Kaia Patterson
// France’s deserved anger at Australian submarine deal snub //
A “stab in the back” was just one of the many metaphors used by the French government in response to Australia’s withdrawal from what France viewed as the “contract of the century.” In 2016, Australia and France agreed to a $66 billion deal in which France provided Australia with a dozen conventional attack submarines. Set as a fifty-year contract, this deal acted as a direct response to China’s continuous attempts to gain power in the Indo-Pacific region. Yet, just hours before the official initiation of this deal, French President Emmanuel Macron received upsetting news. Following a meeting with the United States and Britain, Australia announced that it would purchase American and British-supplied nuclear submarines instead. As the Australian cancellation of this deal lacked any form of communication with French allies before or after this decision was made public by Australia’s officials, France should feel fully justified in its resentment of this secretive deal.
Regardless of Australia’s supposed defense of their actions, Australian negligence for this submarine deal goes against the principle of mutual respect. Upset by the lack of Australian communication, French Ambassador Thebault took note of Prime Minister Morrison’s visit to Paris’ Elysee Palace in mid-June. Seeing as this visit occurred long before Australia’s official announcement of the new deal, Thebault expressed shock that Prime Minister Morrison had discussed this nuclear pivot just a couple days before meeting with Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as well as President Biden on the sidelines of a G-7 meeting in Cornwall. Macron was never informed of these discussions. As no indication of this meeting was given to France, Thebault stated that “the relationship between France and Australia was built on trust. Everything was supposed to be done in full transparency between the two partners.” Thebault further stated that this Anglo-Saxon plot was “in the making for eighteen months. At the same time while we were engaged with making the best of this [submarine] program where France committed its most well-kept military secrets, there was a complete other project that we discovered, thanks to the press, one hour before the announcement. So you can imagine our anger — we felt fooled.” Thus, France’s principles and global relations, built on the ideals of communication, trust, and confidence, have been compromised by this Australian snub.
Regardless of these betrayed principles, a second repercussion of Australia’s scrapping of the submarine deal was the sheer disregard for the political and economical turmoil soon to be faced by French President Macron. Although France was initially set to create these nuclear submarines in its Cherbourg Naval Base, the consequences of this project cancellation will be, according to French newspaper Ouest France, “a small social and economic earthquake.” With merely a year standing between Macron’s presidency and the upcoming 2022 French presidential election, there is no doubt that the discarding of this deal has given some form of ammunition to Macron’s political opponents. The New York Times’ Norimitsu Onishi wrote that this contract was viewed by the French “as a framework to project power in the decades to come,” further cementing Macron’s legacy in making France a larger global superpower. Excluded from this new deal, however, Macron will come to face China’s ever-looming desire for a rise in power within the Pacific region. Thus, “France needs policy in the Pacific,” exclaimed Arnaud Danjean, a French member of the European parliament, “we have commercial, economic and territorial interests there, but the means we have now don’t allow us to be a credible alternative to the United States in facing China.” If France were to gain access to a form of international leadership, however, this global dependence would not only reflect well on the country, but it would also bring France closer to its goal of being equal in influence and power to the United States. Accordingly, in disregarding France’s interest to protect its economic and political standing, the Anglo-Saxon powers have prioritized a nationalistic and power-hungry gain over positive relations with France.
Hours before the public announcement of Australia’s new deal with Washington and London, President Macron recalled the French ambassadors from the United States and Australia in protest. Noted by the New York Times, this was the first recall since 1778 in which a French ambassador was ordered back to Paris for consultations from a longstanding and powerful nation. Signing the French-Australian contract for the first time in 2016, France expressed little concern about the possibility of losing the submarine deal; the deal’s cancellation came as a complete surprise. Responding to Australia’s handling of this deal, Australian Senator Penny Wong claimed it was “not in our national interest to make our friends so angry and disappointed. The French would be asking, with friends like this, who needs enemies?” Wong is right. As this snub is considered by many as a breach of trust, France was deceived by countries once considered allies. If there is to ever be a lack of tension amongst these countries again, Biden and his Anglo-Saxon allies must include France in their decision making while maintaining full and utter transparency.
