Diplomacy has more sophisticated words for these things. But in trivial terms, this is called a “slap”. There are no other words to describe the affront made to France by Australia by abruptly canceling what was called yesterday the “contract of the century”, namely the sale concluded in 2016 to Canberra of 12 submarines from the Barracuda program. Not content with blowing a 50 billion euro deal in Paris, Joe Biden added insult to humiliation by announcing himself this breach of contract in the company of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his British counterpart , Boris Johnson.
The way in which the incident went virtually unnoticed in Washington shows that for Uncle Sam it is only a trivial detail in the vast strategic reorganization underway intended to prepare for a new Cold War, this times in the Pacific. It has been a few decades since American strategists began this redeployment. But the reality had come to thwart the plans of the Pentagon. Starting with September 11, which forced the Americans to disperse in Afghanistan, Iraq, then Syria.
With the albeit disastrous withdrawal from Kabul, this era is well and truly over. Biden can finally focus all his energies on China, as Barack Obama had begun to do before him and Donald Trump. Despite very different styles, the logic is the same.
Maybe now is the time to remember that on a visit to Canada in 1941, Winston Churchill had expressed his conviction that the “salvation of the world” could only rest “on an organism of which the English-speaking peoples will constitute the heart”. Other times, other customs: the “Old Lion” did not need to hide his imperial convictions behind sloppy multiculturalist speeches.
Three quarters of a century later, his wishes come true again. The new strategic alliance resulting from 18 months of secret negotiations, called AUKUS, brings together only pure English-speaking countries: Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States! In reality, only Canada and New Zealand are missing!
This new Pacific NATO obviously marginalizes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which Emmanuel Macron had already said that she was in a state of “brain death”. With Brexit, this alliance also puts the last nail in the coffin of the Lancaster House agreements, signed 10 years ago, which established defense cooperation between France and the United Kingdom.
Hadn’t Samuel Huntingdon warned us in The clash of civilizations ? Far from suppressing identities, globalization has given rise to civilizational clashes. Why be surprised therefore that to the economic affront, the champion of the “openness” that Joe Biden claims to be adds a touch of Anglo-Saxon supremacism?
It should come as no surprise that Emmanuel Macron stood out with his absence last week from the UN General Assembly. If we add to this portrait the French setbacks in Mali, now courted by Russia and its private militia Wagner, we are entitled to wonder if, despite his diplomatic voluntarism, this president will not make history. like the one who put the finishing touches to the French decline? To the internal decline, which manifests itself in the rise of insecurity and the “archipelagism” of the country, is added this series of diplomatic setbacks which clearly illustrate how much France counts today for plums in the economy. world.
The lauders of the European Union, of which the French president is a member, will take the opportunity to once again reaffirm their confidence in a chimerical European defense. They will pretend not to have noticed Angela Merkel’s deafening silence for two weeks. Now that Biden has lifted any threat of sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will soon deliver 55 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Germany annually, Berlin has returned to the chair of the good Washington student it occupies. since the post-war period.
Almost all of the five European defense programs were already in the dark. It is hard to believe that the coalition which will soon lead Germany will be a game-changer since the Liberal Democrats (FDP) and the Greens will almost necessarily be part of it. However, the former are fervent Atlanticists, while the latter are inveterate pacifists. In this blackboard, it would not miss any more that France loses New Caledonia during the referendum on independence which should take place on December 12th.
We understand why, in this climate of decline, the essayist and possible presidential candidate Eric Zemmour sold, in less than a week, 78,000 copies of his latest book. The title alone (France has not said its last word) contrasts with this deleterious atmosphere. As noted by Franz-Olivier Giesbert, columnist at the magazine Point, “Everyone is a sovereignist in the world, except Western Europeans”… not to say France!
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