I don’t think you have to go quite that far. NATO was intended to provide cover against the other superpower bloc in Europe. That superpower isn’t really a superpower anymore, but the remnant that legally succeeded it still has a lot of nukes.
Arguably in a world of superpowers, only superpowers have total sovereignty under your definition, hence why I said it was a sliding scale. 95% of any individual nation or most configurations of alliances you could technically (though maybe not plausibly) come up with would still get crushed by the French military in a mano a mano military conflict. They can defend themselves, but what if they have to defend themselves alone vs the United States, Russia, the PRC, or a medley of European great powers? NATO keeps them from having to go it alone, and NATO plus the EU takes a couple of those possibilities off the table, at least for a while, but in Charles de Gaulle’s time, France still had a colonial empire they were trying to keep together (and they still have a fair number of overseas territories outside of metropolitan France) and the plausibility of NATO keeping it together was all up in the air.
Throughout the duration of the Cold War, I don’t think you can make a winning argument that on balance the US was ever a bad ally, but as an old European leader, he was definitely right to be skeptical about the tradeoffs, and right to think that if France has more power, then it wouldn’t need to cede sovereignty or at least much sovereignty to all these newfangled international institutions popping up across Europe.
Arguably in a world of superpowers, only superpowers have total sovereignty under your definition, hence why I said it was a sliding scale. 95% of any individual nation or most configurations of alliances you could technically (though maybe not plausibly) come up with would still get crushed by the French military in a mano a mano military conflict. They can defend themselves, but what if they have to defend themselves alone vs the United States, Russia, the PRC, or a medley of European great powers? NATO keeps them from having to go it alone, and NATO plus the EU takes a couple of those possibilities off the table, at least for a while, but in Charles de Gaulle’s time, France still had a colonial empire they were trying to keep together (and they still have a fair number of overseas territories outside of metropolitan France) and the plausibility of NATO keeping it together was all up in the air.
Throughout the duration of the Cold War, I don’t think you can make a winning argument that on balance the US was ever a bad ally, but as an old European leader, he was definitely right to be skeptical about the tradeoffs, and right to think that if France has more power, then it wouldn’t need to cede sovereignty or at least much sovereignty to all these newfangled international institutions popping up across Europe.