Retired French three-star general Michel Yakovleff emerged as one of the clearest public faces of allied skepticism toward President Donald Trump’s Iran strategy after ridiculing the idea of Europe joining a US-led operation that he argued lacked a coherent structure, clear political purpose, and credible military design.
Yakovleff, a former senior NATO officer and former commander of the French Foreign Legion, delivered the critique on French television as Washington pressed partners to support its wider campaign around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz.
His most widely cited line compared joining Trump’s war to buying a cheap ticket for the Titanic after it had already hit the iceberg.
Yakovleff argued that Europe could not sensibly run one mission while the US simultaneously conducted a different war above it. He said any operation of that kind would need to be unified, formally defined, and run under a NATO framework rather than improvised through changing public statements.
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He also said the Americans needed to put their plans “in writing,” not in messages that shifted “every two minutes.”
The Washington Post reported that Trump had asked for a military option to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile rather than simply destroy facilities from the air. The proposal reportedly involved securing mountainous terrain inside Iran, bringing in excavation equipment, and constructing a makeshift runway so cargo aircraft could extract the material. Officials were said to have warned the plan carried significant operational risk and might require hundreds or thousands of troops over a mission that could last weeks.
Iran is believed to control about 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%, with some or all of it moved to Isfahan. That level is below weapons-grade but far above civilian enrichment thresholds, making the stockpile central to the war’s stated rationale and to the logic of any attempt to physically seize it.
Conflicting his own plan, Trump dismissed concern over the uranium by saying it was so far underground that he did not care about it, even as the reported US plan had centered on physically extracting that same material.
France’s position at the state level also lined up with the caution Yakovleff voiced on air. On Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron said forcing open the Strait of Hormuz through military action was unrealistic, would take too long, and would expose forces to risks from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and ballistic missiles. He added that the US-Israeli campaign was not France’s operation and said Paris wanted peace as soon as possible.
Reuters reported that France had refused Israel permission to use French airspace to transfer US weapons for the Iran war.
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