I shall thoroughly enjoy watching American conservatives pretend that they give even a single fuck what France has to say about anything . . . 'course since it lets 'em score points on a Democrat President we can expect no less.
Meh. The French are pissed because our deal to sell nuclear subs to Australia negates their deal to sell them diesel subs. They’ll huff and puff over it but they’re not going to do anything substantive about it.
Meanwhile the deal draws us closer to a major Pacific Rim ally and equips them with cutting edge military technology as China becomes more aggressive in the region. Which is the point.
True, but it can be churned by the right pretty easily. “Biden Gaffe Angers Major Ally!” That kind of empty outrage. On its face and just based on that article, it seems a little sloppy.
Nah, Biden did awesomeness here. This right here will go down as one of the greatest things of his presidency.
On Reddit, I saw conservatives spinning it as, “Given Australia’s brutal crackdown on Covid anti-vaxxers, how can we trust them with such advanced military technology?”
Can you expand on that?
Moderating:
Both: You’re making this somewhat personal. Please stop now.
No warnings, just a note.
It’s not like the U.S. has been trustworthy for the past few years… maybe everyone expected a government not run by Trump to act better. But, I guess that’s not the American Way ™
Maybe they should sell them to Iran. Would that be substantive? It certainly would be delicious and hilarious. Then it would be the US’s turn to huff and puff.
Boy, that would show us all right! And how!
Clearly, we owe it to our allies to not offer them cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable materiel than the obsolete-60-years-ago tech our other allies were offering them.
What the hell is with the glee with fucking over the French? Fine, Australia opts to take a shiny deal fromthe US but both the US and Australia KNOW it will screw the French president by making him look out of the loop, by removing “good paying jobs for hardworking French citizens”, and by pulling in the fucking clown show that is the UK government that’s done it best to weaken the EU.
Given all that, was there seriously no method to do this in a better manner? And as a Canadian, having seen British involvement with submarine purchases, I suggest the Australians watch them like.a hawk.
There’s your problem. Australia was getting frustrated that the French aren’t ‘hard-working’. They were trying to work with the French and getting annoyed at their habits - showing up to meetings 15 minutes late (common in France), having too many holidays, and taking a month off every summer, which also shuts down Australians trying to work with the French.
The France project was way behind schedule, had ballooned to almost twice the original budget in just four years, and there were endless issues with the subs. So it was particularly galling to the to have the French announce another one-month shutdown for this summer as everyone goes on vacation.
I keep forgetting how military procurement is a model of efficiency and prudent spending.
But this thread is about damaging foreign relations and weakening/screwing over Marcon a year out from a presidential election is damaging foreign relations. Consider that the EU will see a new German Chancellor by this time next year as well. All that adds up to potential degradation of trans-Atlantic solidarity in the next 12-24 months.
I’ll assume the US has weighed these actions and considers Australian built nuclear subs coming online in the 2040s is a better deal than a French ally pissed of at them now.
I have been critical about Biden’s withdraw from Afghanistan, in terms of how it was handled. However, it’s ridiculous to frame this as damage relative to where the US was, given all the disastrous things that Trump did over his tenure.
And, even in terms of Afghanistan, Trump also wanted to pull out, and made an awful deal with the Taliban to that effect, he just didn’t get it done. And, if we look at the pull out in Syria, we see that under that administration retreats were also done overnight, and in fact with less international support.
In terms with the deal with the subs, I agree we should not revel in it too much, but I also agree with what has happened. And any Trump supporter with any connection to objective reality would concede that they would also have seen it as a positive under the previous administration.
Precisely. I don’t know enough about the deal and the diplomatic fall out to have too much of an opinion as to whether this was a good or bad idea. But this is exactly the sort of deal that Trump would have been touting to the heavens. “You snooze you lose frog eaters! MAGA!”
The only difference is that he would also be looking for a way to screw the Brits and the Ausies now that the deal is made.
That one’s easy. Hire the lowest bidders to build the subs, then screw them out of their payment anyways. Who cares if a bunch of Aussie sailors end up irradiated on the bottom of the sea?
The reporting we’ve seen is that Australia had decided it was unsatisfied with French execution of their sub deal, and had concluded they need nuclear submarines more anyway. The Indo-Pacific area is vast, to operate diesel subs you need refueling, they have fixed ranges. Nuclear submarines have essentially unlimited range. For addressing concerns in the next 20-30 years it is actually in Australia’s interest to pursue nuclear sub technology. That technology is expensive to develop and implement, and there are major economies of scale if you can work with the United States to use their technology.
France on the other hand has historically been less willing to share nuclear sub technology (there is a deal in the works with Brazil to do just this, but details are sparse on what the level of cooperation will be.)
I think the better read on this is France fumbled its deal with Australia–and Australia made a mistake signing the deal. My understanding is there has been some latent hesitation in terms of domestic politics and Australia getting on board with nuclear subs, but the country appears to have come around as supposedly this deal has cross-party support in Australia.
Most people consider Macron’s reaction to be a vast overreaction–he has recalled Ambassadors posted to allied countries for “consultation” four times as President to signal displeasure. This is something that hadn’t been done in something like 100 years or more in France and is basically not common in diplomatic relations at all. A full Ambassadorial recall is generally the first step in ceasing diplomatic relations, a very serious move. That isn’t what Macro has done, he has not pulled the Ambassadors in a true recall (if he did, they would have to be recredentialed etc which is a whole thing, to resume their post), he has just brought them home for “consultations.” But it’s actually a pretty major “tantrum” in international diplomacy and many people frankly think it’s a major overreaction.
Do you remember when the Bush Admin got mad at France over not supporting the Iraq War? As serious as that row was, and it created stupid incidents like renaming French fries in a Congressional cafeteria to “Freedom Fries”, nothing approaching this level of formal diplomatic temper tantrum occurred. Frankly, Macron is reacting very badly here and outside the norm. I have seen zero evidence Biden or anyone else in the Administration has sought to “revel in it.”
Additionally key stakeholder countries in the Indo-Pacific–specifically India and Japan, have embraced the announcement of the AUKUS deal. This suggests this was much more a French blunder than an American mistake.
If that’s at me, when I used that expression a couple posts ago, it was just in terms of this thread. *We*, that is, Dope members, shouldn’t revel in it. No accusation regarding any world leaders’ words or behaviour.
I heard an interesting idea to fix the problem: The U.S. and Britain should broker a deal with France to sell the subs to Vietnam, perhaps subsidizing the price.
I don’t kmow how reasonable this is, since I have not been following that part of the world too closely. Vietnam is putatively still Communist, but it’s become more of a state capitalist country like China. However, China is serious threat to their sovereignty on the ocean, and diesel subs work perfectly for their mission, guarding their own territorial waters. It would mollify the French, and it would be helpful to have Vietnam join a coalition of countries aimed at curtailing Chinese imperialism.
China would probably throw a fit over it, but it might be worth it just to send a signal that their attempts to claim international waters for themselves will not be unopposed.
Does this olan make any sense? I homestly don’t know. It sounds clever and an intriguing way to kill multiple birds with one stone, but maybe there are nuances I don’t know.