Alain Juillet | Former French Spy Chief:
“We Prepared This War”
In this new interview, former French intelligence chief and economic intelligence pioneer Alain Juillet offers a stark warning: a Western—especially French—slide into open war with Russia would have no clear strategic objective for France and would likely end in profound economic and geopolitical loss for the country.
Who Is Alain Juillet—and Why He Matters
Alain Juillet served at the top of the French intelligence apparatus and later headed economic intelligence in the French Prime Minister’s office, before advising major French and foreign companies. Drawing on this dual background, he insists that today’s real power struggles are driven far more by economic dynamics than by classical military logic. That vantage point allows him to read current war rhetoric not as patriotic necessity but as the outcome of deeper strategic and economic miscalculations.
How We Got Here: Broken Promises and Manufactured Escalation
Juillet traces the current Russia–Ukraine war back to the post–Cold War settlement and its gradual unraveling. He recalls the informal understanding between Gorbachev and the West that NATO forces would not be pushed into the states bordering Russia, a buffer that was effectively erased as one country after another joined NATO and Western structures.
Key points he stresses:
• Between the early 1990s and 2010s, the U.S. and its allies progressively integrated the entire “buffer zone” around Russia—militarily, politically, and economically.
• Ukraine became a decisive battleground as Western governments and companies moved in, training Ukrainian forces, buying strategic assets, and establishing intelligence infrastructure along Russia’s border.
• The Maidan period, the reversal of Kyiv’s orientation toward the EU, and the refusal to implement the Minsk accords created a long, predictable path to war rather than a sudden, unforeseeable crisis.
For Juillet, this means that Western leaders—including French leaders—cannot credibly pretend to be surprised by the outcome; they helped shape the environment that made war almost inevitable.
Why a Wider War Serves No French Interest
From Juillet’s perspective, the crucial question is simple: what strategic objective would France actually achieve by escalating toward direct war with Russia? His answer is blunt—none that justifies the risks.
He emphasizes several core dangers:
• Military reality: Russia is better structured for a long, attritional, industrial war—cheap, simple, mass-producible weapons and high tolerance for losses—whereas Western systems are extremely costly, complex, and hard to replace. The fact that inexpensive drones can destroy multi-million-euro armored platforms illustrates how badly Western cost structures fit this type of conflict.
• Industrial weakness: The U.S. and Europe struggle even to supply Ukraine with enough basic ammunition; they lack the industrial depth for a prolonged, high-intensity war with Russia. France, with a smaller industrial base than the U.S., would be especially exposed.
• Economic self-harm: Juillet argues that this war has already been a disaster for European economies: energy shocks, deindustrialization pressure, and loss of competitive access to Eurasian markets. A further escalation would amplify these costs while offering no realistic prospect of “victory” that materially improves France’s position.
In other words, France would be risking its economic base and geopolitical flexibility to pursue Washington- or Brussels-driven objectives that do not align with French interests.
The Bigger Picture: Power Is Moving, and Europe Is Out of Position
As with our previous film, Planet Lockdown, we are releasing all interviews in full, providing the public with a collection of high level cinema interviews to better understand the events shaping our times. All interviews are freely available here.
This interview can be downloaded and reposted with attribution: [WWIII The Documentary directed by James Patrick,
WorldWarThreeDocumentary.com]
worldwarthreedocumentary.com…