President Macron has been accused of playing into China’s hands with an outspoken attack on a deal for Britain and the United States to help Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
The French leader and his ministers claim the agreement could provoke confrontation with Beijing. They also suggest that Britain and America will be unable to provide the nuclear- powered submarines for “a lot longer than expected”. The French say Canberra would be better reviving a deal to buy conventionally powered French submarines.
The French offensive caused anger in Australia, which mounted when the Global Times, China’s state-run newspaper, echoed Macron’s comments. It said Aukus, as the pact between Australia, the UK and the US is known, was a “threat to peace”.
Writing in The Australian newspaper, Peter Jennings, senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said Macron was spouting “diplomatic nonsense” that was a “gift to Beijing”.
Under the Aukus pact, announced in September 2021, Australia is scheduled to get British and American assistance and technology to build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines by 2040. The agreement led Canberra to pull out of a €56 billion deal to buy 12 conventional Barracuda submarines from the French state-owned Naval Group.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister at the time, described the U-turn as a “stab in the back”, complaining that Paris had been kept in the dark during talks between London, Washington and Canberra.
Now Macron is trying to resurrect the French deal. “The offer is still on the table,” he said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting in Thailand this month. He said British and American order books were full and suggested that Australia could not afford to wait for them to deliver nuclear-powered submarines. “I think Australia will be confronted with what I described at the time: Aukus will not deliver,” he said.
Sébastien Lecornu, France’s armed forces minister, said Australia would “have to wait a lot longer than expected to get [the nuclear-powered submarines], unlike our offer of conventionally powered submarines.”
French officials argue that BAE Systems, the British defence group, will be busy for years building four Dreadnought class ballistic missile submarines for the Royal Navy while completing a programme to deliver seven nuclear-powered Astute class submarines. They say the group has no spare capacity to work on the Australian project for the foreseeable future. A spokeswoman for BAE Systems declined to comment.
The French are also claiming that Aukus would undermine Australia’s sovereignty while putting it on a collision course with China. Macron said the deal involved “re-entering into nuclear confrontation, making [Australia] completely dependent by deciding to equip themselves with a submarine fleet that the Australians are incapable of producing and maintaining in-house”.
France is said to be trying to persuade Canberra to buy four conventional French submarines. Officially, this is being sold as a stopgap measure until the nuclear-powered vessels are ready.
Sussan Ley, Australia’s deputy opposition Liberal Party leader, said Macron’s comments were a “stinging rebuke” of Aukus. Tony Abbott, Australia’s former prime minister, accused Macron of hypocrisy, saying his comments were “an extraordinary double standard. It’s OK for France to have nuclear-powered submarines, but somehow if Australia gets nuclear submarines that’s a threat to global peace.”
