Afghan officials say a suspected Pakistani air strike hit a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul, killing hundreds of patients and staff and leaving the facility in ruins. Pakistan denies targeting civilians, as tensions escalate between Islamabad and Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government.

Paris, France – A couple of days after the United States and Israel launched their assault on Iran, French President Emmanuel Macron announced on March 2 that France would bolster its nuclear arsenal and strengthen ties with fellow European Union countries.

He called the policy “forward deterrence”.

With the speech, Macron demonstrated a show of strength in a rapidly changing world, where European allies are hesitant to rely on the US’s nuclear protection.

France currently has the fourth biggest nuclear arsenal in the world.

“What I want more than anything, as you will have understood, is for Europeans to regain control of their own destiny,” Macron said.

The declaration raises questions about Europe’s strategic future.

Some have described a watershed moment for European security, but the rhetoric is mainly a strong confirmation of France’s longstanding nuclear policy, according to geopolitical analyst Gregoire Roos.

“Ever since the French acquired nuclear weapons in the sixties, the French have a definition of the concept of vital interest that projects way beyond national borders,” Roos said. “The French have never thought of nuclear deterrence in an exclusively national context, at least from a geographical perspective … There’s always been a strong European dimension.”

France tends to be vague about the precise geographical extent of its “vital interests”, but its focus extends beyond the country’s borders.

“Macron heightened the fact that for France, the scope of vital interest was much larger than what many would think,” Roos said. “It also matters to remain ambiguous when it comes to the exact geographical scope of your vital interests.”

France’s ‘balancing act’

Macron’s policy reaffirms the doctrine of French nuclear strategy adopted by General Charles de Gaulle, the first president of the country’s Fifth Republic.

The Gaullist policy considered nuclear deterrence a protection for France’s territory and an assurance of political independence, Roos noted.

“This is a balancing act. The president reminded everyone that nuclear deterrence remained sovereign. There is no such thing as sharing nuclear codes or decisions on nuclear weapons,” Roos said.

Reaffirming ambiguity, France will stop communicating the number of their nuclear warheads. Currently, the country has approximately 290 warheads.

France also plans to collaborate more closely with the United Kingdom, the only neighbouring country with nuclear weapons, along with Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden and Denmark.

“There’s a clear keenness and ability to project nuclear force outside of the national territory by positioning, for instance, French jet fighters carrying nuclear weapons on the territory of other European countries,” Roos said.

Nuclear programme decisions as Iran war rages

With escalating conflict in the Middle East, Iran’s nuclear programme is at the forefront of discussions.

While France opposes Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, Macron has condemned the US and Israel’s assault on the country, calling the strikes illegal and outside of international law.

“The French are very clear on the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme. But the threats emanating from the country can’t be solved militarily, let alone with regime change,” Laure Foucher, a researcher at the French think tank Foundation for Strategic Research, or FRS, told Al Jazeera.

“The [French] have always favoured a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue in Iran,” Foucher added.

France has a tangled history with Iran.

In 1974, Iran expressed interest in France’s nuclear technology and signed an agreement where Iran became a 10 percent shareholder in Eurodif, a French uranium enrichment company. The uranium was intended to be used in Iran’s civilian nuclear energy development.

“The goal of Iran’s nuclear programme was not military. But it’s clear that when you develop civilian nuclear technology, inevitably, the military possibility becomes accessible,” Ardeshir Zahedi, Iran’s late former foreign minister, said in an interview with French radio station RFI.

In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rose to power in the Islamic revolution, and tensions escalated. Tehran demanded repayment of the loan it had given to Eurodif for production. But because of the revolution, the French government refused, saying Iran did not meet its shareholder obligations.

Relations worsened, and members of the Islamic Jihad in Lebanon kidnapped several French journalists and diplomats. They demanded that France repay its debt to Iran and stop supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The French government refused.

In this period, Iran was accused of indirectly sponsoring several attacks in France. In 1986, a bomb exploded in Paris, killing seven people and injuring 55.

Finally, the French government agreed to pay the majority of the Eurodif debt in exchange for the hostages in Lebanon in 1988. Three years later, the remaining debt was settled with a $1bn payment to Iran.

‘An age of geopolitical acceleration’

France signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal, in 2015, which significantly limited Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for easing some of the sanctions on the country. But in 2018, Trump withdrew the US from the deal, and Iran resumed operations.

“France was involved in diplomatic efforts, even though the Europeans were marginalised in the negotiations between the United States and Iran,” Foucher noted.

Macron’s announcement comes at a time when Europe is working to stand strong, independent of the US and its nuclear umbrella.

“We live in an age of geopolitical acceleration, in which conventional threats and war are coming back very quickly,” Roos said. “So there is this feeling that the nuclear option has to be visible on the table.”

In his speech, Macron said, “We are in another strategic universe.”

“The next half century … will be an age of nuclear weapons.”

Despite the strong rhetoric, France faces an uphill battle to bolster its capabilities.

“You need a greater budget. That means at least an additional 100 billion euros per year [$115bn], and that will not come with more debt. It will come with reduced spending in other areas,” Roos said. “To make it sustainable, the French will need to significantly increase their defence spending.”

Macron’s presidency ends in about a year, with elections slated for April 2027.

“He is so weak domestically,” Roos said. “Macron is left with only the world stage, because constitutionally, he is the master, if I may say so, of foreign and defence policy. He knows he has one year left to really cement his legacy as someone who woke Europe up after decades of sleepwalking.”

To succeed, Macron needs to strengthen European alliances, including coordination for the EU’s nuclear umbrella.

“He knows that there is no legacy in global affairs and foreign policy if his legacy in Europe is not clear,” Roos said.

The United States–Israeli war on Iran is as much a collision of competing religious ideologies as it is a clash of strategic interests. To understand it purely through a secular realist lens is to miss half the story.

After the March 2 Pentagon press briefing, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that “crazy regimes like Iran hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions cannot have nuclear weapons”. Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Iran’s rulers as “religious fanatic lunatics”.

To understand why these remarks matter and why this war cannot be understood through a purely strategic lens, one must first understand what has been happening inside Western Christian societies.

For decades, Western systems have operated on a secular premise: religion belongs strictly in private life; the state is neutral. While Muslims have mostly maintained religion as the organising principle of family, law and public affairs, large parts of the Christian West either abandoned religious practice altogether or confined it to the margins of private devotion.

The consequences, in the view of conservative Christians, have been severe: the erosion of the traditional family, declining birth rates, the advance of ultra-liberal sexual politics and the general retreat of faith from public and moral life. These, notably, are precisely the areas where conservative Christians and Muslims are likely to find common ground.

But within the conservative coalition there is a harder, more troubling current. Christian nationalism, as distinct from mainstream religious conservatism, seeks the subordination of all other religions and cultural systems to Christian supremacy across every domain of political, legal and social existence. This ideology correlates strongly with white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Pete Hegseth exemplifies this hard-right current. Associated with Christian Reconstructionism, a movement that rejects the secular separation of church and state, he treats the Pentagon as an instrument of holy war. He has described his tattoos, the Jerusalem Cross and Deus Vult (“God wills it”), as emblems of the “modern-day American Christian crusade”. He also bears the Arabic word kafir (“infidel”) — a deliberate anti-Muslim provocation.

Thanks to him, this Crusader framing has migrated from the fringe voices into operational military culture.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports being inundated with more than 110 complaints from US service members stationed across the Middle East, including one non-commissioned officer who reported that his commander told troops this war was “all part of God’s divine plan,” citing the Book of Revelation and declaring that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon”.

Robert P Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, captured the logic of this worldview plainly, saying: “It’s not just a glorification of violence but a glorification of violence in the name of Christianity and civilisation … It takes it out of the realm of politics and casts it as a holy war of a supposedly Christian nation against a Muslim nation.”

Among the most influential elements within this tendency are Christian Zionists and evangelical dispensationalists who believe that rebuilding the Third Temple on the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is a theological prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ.

US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee – a self-described unapologetic Christian Zionist who denies the existence of a Palestinian people and supports their expulsion through Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank – recently stated in an interview that “it would be fine if they took it all,” referring to Israel potentially controlling much of the Middle East under a biblical interpretation of its borders.

To such extreme Zionist ideologues, Iran represents a spiritual barrier to the conditions required for the Third Temple’s creation and therefore must be militarily neutered to fulfil biblical prophecy.

How does Iran have “Islamist prophetic delusions,” according to Hegseth and co?

Iran’s state ideology — Welayat al-Faqih, the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist — holds that in the absence of the Twelfth Imam (leader), who is in occultation (ghaybah, or in hiding), supreme authority must rest with a qualified Islamic jurist governing on his behalf.

Moreover, factions within Iran’s clerical and military establishment went further, transforming the theological expectation of the Mahdi’s return into an operational political doctrine.

 The Iranian leadership has institutionalised the idea that unrelenting struggle against oppressive powers is a sacred obligation. Under this framework, strategic retreat or diplomatic accommodation would be tantamount to prophetic betrayal.

During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Tehran galvanised the masses by transforming Shi’ism into a “sacred defense,” casting the struggle as a modern-day stand at Karbala. This theological framing later justified “forward defence“—a strategy of exporting the revolution to forge proxy networks throughout the region. By engaging adversaries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or Gaza, the Islamic Republic aimed to confront threats at their source, keeping military confrontation far from Iranian soil.

The US-Israel war against Iran can therefore be interpreted as religious just as much as strategic.

In religious terms, two civilisational ideologies are in direct structural conflict, each regarding the other’s existence in its maximalist form as an obstacle to a divinely sanctioned outcome.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have explicitly invoked this framing, referring to Hamas and Iran as the biblical Amalekites, drawing on passages in Exodus, Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel that mandate the complete eradication of Amalek, commanding the killing of all men, women, infants and livestock.

The conflict has, in this sense, mutated into a zero-sum collision of competing messianic frameworks, one in which conventional diplomacy is structurally difficult because both sides believe, in their maximalist iterations, that they are executing a divine mandate.

Finally, Washington’s shifting justifications for the war — moving between regime change, military disarmament and nuclear enrichment prevention — actually reflect the constituencies its campaign is serving.

Among those constituencies, one whose objectives look a lot less ambiguous is Netanyahu and his Zionist and evangelical allies in the US. Their only favourable war outcome would be a regime change or a dismembered and fragmented Iran stripped of all its military, security and policing capabilities so that it becomes structurally too weakened to challenge Israeli hegemony.

This is a conflict that Netanyahu said he has been waiting 40 years for. Israel will do all it can to utilise this moment and destroy Iran’s economic, policing, and military infrastructure, even if it can’t change the regime.

Likewise, Iran has also prepared for exactly this moment and understands Israeli ambitions. It has been strategically expanding and escalating the war, targeting American military bases and installations in the region as well as Arab countries’ economic infrastructure: to highlight how the American military presence in Arab countries is a source of insecurity, not deterrence; to expose dependence on a power whose primary interest is to protect its favourite ally; and, if this disillusionment works, to ultimately drive the US out of the Gulf region.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.