Thierry Carlier spent his career selling and buying weapons for France. As ambassador to Sweden he now presides over a defence relationship in which the two countries increasingly buy each other's kit. His explanation is disarmingly simple.
Thierry Carlier has an engineer's view of diplomacy. We meet over coffee at his official residence on Narvavägen in Stockholm. Before he became France's ambassador to Sweden in March 2025, he spent most of his career at the DGA, France's defence procurement agency. He ended up as its deputy director general, and before that ran its international development, the arm that handles arms exports. Early on, he worked on missiles. "You are well informed," he laughs when I run through the résumé.
It is a fitting background, because the first concrete defence project of the current Franco-Swedish relationship was itself about missiles. Was that a coincidence, I ask. "I think it has been a very pragmatic example of what we do in Europe," he says.
The logic is worth spelling out. In 2022, just after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, France had launched the MMP, or Akeron, a medium-range ground combat missile from MBDA. It needed a shorter-range capability too, and did not have one. "The normal method would have been to start a new programme from scratch. It would have lasted five to ten years," he says. "But we were in a hurry. This war had started, we wanted to equip our warfighters quicker, so we needed to see what was already available." What was available was Sweden's NLAW, Saab's short-range anti-tank weapon. "This totally matched the need of our forces. So why should we reinvent the wheel?"
At the same time, Sweden wanted the longer reach that Akeron offered. So the two countries bought into each other's programmes. France, Carlier says, took its first NLAW rounds directly from the Swedish Army; Sweden adopted Akeron. "It is some kind of cross-purchase," he says. "For both our armies we get access to a wider range of capabilities, already available. And it gives synergies to the companies, Saab and MBDA, because it lets them work together on the future generation of both NLAW and Akeron."
Carlier describes the deals that followed in the same terms, each one on its own merits. At the end of 2025 France signed for Saab's GlobalEye as its new airborne early-warning aircraft, a decision that lets it retire its ageing AWACS earlier than planned. "Once again: we need a capability, Sweden has something available that matches our need," he says. "And you can do this only when you trust the other nation. We trust Saab, we trust Sweden." Sweden, for its part, chose France's FDI design for its new Luleå-class frigates. Carlier calls the shared hull "a backbone for both our navies," a platform he expects the two countries to evolve together over time, through future sensors, drones and common maintenance.
Trust is the word he keeps returning to, and he roots it in what he calls a common DNA. When Nordic Defence Sector spoke to Carlier aboard the French frigate Amiral Ronarc’h in Gothenburg earlier this year, he similarly emphasised Sweden’s importance to European defence cooperation. Both are engineering nations with their own defence-industrial base; Sweden, he notes, spent 200 years armed and neutral. “To be neutral you needed to be strong, and you needed a very strong degree of reliability from your industry.”
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When I ask whether "autonomy" and "sovereignty," the two words that circle every European defence debate, mean different things to him, he waves the distinction away. "For me they are quite interchangeable. It is really about how we prevent ourselves from what we call, and what I think Sweden also calls, harmful dependencies." That, he is careful to add, is not a retreat from trade or from allies. "It has to be free trade, but it also has to be fair trade." The United States "stays our strongest ally," and interoperability inside NATO, as weapon systems become "systems of systems," is "absolutely key." The aim, as he puts it, is to keep developing that interoperability "without being dependent on the US."
So what should a Swedish company do if it believes it has technology France needs? There is no shortcut, he suggests, only the same pragmatic approach: trust, and a capability that genuinely fills a gap. "Because we trust one another, and because Sweden has fantastic industrial capabilities, it paves the way for concrete cooperation," he says, pointing again to GlobalEye. The door opens when the fit is real.
How far that can run is becoming visible across every domain. France and Sweden have both signed letters of intent to provide combat aircraft to Ukraine, Rafale and Gripen, which, Carlier notes, will leave the Ukrainian Air Force flying "two European aircraft, best in class." Saab and Dassault, he adds, are "the only companies in Europe still able, on their own, to develop and manufacture combat aircraft," and they have history together in the nEUROn unmanned combat demonstrator.
Sweden, he points out, was among the first countries to engage with France's "forward deterrence," the push Emmanuel Macron set out in a March 2026 speech at the Île Longue submarine base to extend the role of French nuclear forces in European security, and Pål Jonson, Sweden's defence minister, represented Stockholm at September's space summit in Paris, where the two countries agreed to draft a roadmap for cooperation in orbit.
Next year the strategic partnership, first signed in Gothenburg in 2017, turns ten, and Macron has invited King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia for a state visit to France. Carlier sees it as a chance to show "the level our cooperation has reached, and how Sweden and France, together, pave the way for our allies, for the future of Europe." It seems the right place, and the right time, for an armament engineer to be France's ambassador to Sweden.