So sayeth the French.French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, normally a pretty cool customer, immediately compared Biden to Trump, just “without the tweets.”
"This unilateral, sudden and unforeseeable decision very much recalls what Mr. Trump would do," Le Drian said in an interview with France Info radio, amid cries of “treason” and “betrayal” from Paris.
There have been
a couple of
good essays in the Times explaining exactly why France is so upset with us in the last few days.
Make no mistake. This is a crisis, not a spat.
The new partnership announced last week between the United States, Britain and Australia, in which Australia would be endowed with nuclear-powered submarines, has left the French angry and in shock. And not just because of the loss of their own deal, signed in 2016, to provide Australia with submarines.
...
The fallout is about much more than a scrapped business deal, Gallic pride and bruised egos. This diplomatic bombshell has crudely exposed the unwritten rules of great-power competition, in which France cannot be a player unless it carries the weight of the European Union behind it. The past week has been about 21st-century geopolitics and the brutal adjustment of old alliances to new realities.
France considers itself a “resident power” in the Indo-Pacific region, a crucial battleground for the rivalry between America and China, because it possesses several islands and maintains four naval bases there. It developed its own strategy for the region in 2018 and has been pushing since then for the European Union to come up with a similar project. Ironically, the European Union’s Indo-Pacific strategy was presented on the very day the deal, known as AUKUS, became public. The plan was, of course, drowned out by the uproar.
The United States and Australia went to extraordinary lengths to keep Paris in the dark as they secretly negotiated a plan to build nuclear submarines, scuttling France’s largest defense contract and so enraging President Emmanuel Macron that on Friday he ordered the withdrawal of France’s ambassadors to both nations.
Mr. Macron’s decision was a stunning and unexpected escalation of the breach between Washington and Paris, on a day that the two countries had planned to celebrate an alliance that goes back to the defeat of Britain in the Revolutionary War.
Yet it was driven by France’s realization that two of its closest allies have been negotiating secretly for months. According to interviews with American and British officials, the Australians approached the new administration soon after President Biden’s inauguration and said they had concluded that they had to get out of a $60 billion agreement with France to supply them with a dozen attack submarines.
Basically, we're no longer treating France as an equal partner. They might have expected that from Trump...but Biden? That's gotta sting.
/. "She climbed backwards out her
\/ window into Outside Over There."