UNITED NATIONS— Choosing a full-fledged confrontation
with the US due to the loss of a mega-contract for submarines for Australia,
France is making a risky bet and other nations are not rushing to its defense.
اضافة اعلان
After Australia renounced its deal for conventional
submarines in favor of US nuclear-powered ones, France took the extraordinary
step of pulling its ambassadors from both Washington and Canberra for
consultations.
Bertrand Badie, an international relations professor at the
Sciences Po institute in Paris, said France had put itself in a position where
it can only appear to be backing down or losing face once its ambassador
returns to the US, its historic ally.
"When you get into a crisis like this, you better know
where the exit is," he said.
Australia said it decided that nuclear submarines were a
better choice to ensure its maritime edge as it announced a new three-way
alliance with the US and Britain widely seen as aimed at China — whose rise has
been the overriding priority of US President Joe Biden's administration.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who has stayed subdued
publicly, is set to speak to Biden in the coming days.
But Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has used language
rarely used among friendly nations, alleging "lying" and
"duplicity" and saying France was "stabbed in the back" by
Australia.
He so far has no meeting scheduled on the sidelines of this
week's UN General Assembly in New York with US Secretary of State Antony
Blinken, himself a French speaker known for his love of Europe.
No backing from Europe
With a contract worth $36.5 billion on its signing in 2016,
the French anger may show the country's powerful defense industry that
political leaders are pressing their case.
But the diplomatic impact is less certain, with France
appearing isolated at the start of the UN General Assembly.
Fellow EU power Germany, which holds elections next Sunday,
is hardly eager to get involved. The government simply said it took note of the
dispute.
Celia Belin, an expert on transatlantic relations at the
Brookings Institution, said that France could rally fellow European nations
around shared perceptions that the Biden administration is lacking a Europe
strategy.
"France needs to share this assessment with European
allies and put it on the table with the Americans to find solutions," she
said.
While most European nations rejoiced at seeing Biden defeat
the divisive Donald Trump, Biden also triggered criticism from European allies
over his determined withdrawal from Afghanistan, which led to a swift Taliban
victory after a 20-year NATO-backed war.
Another sore point is the continued COVID-19 ban on most
Europeans from traveling to the US, even as the European Union — spurred by
nations depending on tourism — relaxed entrance requirements for Americans.
'Bold' action?
Max Bergmann, a former US State Department official now at
the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said Biden needed to take
"bold steps to repair relations with France to prevent this from
spiraling."
He said Biden could invite Macron to the White House,
embrace the French leader's vision of a European defense capacity and move to
end the travel ban.
"The danger is that this incident poisons the well and
upends transatlantic cooperation on all sorts of critical areas from NATO, tech
and trade cooperation and developing a unified approach to China and
Russia," he said, while saying that the alliance benefited Australia's
security.
Biden also earlier annoyed Eastern Europeans by waiving most
sanctions on Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany that
critics say will let Moscow exert new pressure on smaller nations it can
bypass.
The Biden administration said it took the decision partly
for the sake of ensuring strong relations with Germany.
"Europe has never been as divided on its foreign policy
options," Badie said.
Le Drian also has no plans to meet individually in New York
with his new British counterpart, Liz Truss, and France scrapped meetings
scheduled this week with Britain's defense minister.
"They have the right to be angry," Francois
Heisbourg of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research said of the
French.
"The risk for France is that anger becomes its
guide," he said.
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