Emmanuel Macron just announced that France is going to build more nuclear warheads and offer Europe a “nuclear umbrella” to protect them from Russia. This is the same France that couldn’t protect itself from Germany in 1940 without us bailing them out. Now they want to be the nuclear shield for a continent that can’t even keep its tanks running.

“To be free, one needs to be feared,” declared Macron from a military base housing France’s ballistic missile submarines. Feared by whom, exactly? The only people who should be scared are French taxpayers when they find out how much this costs.

Here’s the background. NATO just agreed that all member nations need to spend 5% of their GDP on defense by 2035. For context, most of these countries have been struggling to hit the old 2% target that they agreed to back in 2014. The average European NATO member was spending about 1.9% of GDP on defense in 2024. They promised 2% over a decade ago and still couldn’t get there. Now they’re supposed to more than double that?

Good luck with that.

Macron’s big plan involves increasing France’s nuclear arsenal above its current 290 warheads — the first expansion since 1992 — and allowing French nuclear-armed jets to temporarily deploy to allied countries. Eight European nations have signed up for this program, including Germany, Britain, Poland, and five others. France and Germany even created a “nuclear steering group,” which sounds very official for two countries that can barely organize a tank battalion between them.

Speaking of Germany — you remember the Bundeswehr, right? These are the folks who sent their soldiers to a NATO exercise with broomsticks painted black and strapped to their armored vehicles because they didn’t have enough guns. Not a joke. Not satire. German soldiers literally used broomsticks instead of machine guns during a NATO rapid response exercise. Forty-one percent of the troops lacked pistols they’d need for actual deployment.

These are the people Macron wants to protect with French nukes.

It gets better. Germany was supposed to have 44 Leopard 2 tanks ready for NATO’s rapid response force. They showed up with nine. Nine! Out of 44! They also used regular Mercedes vans as stand-ins for armored personnel carriers because they didn’t have enough of those either. Two-thirds of the entire German armed forces are classified as non-operational.

But don’t worry — they’ve got a nuclear steering group now.

Then there’s Italy. When NATO announced the 5% target, Italy’s government had a brilliant idea: classify a €13.5 billion bridge to Sicily as military spending. A bridge. To meet NATO defense targets. The U.S. ambassador to NATO called it “creative accounting” and told them to knock it off. Italy sheepishly backed down, but the fact that their first instinct was to count a bridge as a tank tells you everything about how seriously these people take their own defense.

And Spain? Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez just flat-out refused. He got a formal exemption from the 5% target, capping Spain’s defense spending at 2.1% of GDP. His argument was simple: spending 5% on defense is “incompatible with our welfare state.”

At least he’s honest about it. Spain would rather let America keep paying for their defense so they can keep their six-week vacations and retire at 62.

Sanchez actually did the math on what 5% would mean for Spain, and it’s devastating. Going from 2% to 5% by 2035 would require an extra €350 billion. That means either raising taxes on every worker by €3,000 per year, eliminating unemployment and maternity benefits entirely, cutting all pensions by 40%, or slashing education spending in half.

Read that list again. Those aren’t scare tactics — those are the actual budget options when you suddenly have to pay for your own military after 75 years of freeloading.

Here’s the thing nobody in Europe wants to say out loud: their beloved welfare states were built on the back of American defense spending. Ever since NATO was founded, Europeans got to pour money into free healthcare, generous pensions, and lavish social programs because Uncle Sam was footing the defense bill. President Eisenhower was complaining about European freeloading back in 1952 — said “the American well had run dry” — and nothing changed for seven decades because we kept paying anyway.

That subsidy is ending. And when it does, European voters are going to face a choice their politicians have been avoiding since the Cold War: Do you want an army, or do you want to retire at 60?

Mark my words — within five years, you’re going to see European governments gutting pension programs, cutting healthcare budgets, and slashing social benefits to fund militaries they should have been funding all along. And the riots that follow are going to make the Yellow Vest protests in France look like a wine tasting.

The continent that spent 75 years lecturing America about how “civilized” their social programs are is about to discover that those programs were paid for with American tax dollars. You’re welcome, Europe. The broomsticks are on us.