Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States (AUKUS) announced on September 15, 2021

The advent of this new alliance for the Pacific between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States (AUKUS) announced on September 15 questions the role of Europeans in the major contemporary military issues.

Indeed, the alliance burst onto the international scene with a loud scorn and disdain when France was evicted from the Australian submarine contract, which raises very embarrassing questions about the capabilities of French diplomacy and the future of France in the Indo-Pacific and the autonomy of its sovereign powers, as Sandrine Teyssoneyre points out. The cancellation of the French submarine contract with Australia should never have come as a surprise, given the close and historical relationship between the “Five Eyes” countries (USCNGBNZAUS, an organized spy association with the USA as its tutelary figure) and the permanent connivance of the staffs of the three countries, and in particular those of the United States and Australia, are intimately linked. Canberra has always been a formal ally of Washington, from which it receives GI’s. The arms industry and think tank meetings are a corollary of this state of affairs.

To top it all off, Great Britain, though an ally of France, has not hesitated to wipe its feet on these links in favor of greater loyalty to the countries of its former colonial empire. The formation of Aukus according to British calculations allows the United Kingdom to cement both its status (and its technology) as a nuclear power, and its alliance with the great American power and its return to the space of its former empire, now the center of the game. For this return, the United Kingdom is ready to oblige, and has demonstrated this by playing the role of intermediary between Australia and the United States in the deconstruction of the French contract. For Boris Johnson’s England, Aukus is a precious tool for its post-European transition.

France is also aware that it is inserted in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon space where its language, an instrument of power, is contested. How is it possible that the secret discussions between the three Anglo-Saxon “allies” at the G7 Summit did not transpire, and this well before June 2021?

European strategic autonomy:

The disengagement of U.S. forces from Afghanistan – with their tails between their legs in a “Great Courage Run!” – has again demonstrated the inability of Europeans to sustain themselves in an external theater autonomously in August 2021 . These events have both raised strong European criticism of American decisions and reinforced the desire of some member states to see the emergence of a real strategic defense autonomy in Europe.

President Biden

For the time being, after declaring NATO brain-dead, President Emmanuel Macron is struggling to demonstrate the dividends and benefits that France derives from its good and loyal service within the Atlantic Alliance. It is as if France is confined to the role of “Be beautiful and shut up”. France’s membership in the Atlantic Alliance has mostly resulted in a growing loss of foreign policy autonomy, a bogging down in the Sahel costly in elite troops where it moves and wanders from country to country in search of a place of refuge. Another talle⅞ benefit, the right to be associated with the Afghan debacle and the cancellation of some mega arms contracts, which moreover, are conditioned on Washington’s permission? Between submission and being “true to itself,” the United States has ostensibly chosen.

As far as defence is concerned, all the European partners agree on one point: it would be dangerous to isolate ourselves from certain forms of alliance in a world where geopolitical stakes are rapidly evolving. Differences of opinion arise when it comes to knowing with whom it is worthwhile to ally oneself. And although the European Union’s common defence policy is provided for in the Lisbon Treaty (Article 42(2)), the text also clearly states the primacy of national defence policy, for example by leaving the choice of joining NATO or remaining neutral.