Background: In 2016, Australia had signed a deal to buy 12 diesel submarines from a French company.
Fast-forward to now, and Australia, the UK, and the US have just announced a 3-way deal to provide the Aussies with nuclear subs. This has made the French VERY upset.
I can’t wait to see the Venn diagram of “people who use this to blame Biden for eroding our centuries-old alliance with France” and “people who were using the term ‘freedom fries’ in 2003”.
France has no one to blame but itself. Cost ballooned 50%. No nation in their right mind would buy diesel submarines at over $7 billion apiece. Aussies had no choice but to cancel. Furthermore France has a long history of trouble-ridden foreign military sales.
What nation in their right mind would commit a trillion dollars to an overhyped fighter plane that was the subject of one of the defense industry’s most spectacular cost overruns?
In Chuck Yeager’s autobiography, he tells the story of doing flight testing for some French airplanes (they were not fighters- his area of expertise, I believe they were long range bombers but I could be wrong and they might have been transports). In any case he tells the story of taking off with his commanding officer, General Boyd (who had previously selected him as the X1 test pilot) and as soon as they were airborne a French steward arrived with champagne to celebrate the successful takeoff. As I recall the story, the two American airmen looked at each other and laughed because “that was all they needed in a strange aircraft with a difficult flight profile to fly ahead of them”.
The message I took from the encounter was that the French military has not been respected by outsiders since Musketeers were their most highly regarded soldiers. (In fairness, I don’t recall if Yeager himself made that claim or if my friends and I arrived at the conclusion on our own. We were all fans and avid readers of Dumas then as we are now.)
That was my first thought too.
Are you saying that Biden torpedoed this deal? It seems more like the French were just in over their heads.
I don’t know if you ever saw this humor piece. It made the rounds some years back–I think around the time of the “freedom fries” incident.
Humor-impaired pedants like me always mutter at those sorts of things 
. I think I may have dissected that one before, but regardless if its the same one or not it is loaded with a few truths, a few half-truths and a metric shit-ton of inaccuracy. I mean calling the Gauls French is stretching history well past the breaking point - I mean it would be more accurate to call the Romans French if we went by linguistic distance 
.
The-French-are-shit-at-war meme really derives from WW II, mixed with a little traditional Anglocentric exceptionalism and maybe flavored in the U.S. with just an added smidgeon of American political antipathy towards the assertively independent Gaullism of the French Fourth Republic. France was a very wealthy and very populous country from the high Middle Ages onward and consequently was often the dominant military power on the continent. They had certainly definitively displaced the Holy Roman Empire as such by the opening of the 13th century. They weren’t really knocked off that spot until the 19th century and they remained a Great Power until WW II did in many of the traditional Great Powers.
A photo in the original linked story makes it seem like French citizens turned out for a massive flag-waving protest on the Champs-Elysees over cancellation of the sub deal, which I tend to doubt.
More serious than the recall of diplomats is this:
“On Thursday, the French cancelled an embassy soiree that had been scheduled to take place Friday at the ambassador’s residence in Washington to celebrate the U.S.-French alliance dating back to the American Revolutionary War.”
I’ll bet they were planning to serve some really good grub at the bash.
I just hope the French Embassy didn’t cancel the caterers’ contract. 
Major Airplane orders from Airbus vs Boeing in certain parts of the world often have some input from the US or EU (notably France). I’m wondering how much of this just something similar.
Australia isn’t worried about Russian tanks invading.
Zut alors!
Napoleon might have something to say about that. 
A more balanced list:
(The green rows are French victories)
To be fair, the world’s condition is such that the US has little energy to expend on making France feel like an important Great Power any more.
That’s so wild I don’t even see how it’s plausible. Astute and Virginia class attack subs cost half as much, and they’re the best in the world, and including a rather costly and complex nuclear reactor. Australia’s naval concerns are much more regional.
The wiki page says it’s based off a nuclear version of that design with a very sane sailaway cost of around $1.6b euros. I have no idea how they managed to take the nuclear power plant out of the sub and increase the price 3-4x in the process. It was a modification of an establish design - if anything, it should’ve been cheaper.
I’m reasonably sure I can make such a list of every country in the world.
Military campaigns that actually accomplish stuff are so rare you would be forgiven to think they do not exist.
You misspelled “cheese eating surrender monkeys”.
Perhaps we can agree that it is complicated. Blaming the French is like adding insult to injury, letting them off the hook is ignoring their lack of competence. I guess language (Macron believing he understands English - Australian English to boot - better than he actually does and his assesors not daring to use an interpreter if the boss does not because how does it look? is part of the problem). As this side switching started under Trump we have to take pettiness into account too, and then there is the unbearable sight of Boris Johnson’s glee. Did you see and hear him at the press conference where he said that this bombastic deal was the apex of brotherhood with the former penal colony, that it cemented peace, equal standing and poodleishness with the great USA, showed that the Frogs were ignorant idjots and that therefore Brexit was best, rarara! (He used other words, but that was the gist). Obnoxious.
Ah, if I only would get 1% of the “commissions” Boris’s friends and family have carved out for themselves!
Sorry, my bad - upon further check, it meant over 7 billion Australian dollars apiece. Not US dollars.
Still an insanely high price, but not as wild as I thought.
I don’t know much about it but you wouldn’t want to assume that the blame for the cost blowout falls entirely at the feet of the French. Just like in the US, major military projects are used in Australia as a form of porkbarrelling. And every local (and indeed nonlocal) contractor, consultancy, etc wants to get their snout well and truly into the trough. There will have been heavy requirements for use of Australian contractors and employees. Unions will have made sure they got their members a goodly slice. And so on.
This is my sense as well. It seems that France’s injury is in the context of Brexit and concerns about the future stability of the EU. I’m not there on that side of the Atlantic but I keep reading about increasing energy prices, and that’s the sort of thing that can really cause economic and political tumult across the Continent, not that this deal has any direct relationship to that but perhaps the timing is bad.
Well, I got the puns and found them very funny. I wanted to add to the list, but nothing came to mind so I dropped it. I did however, really expect some Doper to run with this as I have seen done so many times in the past.
I suppose it is all for the best. At the prices the French were asking, Australia would have found itself drowning in debt.
I did find the list very funny, but it you do have a point here. Even though I laughed out loud at a few examples which were fanciful but entertaining-- it did occur to me that the recent military of the United States is abysmal for any superpower and especially so for a nation that considers itself the sole remaining one on Earth.
I always thought the Bill Murray line from Stripes was hilarious, (roughly) “We are Americans . . . we are 10-0-1!!” In other words, we could have gone to the Rose Bowl even before there were so many insignificant Bowls that half the teams went to one. Now our record must sound more like a baseball recap. Team USA is 56 and 42 after the all star break, sitting twelve wins behind first place with a really lousy streak on the road.
As we mirror the fall of Rome more and more with each generation, it is really all we can do to make ourselves like an important Great Power these days.
(Seriously, it is very much to our benefit that we have a horde of friendly Canadians amassed on our northern border rather than Germanic tribes!)