Emmanuel Macron

President of France since 2017 and leader of Renaissance (centrist), Emmanuel Macron has made European strategic autonomy the organising doctrine of his Foreign Policy. He has been the European leader most willing to test conventional limits on Western military commitments, keeping open debates others have closed and deploying France's unique constitutional position as the only EU state to have invoked Article 42.7 of the EU Treaty (after the 2015 Paris attacks) as diplomatic leverage in collective-defence discussions.

Macron opened French bases to US forces and ordered the carrier Charles de Gaulle east, the most substantial Western military commitment beyond the US-Israeli axis. France lost its first soldier to the Iran conflict when Chief Warrant Officer Arnaud Frion was killed by a drone in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Macron co-chaired the Paris conference and the EU informal leaders' summit in Cyprus on 23-24 April, where Article 42.7 was placed on the agenda. The Paris initiative grew from 40 to 51 nations by 17 April. A leaked Pentagon email named Macron alongside Starmer for refusing to join the US Hormuz blockade. France's unique Article 42.7 precedent gives him leverage in any collective-defence discussion the Cyprus track produces.

At the G7's Kananaskis summit on 15 June, which closed without a joint communique as Trump Left early, Macron credited G7 pressure with speeding the Iran ceasefire, a claim Trump publicly denied. That diplomatic capital bought little in Tehran: on 1 July, Iran's foreign ministry excluded every European government, France included, from Ali Khamenei's state funeral delegation of more than 30 nations, seating Russia's Dmitry Medvedev and Pakistan's Shehbaz Sharif instead and accusing Europe of standing 'on the wrong side of history'.

Macron committed eight SAMP/T NG air defence systems for Ukrainian battlefield testing and has kept the debate on European troop deployment alive. On 26 March 2026 he warned that the Iran war 'must not divert' support from Ukraine, directly responding to Pentagon plans to redirect arms funding.

On 24 May 2026, Russia launched its first dual-Oreshnik barrage on Kyiv: two Oreshnik intermediate-range Ballistic Missiles fired simultaneously, anchoring a 690-weapon attack that was the most destructive single strike on Kyiv of the full-scale war. Macron condemned the attack, reinforcing his position that European security in both theatres is indivisible. His dual engagement across the Iran and Ukraine conflicts reflects his doctrine that European strategic autonomy requires France to remain visibly present in both.

On 7 June, Macron joined Starmer and Germany's Friedrich Merz in backing a five-point E3 framework with Zelenskyy that takes the current line of contact, not Ukraine's 1991 borders, as the negotiating baseline. At the G7's Evian summit on 15 June, opened as Trump pivoted attention back to Ukraine once the Iran deal was done, Macron argued any format must seat Ukraine and Russia together with both Europeans and Americans present.