Interesting article on AUKUS and France

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Here

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Is there any way of reading without subscribing

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Oh sorry. I thought you were good for a few articles.
Il copy and paste

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OPINION: France’s Australian submarine row shows that Macron was right about NATO
Australian PM Scott Morrison visiting Macron in Paris in June. Photo: Thomas Samson/AFP
John Lichfield
18 September 2021
17:55 CEST

The Franco-American-Australian submarine war seems to have surfaced from nowhere. To understand what is going on, you have to answer three pub-quiz questions, writes John Lichfield.
First, which country is immediately west of Australia? Second, which country is immediately east of Australia? Thirdly, which country sprawls most widely over the globe?

The answer to all of these questions is the same: France.

The nasty row which has broken out between Paris, Washington, Canberra and (to an extent) London, is about more than a €60bn French contract to build 12 submarines for the Australian navy.

It is about France as a Pacific and Indian ocean nation; it is about France’s desire to play an important role in Indian-Pacific affairs, containing China without antagonising China; it is about America’s willingness to treat allies as allies, not vassals; it is about honesty and openness in international affairs.

President Emmanuel Macron has withdrawn the French ambassadors to Washington and Canberra after the US, Australia and Britain announced a new security pact, called AUKUS, after 18 months of secret talks. As part of the pact France’s 2016 deal to supply 12 diesel-powered, Barracuda-class submarines to Australia has been replaced by a US-UK promise (not yet a deal) to supply nuclear-powered, but not nuclear armed, subs.

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France accuses the three English-speaking nations of a “stab in the back”. But it has not withdrawn its ambassador from London. Some commentators suggest that is because France has so many important interests in common with the UK, Brexit or no Brexit.

Other commentators and French officials suggest that, au contraire, it is because Paris regards the UK involvement in AUKUS as something “opportunistic” and irrelevant.

French officials told Le Monde that NOT withdrawing the French ambassador from London was a way of expressing contempt for Boris Johnson’s role as a “stowaway” in a US-Australian submarine.

But why is France so furious? Arms deals are a murky business. The bigger they are, the murkier they become. One friendly nation beating another to a huge arms deal is hardly new.

Let’s return to our pub quiz question. Australia’s nearest significant neighbour directly to the west is the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. To the east it is the archipelago of New Caledonia. These islands are constitutionally and legally not French colonies: they are as much part of France as Corsica or Calais.

READ ALSO ‘Confetti of an empire’ – a look at France’s overseas territories

The torpedoed submarine deal was commercially important to France but also politically important as the cornerstone of a new Pacific and Indian Ocean security partnership with Australia agreed in 2016 and re-asserted this year. That, in turn, was crucial to France’s hopes of building an Indo-Pacific strategy which would make it the most important European player in the region.

The commitment to both was restated by Paris and Canberra as recently as June 15th when the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, visited Macron in the Elysée.

“Every element of our partnership is about reinforcing the values and beliefs that we hold dearly,” Morrison said at the time. He gave Macron no hint that the submarine deal was in trouble. Problems with cost over-runs and design details appeared to have been resolved.

In fact, it now emerges, the US has been involved in talks with Australia and the UK to blow both the French deal and the Franco-OZ pact out of the water for 18 months. In other words, the secret talks began under President Donald Trump and continued and were completed under President Joe Biden.

“And we thought we were mates,” the departing French ambassador Jean-Pierre Thebault said in interview with Australian newspapers today. “This is not what you do a partner and even less to a friend.”

Which was more important to the United States? Stealing the submarine deal? Or destroying French hopes of playing an allied role with the US , Japan and others in Indo-Pacific affairs and coping with an increasingly aggressive and confident China?

Some people suggest that AUKUS is just a vulgar arms deal dressed up as a security pact. The US and Australia already have a security agreement. Why do they need another one? And what can Britain do to help with a tiny Royal Navy and an Army that can’t fill Wembley stadium?

Others commentators suggest that Washington was too ignorant or too inward-looking to grasp that AUKUS would humiliate and infuriate the French. Australia, they say, grew unhappy with the conventionally-powered French subs. It secretly approached Washington – even though France had offered to upgrade its own deal to nuclear-powered submarines.

One of the many oddities of this affair is that US arms companies already stood to earn more from the French deal than French ones. Only €8bn of the €60bn was to be spent in France (for the submarine hulls mostly). The rest was to be spent on US armaments and high-tech equipment and Australian labour.

The suspicion in the Elysée Palace is that AUKUS is a deliberate and well-planned hit on French ambitions in the Pacific (which precede Macron but have been emphasised since he came to power) Hence the extreme, though symbolic, measure taken by Macron to withdraw ambassadors from allied countries (and the first time ever from the US).

Macron finds himself in a strange place – both vindicated by what has happened and humiliated by it. He has been saying for almost four years that Nato is “brain dead” and Europe can no longer rely on the United States to defend, or even consider, European interests.

He wanted to strengthen France’s role in the Pacific partly because he feared that Washington – whichever President might be in power – would stumble into a confrontational approach to China. He wanted Europe to have its own voice in western-Chinese relations.

Arguably, he over-reached himself. The US has now, in effect, slapped him down.

There is nothing much he can do about it. Germany is preoccupied by its election. Most other European countries are reluctant to face the consequences of quarrelling with Uncle Sam. None of them have islands in the Pacific or Indian Oceans.

All the same, the AUKUS affair, coming so soon after the debacle of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, proves that Macron is right. Nato is brain dead. Washington doesn’t have allies, only junior partners. Britain has willingly accepted that role. It is time that for the European Union to consider how (to coin a phrase) it can take back control of its own security and prosperity.

[Mandochris]

Follow up article after yesterday's phone call for anyone who may be interested.

OPINION: Macron got concessions for France from Biden in the wake of submarine row
After almost a week of newspaper headlines, diplomatic gestures and finally a phone call, John Lichfield looks at how the Australian submarine crisis has played out for Emmanuel Macron. So Emmanuel and Joe kissed and made up and Boris tried to make a joke of the whole affair while titillating his supporters by mocking Emmanuel.
Is the great submarine crisis of 2021 over? No. There is still much of this strange saga which is unexplained – submerged if you like.
President Macron still faces awkward questions.
How did France miss so many signs and symptoms that the US, Australia and Britain were plotting behind France’s back?
What is France’s true strength and importance militarily and diplomatically if the Anglo-Saxon trio was prepared to humiliate Paris in this way?
Is there something about Macron himself – his tendency to lecture; his cocksure certainty – which made him the target, not just France?
For the time being, Macron has emerged from this murky business reasonably well. It is unlikely, I think, to damage him domestically.
He obtained, in his joint statement with President Biden on Wednesday night, what amounted to an American apology (a rare event). He seems, on paper at least, to have gained a couple of concessions from the United States on support for European defence policy and further US logistical help for the French-led anti-Islamist war in the Sahel.
How solid those commitments from Washington are remains to be seen.
Relations between Paris and Canberra remain – and will remain for some time – plunged into a freeze of Antarctic intensity.
Relations between Paris and London will continue as before – miserably bad on the surface; correct and even cooperative at the practical level beyond the tabloid headlines.
Boris Johnson’s little franglais joke – asking Macron to “donnez moi un break” – will confirm the view in Paris that the current British Prime Minister is not a serious person; that he turns everything into either a joke or a lie.
Johnson was promoting the false view – common in the UK media but also the US media – that France was merely sulking because it had lost a €56bn submarine contract signed with Australia five years ago. Nothing to see here. Just normal business. Just the French being the French.
That is not what happened. The US, the UK and Australia had been in secret talks for six months on a new Indo-Pacific security pact including a vague promise to build US-UK nuclear submarines to replace the French ones (diesel powered at Australia’s insistence).
The AUSUK pact, announced last Wednesday without notice, blew up not only the French submarine deal but also, in effect, a nine-year-old security and cooperation agreement between Paris and Canberra. (France, let us recall, is an Indo-Pacific power with five French overseas territories or départements in the region.)
The secrecy of the talks and the undiplomatic brutality of the AUKUS announcement, was seen in Paris as a deliberate hit by the United States – a warning that Washington saw Indo-Pacific security and future relations between China and the West as the exclusive interest of the US and English-speaking junior partners.
The French said that they had documentary proof that the US had lied to them. On the day of the AUKUS announcement they said, they received a letter from an Australian admiral saying Canberra wanted to push ahead with the next stage of the French submarine deal.
The issue, France said, was not just a submarine contract. It was how allies behaved to one another. If they behaved in this way, should they be considered allies at all?
Macron, we were told, was incandescent with rage. But he said nothing in public. He didn’t call Canberra or London. He refused to take a call from President Biden until Wednesday. He did call the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. He did – with some, but far from complete, success – urge other European governments and the European Commission to make statements supporting France.
The strategy seems to have been to distance Macron from the quarrel and big up his role in the solution – or temporary solution.
It is worth going line by line through the short Macron-Biden statement after their phone call on Wednesday evening.
It is made clear that Biden sought the call, not Macron. It is stated that “the situation would have benefited from open consultations among allies on matters of strategic interest to France and our European partners”. That’s as close to an apology as France was ever likely to get.
The two presidents say they will meet in October.
Then Biden gives Macron three cadeaux.
He accepts the “the strategic importance of French and European engagement in the Indo-Pacific region”.
He  “recognises the importance of a stronger and more capable European defence, that contributes positively to transatlantic and global security and is complementary to NATO”.
He commits the US to “reinforcing its support to counter-terrorism operations in the Sahel conducted by European states”.
The European defence statement is important. The US has always (rightly) wanted European countries to spend more on their own defence – but as part of Nato. Biden here is accepting the Macron Doctrine – that EU countries should have their own defence and security policy separate to Nato but in cooperation with it.
Does it mean anything? Is Biden really changing settled US policy? Or just sweet-talking Macron?
Other questions remain. Was AUKUS really a hit on France as well as China? Or was it clumsy diplomacy by one part of the Biden administration not talking to another? Or something cynically pushed by the US and UK arms industries?
Much of the submarine crisis remains unexplained. Maybe it will be forced to the surface one day. Maybe not.