by Pete Hegseth
Roosevelt closed his Sorbonne speech by saying, “For [France] to sink would be a loss to all the world.” Today, Roosevelt would surely say, “For America to sink would be to lose the entire free world.” America is—as a military and economic point of fact—the only remaining guarantor of Western civilization, and by extension, the only guarantor of freedom and free peoples in the world. Other countries may have strong militaries, but they are either not free or not prosperous. Some countries may have free and growing economies, but not the ability to project military power. Most Western countries today—saddled with massive welfare states and limited by anemic militaries—have neither. Others rely solely on the so-called international community. This means that the rise and fall of America is completely and inextricably linked to the rise and fall of human freedom. The two cannot be separated. America is the last and only linchpin of the free world. Only a restoration of American values and power will keep the world from sliding toward collectivism and stagnation.
The study of how and why great powers and civilizations rise and fall is a massive and inexact science, filling millennia of events and volumes of academic study. These pages won’t remotely attempt to enter that expansive debate, but instead will briefly illuminate developments in France since Teddy Roosevelt took the lectern at the Sorbonne in order to tease out the contours of why modern Western “great republics” decline. Dozens of other countries could be dissected in these pages—our close cousin Great Britain, or the modern case of the moribund and debt-ridden Greece—but given Roosevelt’s remarks, France provides a natural and telling case study.
WHY FRANCE FELL
In August 2013, 103 years after the New York Times hailed Teddy Roosevelt’s historic trip to France, a headline from the same paper read “A Proud Nation [France] Ponders How to Halt Its Slow Decline.” Once a far-flung empire, a global power in Roosevelt’s time, then a European leader, and now on the verge of “slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier,” the French Republic has seen grander days. France today ranks 28th out of the 60 most competitive economies in the world, has seen more than a thousand factories closed since 2009, and has record-high unemployment. Its public debt recently surpassed its entire economy, the central government accounts for more than half of the country’s gross domestic product, and they have serious demographic challenges in their midst. The active French military ranks 25th in size in the world—making it the largest standing military in Europe, but at 2 percent of its budget, still just one-sixth the size of the active U.S. military. France’s ability to project military power is so minimal that in order to commence its 2013 intervention in its former colony of Mali, U.S. military cargo planes literally had to transport French troops and equipment. Like all of Europe, France’s sovereignty is ultimately guaranteed by America.
The decline of great powers like France—and so many others throughout history—is not a historical happenstance, but instead the result of individual and collective choices. Some choices are conscious, many unconscious, and others uncontrollable. The weight and trajectory of history have, in fact, not been kind to great powers—and certainly have not been kind to France. As broadly outlined by German historian Oswald Spengler in his contemporaneous 1918 book Decline of the West, great civilizations—like great countries—go through identifiable seasons of maturation: from infancy (spring) to growth (summer) to peak (fall) and ultimately, and almost inevitably, to decline (winter). The history of France stretches back thousands of years, encompassing umpteen seasons. Even when applied only to France’s postrevolutionary history, the seasons develop in fits and starts; but no matter how one breaks up the progression of postrevolutionary France from spring to fall, there is little dispute the former great power is stuck in a prolonged winter of decline—with no spring in sight. From economics to governance to demographics to the military, France has seen its stature in the world slip, and slip rapidly. France ignored Teddy Roosevelt’s exhortation, and has paid the price for it.
It’s essential to note, when talking about great powers, that nothing happens in a vacuum. The rise and fall of countries can be taken only alongside the relative advances or degradations of other countries. It’s not enough to build wealth, effective governance, and a strong and technologically advanced military; great powers must be able to grow faster, larger, and more durably than their competitors, rivals, and enemies. Otherwise, advances in peacetime can still beget defeats in wartime. No country exemplifies this better than France, especially during the lead-up to World War I and its aftermath. France before World War I was much more powerful than it had been fifty years earlier, making substantial economic and military advances in the later part of the nineteenth century. Between 1871 and 1900 alone, France added 3.5 million square miles to its colonial territories and made impressive domestic economic gains. But, by the time World War I broke out, Germany had caught up to and far surpassed France in economic and military might. Stifled by small-scale production, outdated technology, and protectionist local markets, France’s economy was only half that of Germany’s at the war’s outset. Moreover, while Germany’s population increased by roughly 18 million in the twenty-five years before the war, France’s population crept up by only one million. France was growing, but Germany was exploding.
Nonetheless, with a skewed impression of the power balance with Germany, the French believed they could win the war. France was a nation that took great pride in its fighting spirit, the tricolored flag, and its long military tradition. In fact, as the drumbeat of the approaching Great War grew louder, there was talk about changing the French uniform. Most other countries were adopting less colorful uniforms—in recognition that bright colors and modern weapons were a bad combination. But not France. In the famous words of Minister of War Eugène Étienne to the French Parliament: “Eliminate the red trousers? Never! The red pants are France!” So French soldiers marched into the machine-gun fire of World War I wearing bright red pants, a fitting demonstration of their predicament.
As unprepared as they were for the horrors of modern combat, the French fought valiantly in World War I. With the Germans threatening Paris, the entire fleet of Parisian taxicabs joined in a massive twenty-four-hour effort to rush more and more French men to the front, saving the city. The stand against the Germans also may have saved the Allied war effort, as the fighting quickly settled into four years of trench warfare. So many young men died in the Great War that the French people felt they had “lost” an entire generation. They mobilized 8,410,000 citizens, and suffered 1.3 million dead and more than 6 million casualties—more than 73 percent of those mobilized—the highest rate in the war except for Russia. Following that carnage, France was unable to maintain its martial spirit in time to fend off a vengeful and resurrected German Reich. The “global community” was unwilling to step in and stop the rebirth of the German war machine as it began to churn out tanks and planes, and the French were not able to muster a war effort capable of deterring or defeating Hitler.
In 1940, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg forces of tanks and planes met little resistance from the French. The French Republic fell and was replaced by the collaborationist Vichy regime, and Paris was occupied for the duration of the war. The French fighting spirit was not totally dead, with Charles de Gaulle and his hardy band of resisters keeping it alive. The French took to the mountains, trying to make life difficult for the German occupiers and passing crucial intelligence to the British and Americans who were preparing for D-Day. World War II may have been won by the Allied powers, but the conflict confirmed—without a shadow of a doubt—that France, and even Britain, had been fully eclipsed as world powers. The United States and Soviet Union, with their competing ideological worldview and economic engines, set the terms of global power for the next fifty years.
Following World War II, the French people felt the agony of a nation divided between the pride in those who had actively resisted and the shame of citizens who had passively collaborated with the Nazis. Through the 1950s an
d ’60s, de Gaulle was determined to rebuild French power and insisted on France having a nuclear weapons capability—its own independent “force de frappe” (military strike force) to deter future external threats. The return of that martial spirit, even absent the economic and military base to support it, led to an effort to maintain select colonial interests, most prominently in French Indochina—or Vietnam. French military forces took horrific losses at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, eroding support for the conflict in Vietnam as well as French military action around the world. The French withdrew from Vietnam humiliated. In the 1960s, as leftist pacifism and opposition to the American war in Vietnam grew around the world, Paris became a hotbed of student protest—a moment in time from which France has never recovered.
Following World War II, France may have rejected Soviet-style communism, but it still succumbed to other, more subtle forms of collectivism. “Socially democratic” political parties—tracing their roots back to the workers’ rights movements of the 1830s—championed a hybrid of socialism and capitalism, ultimately manifesting in an advanced welfare state. France’s democratically elected representatives voted for more extensive state regulation, and full-spectrum government social programs, intended to provide both economic security and equality of outcome. As French influence around the globe shrank, generous social welfare spending, restrictive business regulations, and class-based stratification established increasingly deeper roots in France (and, for that matter, across Europe). Over the course of decades, France exchanged economic dynamism, global relevance, and organic military might for economic security, the pursuit of domestic utopia, and the American military’s security umbrella.
Gutting its military capability to pay for it, France built a social welfare system predicated on providing a comfortable standard of living for its citizenry. But at the turn of this century that system ran headlong into a combination of globalization, domestic demographic problems, and fiscal pressures the likes of which France had never seen. As the French economy stagnated and public debt grew, protestors—mostly disenchanted youth—filled the streets to protect the generous benefits French citizens have accrued over decades. Meanwhile, an anticompetitive business environment drove companies out of the country, limiting the opportunities available to French young people. There never was a Ronald Reagan restoration in France; instead France pulled back from the world in order to serve the demands of a war-weary, increasingly insular, and risk-averse public.
Today the French don’t protest for more freedom, but instead against the very reforms needed to keep their social model sustainable. They protest for the status quo. Most retirees in France enjoy government-funded and controlled health care and pensions, made even more costly by the fact that—after careers with six weeks of vacation, a fiercely guarded thirty-five-hour workweek, and ironclad restrictions against layoffs and firings—many French workers retire before they’re sixty years old. As the state-run, command economy has shrunk, the French government has continued to grow, with fully one in five French workers employed by the government. France’s decline touches all strata of society, with youth unemployment at historic highs (and 80 percent of new jobs temporary), wage growth outpacing productivity for current businesses and workers, and massively generous entitlement benefits coming due for an aging generation of retirees. France is getting older at the same time it is declining in wealth, with no sign that organic population growth and economic dynamism will return.
These realities belie underlying cultural, civic, and political erosions that have taken deep root in France and were forewarned against by Roosevelt. The supremacy of “rights over duties” has permeated all aspects of French society. The relationship between the French people and their government has always been different than that of America, but the result of the country’s leftward lurch is much the same: a generation of youth (a growing number of them Muslim youth) without good jobs and many lacking pride in French identity, and raised to demand rather than earn. Powerful strands of secular humanism, globalism, relativism, socialism, and Islamism have infected the French Republic, creating a societal sclerosis, a lack of will to restore France’s scrappy republican roots. Most dangerously, as Roosevelt forewarned, class warfare has become a permanent fixture of French politics—with political and economic cronyism rampant among an elite and self-perpetuating government class. There exists only a theoretical path to wealth and privilege for those in the lower class, with an entire generation of immigrants and children of immigrants growing up in ghettolike suburbs outside major French cities. In fact, from the podium at the Sorbonne, Roosevelt proclaimed that a republic predicated on class—with the wealthy at perpetual odds with the lower class—was doomed:
There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the wealth that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand.
A detached elite and a permanent French underclass—unassimilated and uninterested in traditional notions of French society—represent a ticking demographic time bomb that France still has not figured out. Following a baby boom after World War II, the birthrates of French families stayed high for decades until slowly declining in the mid-1970s and reaching an all-time low in the mid-1990s. At that point French families were consistently having fewer than two kids. Birthrates then increased, and today they are the strongest in Europe, with a total fertility rate just above two—meaning, taken alongside immigration, the population is growing. But where is that growth coming from? Rough estimates place the non-Muslim French-born-parent birthrate barely above one child per family, far lower than the overall all-time low of the mid-1990s. However, the birthrate of first or second-generation immigrant Muslims remains very high—with between three to four children per family. By some estimates, fully one-third, or at least a quarter, of newborns in France today are born to Muslim parents. French birthrates may be the highest in Europe, but only because of growing Muslim populations.
This fact is not a bad thing if large Muslim families in France are raising their kids in the French tradition, speaking French, and joining republican institutions. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Whereas America has traditionally been a melting pot (if less so today), France remains a tossed salad of separated communities. France is, at its core, a secular republic—grounded in an agnostic and atheist tradition, whereas Islam, and especially Islamism, is grounded in a closed and rigid religious tradition. As you might imagine, the two mix like oil and water. France’s ability, or so far its inability, to assimilate a growing Muslim population (currently around 10 percent and growing) will have lasting systemic and existential ramifications for the republic.
A powerful personal anecdote is helpful here. While serving in Afghanistan, I befriended a young Afghan interpreter named Esmat. He was smart and Westernized, coming from an average family from the capital city of Kabul. We spent a great deal of time together and had many long conversations about life, family, marriage, religion, and Islam. He was a Muslim, but not particularly devout. One evening, when discussing Christianity, Islam, and the future of both, he casually said, “Of course Islam will rule the world someday—the prophet [Muhammad] foretold it. We are having ten kids, and you are having one.” Esmat was not radical. He was not an Islamist. I trusted him with my life, and helped him get to the United States because of threats against his family and because of his service to our shared cause. But even peaceful and educated Muslims believe that Islam’s destiny is to control the world—and by having many children, they are contributing to that cause. These moderate Muslims don’t want to cut off heads or subjugate nonbelievers. However, radicals—of which there are many in F
rance—seek to exploit the growing number of Muslims in order to challenge French values and tradition. Militant and political Islam, known as Islamism, is growing in France, and simple demographic math is its most powerful tool. The recent refugee crisis—with Muslims fleeing the Middle East and flooding Europe—will strongly and quickly exacerbate this existential problem.
Without significant structural changes, especially with tax rates, welfare benefits, pensions, worker protections, and Muslim immigration, France as we know it cannot continue. Nervous French politicians talk about the need for reform but prove incapable of delivering it—even after the Islamic State infiltrated their capital and killed 132 innocent civilians in November of 2015. Pervasive in French culture and elite circles is the wistful belief that France is a socialist paradise, if only religion would fade away and the international market system would, too (France has always had a tepid relationship with free trade and free markets). Or if the rest of the world would stop working so hard. France is not yet in complete fiscal collapse, but Greece provides a powerful glimpse of the kind of future in store for France should it not enact meaningful pro-market and pro-assimilation reforms.
