The United States is assembling an alliance against China and decided to provide Australia with carefully guarded submarine technology. France was furious. What is Europe’s role in the intensifying confrontation?
Washington
United States did something this week that it has never done since 1958 and the president Dwight Eisenhower. It announced that it would allow the use of its nuclear submarine technology ally, Australia. Last time, carefully guarded technology was shared with Britain during the Cold War.
With the agreement between the United States, Britain and Australia, Australia is only becoming the seventh country in the world to have nuclear-powered submarines. The others are the United States, Britain, China, France, India and Russia.
For Australia, the decision is significant and one that a Finn can identify with. With just 25 million inhabitants, Australia has a superpower that has become a threat: China. The country decided that it needed even stronger ties to help the strongest possible ally.
In the process Australia swept overboard France, from which it had previously ordered tens of billions of euros in ordinary diesel-powered submarines.
France considers this to be a fraud.
On Friday, the French Embassy in Washington was to celebrate a major alliance between France and the United States dating back to the 18th century. The party was canceled.
Instead, Friday saw something that is not known to have happened since the 18th century: France announced that it would invite its ambassador from the United States home. The French Ambassador to Australia was also invited to “consult” in Paris.
Among the Allies, the gesture is very exceptional.
French the cause of the outrage is not just the billions and jobs lost but, above all, the broken trust. The New York Times by The United States, Australia, and Britain deliberately kept France in the dark about the plans.
President Joe Biden yet the administration certainly did not expect the French reaction to be so exceptional, an expert in international politics David Sacks says. Sacks works at the Council of Foreign Relations Incubator in the United States.
The outrage in France says he said the Biden administration failed to implement the new policy. As with its withdrawal from Afghanistan, it once again surprised its important ally.
“The approach was almost trumpeting,” Sacks says.
Before the escalation of the diplomatic crisis, the content of the submarine agreement was widely regarded in the United States as good. It is finally a concrete step in the shift of U.S. security policy toward Asia, the incubator of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic and Security Policy Program. Barry Pavel says.
Pavel worked in a senior position at the U.S. Department of Defense at the Pentagon for nearly 18 years. From 2008 to 2010, he was a member of the country’s National Security Council.
Former President Barack Obama announced the shift of U.S. foreign policy focus to the Pacific as early as 2011 in a speech he had just given in Australia.
The turnaround was supposed to mean a shift in U.S. military focus from the Middle East to responding to the Chinese threat, but implementation has taken time. Pavel believes submarines to be the first step among many.
“The down payment has now been paid,” he says.
“There is no NATO defense alliance in the Pacific, so alliances are being created one at a time.”
The next news can be expected as early as next week, when the leaders of the United States, Australia, Japan and India, known as the Quad countries, will meet face-to-face for the first time in Washington.
In 2011, President Barack Obama visited a military base in Darwin, where he met with U.S. and Australian troops.
New the alliances are ultimately driven by the growth of China’s military power and its increased aggression, especially against Taiwan.
“Those who say that about these [Australian] submarines are starting a cycle of armaments, have not followed what China has done in recent decades, ”Pavel says.
“When I worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, not a day went by that no new information about China’s armaments had come to my desk. Not a day. ”
Australian nuclear-powered submarines will dive below the surface of the Pacific in the early 2030s at the earliest. However, the agreement also allows for faster action, for which more information is expected.
New the agreement raised not only the outrage of France, but also the question of the role of the EU in the growing confrontation between China and the United States. Was continental Europe set aside or does it belong to the Pacific at all?
“The worst option is if the EU says this is just a Sino-US problem,” Pavel says.
The Union does not say. At the same time as Australian submarines made headlines, the EU announced its own strategy for the Pacific. It just got completely at the feet of Australia news. That was unfortunate, according to Sacks, and the timing of the news was another mocha from the United States.
“With the exception of Germany, Europe now has the enthusiasm to step up against China,” Sacks says.
Or at least it was before France became furious.
According to both American experts, EU countries are not expected to take primary military action, at least in the Pacific. The Union can also play its part by curbing China’s economic power and focusing on the military threat in its neighborhood, Sacks says.
“If Europe makes sure it meets NATO’s goals and is able to respond to Russia’s threat, it will free up US resources for the Pacific.”
So. Although the United States refuses to say so, this week it became even clearer that a translation to Asia is a translation away from Europe. When the United States got an opportunity from Australia to improve its position in the Pacific, it was ready to break the confidence of another ally, France.
The celebratory speeches previously heard from Biden on the return of diplomacy and allies are hardly enough to remedy that. The deeds tell more.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/hs-analysis-biden-made-the-last-game-move-seen-during-the-cold-war-and-caused-an-exceptional-diplomatic-crisis/
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