Certainly debatable.
De Gaulle started this 'policy' in 1965 and it's mainly the current leadership situation that's been a problem—60 years later. So to a certain extent the policy in question was 'wrong' for decades. How "right" can you really consider them when it was a problem year after year, decade after decade:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
It reminds me of the folks that keep saying there will be a major crash on Wall Street year after year after year… and then it just happens to be occur.
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/12/rich-author-poor-re...
In what sense was the policy wrong? Emphasizing independence when it comes to security doesn't strike me as self-evidently wrong. Curious to hear your arguments. "They were very happy about it 60 years later" alone isn't evidence of it being wrong.
I disagree. It was a right policy in the sense that it bought France an insurance policy that essentially no other Western country has. Like all insurance policies, you hope to be wrong, but when the time comes, you are protected from some of the worse case scenarios.
Yes, this is the debatable part: the policy is "wrong" for 60 years and extracted a cost to France over those years (at least when it came to nuclear weapons?).
There just happened to be a whacko that got into the White House, but if ~70k (out of >100M) had gone the other way in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won and the world would be a different place. (See also ~500 votes in Bush versus Gore.)
I'd be curious to know the 'insurance premium' that was paid by France every year and the total.
> There just happened to be a whacko that got into the White House
My counter to this is that such an occurrence was increasingly likely starting around the time the massive US Evangelical base was essentially fully captured by (and became a wing of) the Republican party. It was more and more obvious over a period of at least 40 of those 60 years you mention.
If you prepare for a crash to happen on September 23rd, you're a fool. You can't point to a crash that happens a year later and say you got it right.
But if you prepare for a crash to happen at some point, that's just good sense. Only a fool would think that there would never be a crash. If you arrange your finances to withstand a crash, and there's eventually a crash, then that was the right thing to do even if it took a long time.
Ensuring the independence of your nation is more of the second kind. And it pays off even when there isn't an outright crisis. The policy wasn't "wrong" for decades. It was fine the whole time.