“A blow in the back”. Jean-Yves Le Drian, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, broke with the usual windings of diplomatic language yesterday when commenting on the Australian about-face.
“I am angry, it is not done between allies,” he added Thursday on France Info.
To hear Hugues Eudeline, a former Navy officer and former nuclear submarine commander, now a researcher at the Thomas More Institute, Canberra’s turnaround nevertheless responds to a certain form of logic.
The French government seems surprised by the breach of the “contract of the century” concluded with Australia. You too ?
The most astonishing in my opinion, it was the signing of the contract itself, in 2016. Traditionally, the Anglo-Saxons always work among themselves. In what is called “the Anglosphere”, language and culture take precedence over alliances. Even though our submarines are very good, the fact that the Australians opted for a French manufacturer aroused some astonishment at the time.
There they actually come back into the fold of their closest friends: the United States, which they see as their greatest ally, and the United Kingdom, to which they are linked via the Commonwealth.
Why this choice, and why now?
I see a main reason for this: the urgency of the threat from China in the Indo-Pacific zone. For two years now, tensions have been growing between Beijing and Canberra. The differences relate in particular to the fate of the Uyghur Muslim minority or the deployment of 5G.
In retaliation, China stopped importing Australian coal. This embargo has significant economic consequences for both countries.
To this already explosive climate is added Beijing’s desire to appropriate the South China Sea. All the raw materials essential for its development pass through these waters. In the other direction, it is also by there that Chinese exports are made which flood the whole world. In short, for Australia, it was necessary to pass a course in terms of naval presence, and quickly.
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The contract with France was for diesel-electric powered submarines. In the alliance concluded with the Americans and the British, this time they will be nuclear powered …
From an operational point of view, nuclear has several enormous advantages in a space as gigantic as the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea.
With this mode of propulsion, there are no more batteries to recharge. You have inexhaustible energy at your disposal, which allows a submarine to cover phenomenal distances at high speed, but also to guarantee the autonomy of the crew in water and oxygen.
“If it weren’t for the food supply, a submersible like this could stay underwater for several years without a problem. In short, it goes farther, longer and can intervene faster.”
Hugues Eudeline (ex-commander of the Casabianca, a nuclear attack submarine)
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The irony is that France knows how to make nuclear submarines, but that in 2016 Australia did not want them ?! So we have, in a way, lost without fighting or demerit …
Is the Australian defection a humiliation for France or does the term seem exaggerated to you?
Even if the choice of Australia follows a certain logic, it remains a diplomatic humiliation and a real snub. The very lively reaction of Jean-Yves Le Drian proves it. Because it is not part of the Anglo-Saxon club, France is brutally put in its place. That of an ally, of course, but a second-rate ally.
Interview by Stéphane Barnoin
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