions.
04:14Russia sees it just the opposite.
04:16And the whole Ukraine war, from Putin's perspective, is really aimed at undermining, destabilizing, weakening, if you will, Europe as a whole, but also, in a sense, pushing back NATO, weakening and undermining NATO.
04:28The threat is very credible because in Putin's world view, absolutely, NATO and the West in general, and France in particular, because Macron has taken a very sort of stand-up position.
04:39He's gone.
04:40He's come a long way since the day of the long table negotiations with Putin when they were sitting there, you know, and he was calling Putin again and again, trying to negotiate with him, trying to hear him out, really trying to have a rational dialogue with him.
04:53Those days are long gone.
04:55Macron has really stood up and been a very, very forceful proponent on the European stage for taking a very forceful posture towards a Russia that he sees as not just expansionist but led by a man who is full of his own imperialistic hubris and will not back down at anything.
05:11So Europe has no chance but to defend itself.
05:14So when the army chief of staff, Thierry Bergard, says that Russia sees France as its number one enemy in Europe, it's very credible.
05:22It's very credible.
05:23I don't know if there's a ranking that Putin has on his wall of enemy one, two, three, or four, but it's plausible.
05:28Put it that way.
05:29And the other thing he said, which also makes people sit up and take notice, is by 2030, five years from now, he sees Russia as being really on Europe's doorstep, a very credible threat, a credible threat of perhaps an incursion into EU and into NATO members, such as the front lines, Poland and the Baltic states.
05:47Those are all credible threats now being said publicly out loud by France's top military brass.
