Macron says there will be no warning. Take him at his word.

On 18 September Emmanuel Macron came out of a crisis meeting with the political forces represented in the French parliament and gave a press conference.¹ The French Dispatch has published an English translation of the transcript it says the Elysée released that day, and put one sentence in quotation marks at the top: “The Day We Are Physically Attacked, We Will Not Be Warned”.¹ The capitals are the headline’s. The sentence, on the Dispatch’s authority, is his.¹

I should say what I have and what I lack. The sentence reaches me as a headline, in a translator’s English, and the part of the translation I have read is his opening statement on Russia and on energy.¹ I did not meet the sentence there, so I cannot tell you what he was asked or what he said next. I can take him at his word, and I can read the words around it, which are sufficient.

Begin with his list. “I want to say here that the nature of Russian aggressiveness and of these threats in Europe is changing”, he said, and this is what followed: “The drone attack on a passenger train from Kyiv, a few days ago, the attempted attack at Leipzig airport, which failed, but it is because it failed that there were so few consequences, attributed by the German services to the GRU, the firing of a flare close to a Danish frigate, incursions into airspace in several European countries and the multiplication of hostile acts in most of our countries.”¹ Every item is the French president’s account, and the attribution to the GRU is his report of what German services concluded.¹

Read the clause in the middle again. The attempt at Leipzig had so few consequences, he says, because it failed.¹ What made it fail I cannot tell you from this page. I note only where the sentence puts the credit. A head of state is telling his public that what stood between an airport and the consequences was that the attempt did not work.

All of this travels under the word “hybrid”. Macron speaks of “the Russian hybrid threat towards Europeans and France”, and says the interior minister convened all the zone prefects “to raise the posture and vigilance with regard to Russian hybrid attacks”.¹ I object to the adjective on grounds of accuracy, not taste. A drone attack on a passenger train is, in plain English, an attack on a train that carries people. “Hybrid” is the word for violence whose author would rather not sign it and whose target would rather not be obliged to call it war. The “physically” in the headline sentence tells me he knows where the soft word stops.

Here is what a state does once it believes no warning will come. By Macron’s account France held a Defence and National Security Council, the prime minister gave instructions to ministers, and the government was asked for a plan to protect critical infrastructure and the most sensitive defence-industry sites against drone and cyber attack.¹ He calls this a “legitimate raising of our posture”.¹ I do not mock it. Guarding the power supply is what governments are for. But consider what a posture is. Warning is the interval in which someone can be woken, a report checked, a second opinion sought and a first impulse overruled; take it away and each of those decisions has to be made beforehand, written into instructions and handed down to whoever is standing nearest when the thing arrives, so that the gravest choice a country can make is settled in advance by people who cannot know the particulars and carried out on the day by people who have no time to weigh them. That is a reflex.

He supplied the second half himself. He recalled “the alert sounded in February 2024, calling on Europeans to gain in strategic ambiguity”.¹ Ambiguity is the policy of making sure the other side cannot know what you will do. Set it beside the headline and you have a leader who expects no warning from his adversary and cites a call to keep that adversary guessing in return. I can follow each half. Together they describe a confrontation in which neither party is to know what the other will do or when, and I cannot find the place in that arrangement where anyone is meant to stop and think.

This paper exists to measure how close nuclear-armed powers are to fighting one another, so I will be exact about tonight’s evidence. The text I have read concerns drones, a flare, airspace, cyber attack and the price of diesel.¹ Whether the headline sentence was meant to reach higher than that I cannot say from the page, and I decline to say from memory. My argument is about the principle, and the principle is indifferent to scale. If no warning is the planning assumption for an airport, I would want to know what assumption governs everything above an airport.

Fairness requires the rest. The larger part of what I read is a president trying to keep fuel arriving.¹ He says France is “doing everything to facilitate the peaceful reopening of the Strait of Hormuz”, that it supports discussions between Oman and Iran, and that an agreement between Iran and the United States “seems to us unlikely in the short term”.¹ Those are a government’s descriptions of its own conduct and I hold them as claims. They are also the sentences of someone still practising the slow method. The same person spoke the sentence in the headline.

So this is what the page gives me, and I add nothing to it. A president who, in the Dispatch’s translation, says “The Day We Are Physically Attacked, We Will Not Be Warned”; who says the attempt at Leipzig airport had so few consequences because it failed; whose government answered with a “legitimate raising of our posture”; and who recalled a call for Europeans “to gain in strategic ambiguity”.¹ A posture is a decision taken before the facts are in. If he is right about the warning, that is the only place left to take it. I believe him.