Alchemists once tried in vain to transform base metal into gold. More recently, French journalists have attempted to turn a presidential gaffe into a nugget of geopolitical wisdom. ‘There’s no consensus today that ground troops should be deployed in an official, accepted and endorsed way,’ Emmanuel Macron said on 26 February 2024 after an international meeting in Paris on military aid for Ukraine. But, he added, ‘in terms of dynamics, nothing should be ruled out. We will do all that’s necessary to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.’

Macron’s statement was swiftly followed by an avalanche of denials. Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz kept it brief: ‘It is clear: there will be no ground troops from European countries or NATO’ (X, 27 February). Two of Kyiv’s main backers echoed him: ‘We are not considering sending our troops to Ukraine and we have a common position on this point [with the Czechs]’, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk told a joint press conference. And a military official made plain NATO had ‘no plans to send ground troops to Ukraine’.

In the US, representatives for the White House, State Department and Pentagon also turned on the fire hose. ‘There will be no US troops on the ground in a combat role there in Ukraine,’ White House National Security Advisor John Kirby said. A spokesman for British prime minister Rishi Sunak ruled out any ‘large-scale deployment of troops’. Spain, Italy, Hungary and Sweden responded with the same blanket dismissal.

Macron’s sally was turning into a disaster: far from fuelling his vaunted ‘strategic ambiguity’, he had managed to clarify the West’s ‘very great unanimity’ – in Scholz’s words – over not sending soldiers to fight the Russians. ‘He can’t be serious’, ran the headline of an article by the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s international editor (27 February), who described French foreign policy as a series of ‘poorly elaborated and ill-thought-out initiatives’. The New York Times summarised it (…)

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