alt Hacker NewsI disagree. It was a right policy in the sense that it bought France an insurance policy that essentially no other Western country has. Like all insurance policies, you hope to be wrong, but when the time comes, you are protected from some of the worse case scenarios.
Yes, this is the debatable part: the policy is "wrong" for 60 years and extracted a cost to France over those years (at least when it came to nuclear weapons?).
There just happened to be a whacko that got into the White House, but if ~70k (out of >100M) had gone the other way in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won and the world would be a different place. (See also ~500 votes in Bush versus Gore.)
I'd be curious to know the 'insurance premium' that was paid by France every year and the total.