On Saturday evening, I reluctantly read an article in Foreign Affairs by Ivo Daalder, Barack Obama’s NATO envoy and a Clinton-era NSC official.

Daalder, whose academic credentials include master’s degrees from Oxford and Georgetown and a PhD from MIT, is perhaps best known for his role in championing Operation Unified Protector, the NATO mission that facilitated the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

In 2012, Daalder famously (or infamously) hailed the operation as “the right way to run an intervention.” “By any measure, NATO succeeded in Libya,” he declared, in a piece co-authored by retired Navy admiral and Carlyle Group partner James G. Stavridis. “It saved tens of thousands of lives from almost certain destruction.”

Gosh, where to begin? Whatever you want to say about Gaddafi — and you’ll be hard-pressed to say much, if anything, good — what ensued in Libya following his bloody, internationally-broadcast demise can only be described as an unmitigated disaster. Just ask UN humanitarian coordinator Yacoub El Hillo, who in 2020 lamented the “incalculable” cost to Libya’s civilian population from the civil war.

After a dozen years, the conflict dead-ended in a ceasefire. Today, the country remains divided between a UN-recognized government in Tripoli and a parallel, Benghazi-based administration that operates as a military dictatorship under Gaddafi lieutenant–turned–coup plotter–turned–Langley resident–turned–warlording oil baron Khalifa Haftar.

I suppose “success” is in the eye of the beholder, but through a 20/20 hindsight lens, I reckon it’s fair to say Operation Unified Protector wasn’t a success “by any measure,” as Daalder prematurely professed. Certainly not if your success metrics include “measures” of political stability.

That’s Daalder. I mean, there’s more to Ivo than that, obviously. But unfortunately for him — and I don’t have a lot of sympathy because this is what happens when you pull a W. and declare “Mission Accomplished” on a foreign intervention before you know how it’s ultimately going to turn out — he’ll forever be remembered as the man who called Libya, which subsequently descended into a failed state, “a model intervention.”

If you can suffer through Daalder’s 2012 missive (which ain’t easy), you’ll discover that his real point is to emphasize the importance of NATO burden sharing and interoperability. That’s one of Daalder’s calling cards, so it comes as no surprise that his new Foreign Affairs piece argues for more alliance integration to confront the Vladimir Putin threat and cope with a United States that most members believe is no longer committed to the mutual defense.

This is an oversimplification, but Daalder’s proposed solution leans quite heavily on the idea that France, which this year launched (no pun intended) an initiative to forward-deploy nuclear-capable aircraft for the purposes of assisting in allied deterrence, should join the Nuclear Planning Group, NATO’s senior body for consultation and decision-making on matters related to nuclear weapons.

Context is key: Although France reentered NATO’s integrated military command structure in 2009, the country’s nuclear policy remains independent, which Daalder argues is an impediment to deterrence in an era when the American nuclear umbrella can’t be taken for granted.

The forward-deployment initiative mentioned above is too ad hoc, Daalder says, to be useful. As he puts it, “these parallel bilateral discussions not only create confusion and distrust about Paris’s true intentions among partners; they also fail to foster the cohesion that could come from a collective European nuclear deterrence dialogue.”

His solution: France needs to join the NPG like, yesterday. “Doing so would not automatically place its nuclear capabilities under NATO command and control, but it would give European partners a better understanding of French thinking and afford France more knowledge of European requirements for deterrence and reassurance,” he writes.

There’s a lot more to Daalder’s analysis, and I’ll leave it to readers to peruse his exposition in full. But as noted above, his blueprint for — and this is his characterization — a “nuclear deal that could save Europe” puts a lot of stock in assumptions about a stable France that’s actually interested in establishing an obligation — binding or not, unspoken of otherwise — related to Paris’s nukes.

The first problem with any such assumptions is that a stable France isn’t guaranteed. Just ask a “burned-out government building” or consult the smoldering husk of a torched vehicle parked along “streets littered with shattered glass,” as The New York Times described the aftermath of this weekend’s protests, which spread to more than 100 locales in the country.

From Lyon to Nantes to Paris, they were out, about and angry. And they weren’t just students this time. Saturday’s mayhem had everything you “want” in a nationwide melee: Vandalism, pillaging, arson and, of course, riot police battling demonstrators dressed in black and donning animal masks.

Politically, the violence was a boon to Marine Le Pen’s shoo-in presidential bid. As discussed here earlier this month, the student protests are an opportunity not just for France’s likely next president to play the law and order card, but to blame the establishment for putting the country in such a desperate situation in the first place, and to point the finger at the far-left for stoking the violence. That’s exactly what she did.

“Loot, ransack, destroy, attack law enforcement: The rioters have once again poisoned the demonstrations in defense of purchasing power,” Le Pen said, adding that,

Legitimate social demands have once again been held hostage by the far-left and the speeches of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s deputies, who, by legitimizing violence, viewing order as oppression and disorder as a right, seek to plunge the country into chaos.

Faced with this incendiary strategy, the French people, who can no longer bear being caught between the austerity and fiscal hammering of those in power and the insurrectionary activists, must hold out for a few more months.

We will free them from Macronist toxic policies and protect them from the violence of the far-left.

Again: Saturday’s otherwise unfortunate events are a veritable godsend for Le Pen. Only she can liberate the French people from the failed policies of France’s political center, and only she can protect citizens from anarchical leftist thugs. That’s her message. And it’ll resonate.

Although I’d like to believe Le Pen will rise to the occasion if (when) she ascends the Élysée next year, I can’t say I’m optimistic, certainly not as it relates to fostering rah-rah, NATO camaraderie or greater European integration, the latter being antithetical to her platform.

Le Pen, fairly or not, is characterized by critics as a Putin sympathizer and she’s made no secret of her intention to cut off aid to Ukraine. “This funding will stop, and it is a matter of honesty to tell [Volodymyr Zelensky] the truth,” she said last week. In an interview with the FT, she described prospective EU membership for Ukraine as akin to Europe “committing harakiri.”

Meanwhile, The Telegraph reported over the weekend that Kyiv and Brussels are rushing to implement new sanctions on Moscow as part of “contingency planning” for a Le Pen presidency. As one official put it, this is “the last opportunity [to impose sanctions] because of the French elections.”

Recall that the structure of the French government concentrates control of the country’s foreign policy in the presidency. And only the president can authorize the use of France’s nukes.

So, color me skeptical that France is the answer to the following questions posed in Foreign Affairs by Daalder:

• What if Russia attacked NATO territory and Washington told Europe it was on its own?
• What if Moscow used nuclear threats, implicit or explicit, to try to force Europe to end its support for Ukraine?

Those scenarios, Daalder cautioned, aren’t “far-fetched.” I’d quibble with that depending on the definition of “far-fetched,” but I take his point: Neither scenario’s out of the question or so implausible as to be unworthy even of a thought experiment.

But Daalder’s thought experiment reaches the wrong conclusion in assessing that NATO can or should depend on France to help shield Europe from the nuclear rain in the absence of the American umbrella.

In the interview mentioned above, the FT asked Le Pen whether Russian aggression is in fact the main threat to European security. “You know, I’m not in Mr. Putin’s head,” she responded. “And I don’t know Mr. Putin’s plans.”

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