French President Emmanuel Macron’s accusation, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting, that Scott Morrison is a liar is of course ridiculous. Nonetheless there is substance in the French leader’s charge that Australia may not get a nuclear submarine in any relevant time frame.
And there is also substance in the charge that there is a certain reputational cost to the way the conventional submarine issue has been decided in Australia.
The real villain from Australia’s point of view, however, is not the tiny foot stamping, cheek puffing episode of Macron, but the really disappointing and much more damaging betrayal of Australia’s diplomatic interests by US president, Joe Biden.
Biden is at that stage of cognitive decline where routinely he can’t remember what he can’t remember. But the idea that the Americans didn’t know the French would be annoyed by the AUKUS decision is ludicrous beyond belief. If this is the charge the Biden administration is making, it shows what a ropey operation they are, and in some senses how irresponsible.
Biden has massively magnified the political consequence of Macron’s temper tantrum by calling the AUKUS process clumsy and apparently agreeing that he thought the French had been fully informed in advance.
Macron’s perfidy is readily explainable by his approaching election. He is running a general, and typically French, nationalist abuse campaign against all the main Anglo-Saxons. His abuse of Morrison is as nothing compared with his fishing wars with Boris Johnson and the Brits.
Biden’s diplomatic contempt for Australia is much more disturbing. The Americans were fully involved, at the highest possible levels, in an intensely confidential negotiation over the availability of nuclear propulsion technology for Australia. The Americans have the best and biggest intelligence services in the world. They knew all about every aspect of the French submarine contract with Australia, in which they had been actively involved at every point. This is because Australia uses US combat systems on its subs and because of the intimacy of our alliance with the Americans.
The fact that at the AUKUS press conference Biden couldn’t remember Morrison’s name, and almost from one day after was apologising to the French and tut-tutting about Australia doing a deal with him, for goodness sake, tells you something very unpleasant about the Biden administration.
The AUKUS agreement was driven in part by Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific co-ordinator. Campbell, though a life long Democrat who served in the Obama administration, nonetheless represents a more traditionally Republican foreign policy outlook. He is an Asia first man, a Pacific Ocean man, through and through.
Biden’s great friend and climate tsar, John Kerry, and to a lesser extent Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, are old fashioned Democrat Atlanticisits. Kerry in particular has never had any time for Australia. It looks as though Biden’s Atlanticists have defeated Biden’s Asianists.
That’s a big story, and very bad news for Australia.
There is no other way of explaining Biden’s bizarre post-AUKUS verbal nonsense validating the French idea that they have been uniquely badly treated in the submarine matter. Given how often the French have behaved with infinitely greater ruthlessness – remember the Rainbow Warrior murder? – is the least of it.
The submarine agreement was structured as a sequence of contracts and from the very first it was always the case that Australia had every right to pull out at the completion of any specific contract stage. Beyond that, the French were very difficult to deal with. Australia has not breached any contract. It has decided not to proceed with a new stage of new contracts.
However, Australia’s reputation suffers in another way.
When AUKUS was first revealed, Australia’s good name was enhanced because the US and Britain were going to share nuclear propulsion technology with us. This was significant in itself and a sign of our closeness to our allies.
That has been greatly diminished by Biden’s diplomatic betrayal.
However, even more important is the revelation in Senate and other testimony that the earliest possible date we could actually get a single nuclear submarine in the water is 2040.
No project of this kind ever comes in early. If the government is saying 2040 now, then a good estimate of the actual first delivery is 2045 or even later. The whole fleet of nuclear boats likely won’t arrive until the 2060s, which is science fiction time.
That reality is gradually sinking in on all the nations concerned with military affairs in our region.
If we could have done, we should have gone forward with six French subs instead of 12, as the bridging capability to the nuke subs. As it is, we’ll have to do something like this eventually.
So the damage to our reputation is not that Macron calls Morrison a liar, but that we show ourselves completely incompetent, almost frivolous, in the way we cannot take and stick to any decision on submarines.
If we are not planning to have a new sub until the 2040s, then we are not serious about our defence. That is the killing point that Macron rightly, if opportunistically, makes.
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