Because Europe, after Aukus, has to choose who to stay with
After the Aukus agreement, Europe no longer has room for ambiguity: it has to choose who to side with, with the United States or with China. Federico Punzi's analysis on Atlantico Quotidiano
For some time now, French President Macron has been taking slaps, real and metaphorical. The Elysée reacted with a real nervous breakdown to the announcement of the Aukus partnership (Australia-United Kingdom-United States), which for Paris means not only the loss of the 56 billion contract for the supply of its submarines to Canberra , but also the defeat of the exclusion from the Indo-Pacific security system that Washington is redesigning to stop Chinese expansionism.
Macron called his ambassadors to Australia and the United States for "immediate consultations". The celebration of Franco-American friendship in memory of the US War of Independence fought side by side against the British 240 years ago canceled from the French embassy in Washington.
The deal was called "a stab in the back" by Paris, but it is not that the French had given their allies ample notice when in 1966 they decided to withdraw from NATO integrated command.
What happened "will weigh on the future of NATO," Foreign Minister Le Drian thundered Saturday, accusing Biden of behaving like Trump, but without tweets. In short, in Paris they have not yet dissipated their anger … Things that happen, when you spend time raving about the EU army and strategic autonomy …
Two hitherto indisputable figures of recent pro-European mythology, born in response to the Brexit and Trump shocks, have crumbled against the announcement of the Aukus partnership. The first: that the disagreements between the United States and the European Union, which had led the top EU leaders, Merkel first, to declare that we Europeans could no longer trust our US and UK allies, and that we should have learned to "act as a alone ”, were the fault of Trump and his hostility towards European integration.
The support of the new US president for the EU project and his friendship with Europe are beyond question, yet the slaps that arrived from Washington within a few months – from the modalities of the withdrawal from Afghanistan to the Aukus agreement – make those of the Trump presidency.
If Europeans can no longer trust the US not only with Trump but not even with Biden in the White House, the suspicion should arise that perhaps it is the Americans who no longer trust Europe. Before it was Trump, now Biden … even before it was Bush and Rumsfeld (that Obama snubbed us could not even be whispered). There is no doubt that perhaps we are the problem?
The second taboo broken by the Aukus agreement is that by leaving the EU, far from regaining its global vocation, the United Kingdom would have condemned itself to a sad condition of international isolation. Nothing could be more false, as with Daniele Capezzone and other authoritative authors we warned in the book “Brexit. The Challenge " ( Giubilei Regnani , 2017).
On the contrary, Aukus shows at the same time the irrelevance of the EU and a recovered freedom of action and centrality of London, which outside the logic and the continental shackles can play a leading role in the Anglosphere and, within it, relaunch itself as a medium power with a global projection.
The agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, Wolfgang Munchau summed up, "shows that the EU has overestimated Biden and underestimated Johnson – a bad combination".
While in Brussels, Paris and even Rome (much less in Berlin) he raves about the EU army after the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan (as if the European countries were so eager, then, to go and, today, to stay … ), Washington, London and Canberra show the potential of an even deeper integration between the democracies of the Anglosphere under the military level, of common defense and sharing of technologies, as our Daniele Meloni explained . An integration in the name of pragmatism and operational flexibility.
Some commentators today realize that perhaps the problem between the US and the EU was not Trump, but we have been writing this in Atlantico Quotidiano for years, practically since we started our publications.
Since the early 2000s we have witnessed an acceleration of the process of strategic misalignment of the EU led by Franco-German from the American ally, which began slowly with the end of the Cold War and with German unification. The progressive misalignment has caused manageable shocks in the face of the asymmetrical threat of Islamic terrorism, but with the emergence of a strategic, systemic rival, such as China, it has become simply unsustainable.
Throughout history, the emergence of new superpowers has always forced a realignment of political and military alliances. Now that the United States has become aware, thanks to the Trump presidency, of how much the rise of Beijing represents a real threat to their global leadership and the international order, they expect a realignment of allies. Recreation is over. Some responded to the call in attendance, Europe did not. At first, hiding behind the Trump alibi. Now, with Biden, whose election was celebrated as the return to the White House of multilateralism and a "friendly" president of the EU, all alibis have fallen away.
We do not believe that the Biden administration has lost hope that the EU – but especially France and Germany – will join China's common containment strategy. Without Europe, any strategy has little chance of success because Beijing can easily break the diplomatic and economic encirclement. But of course, faced with the negative signals coming from the EU, Washington has decided to do without them for the moment.
As soon as Biden was elected, the EU on German push signed the CAI with China, the investment agreement that Beijing had been waiting for for years – now suspended by the European Parliament but not yet rejected. When at the first international summits the Biden administration expressed its intention to involve all allies in a coalition of democracies ready to join forces against the aggressiveness of Beijing, Europe – through its most important capitals, Berlin and Paris – Spades replied, returned the invitation to the sender. Chancellor Merkel explicitly said that "grouping" against China is a bad idea and Berlin would not have been there. President Macron is repeating that NATO is "in a state of brain death", it has opened up to Putin's Russia without receiving even a signal of attention from Moscow and dreams of restoring French grandeur by leading the elusive EU army.
The emphasis, indeed the real obsession, of European leaders on the concept of "strategic autonomy" what else does it mean in practical terms other than distancing oneself from the United States on relations with China, Russia and Iran?
It is not that the US makes the EU "feel" as a second-rate ally. The EU is a second-rate ally. But the fault lies with the EU itself, which does not respond militarily – on the expenditure front – nor politically to the requests for realignment of the USA, indeed it sends signs of intolerance.
Trump had decided to use the cane to bring European allies back to the side of the US. Biden went back to carrots. Defused the Airbus – Boeing dispute by suspending Trump's duties; renounced the sanctions against the European companies engaged in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 , giving the green light to complete the pipeline. It cannot therefore be said that he did not send conciliatory signals. Yet he failed.
All American efforts to bring European allies on board in confrontation with China have so far been unsuccessful, so it is physiological that Washington has decided to move forward with the allies it is most in tune with, in this specific case by following up on the Australian and British offer to deepen and expand defense cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, but not limited to.
In fact, Aukus is not the only initiative. It will be the nexus of a much larger network that will attract other informal regional groupings with different objectives, from security to trade, such as the Quad (United States, Japan, India and Australia), or the Trans Pacific Partnership , a trade agreement that includes the United States. , Australia, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand and the UK awaiting accession.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board made it very clear:
“ Aukus' message to Europe is that the United States is serious about resisting Chinese hegemony in Asia-Pacific. Europe cannot play the game of China's divide and rule on economic and strategic issues without consequences for its relations with the United States ”.
For Washington, the newspaper explains, tensions with Paris are a price worth the effort to maintain a favorable military balance in Asia-Pacific.
The Aukus agreement is a direct response to Beijing, which over the past year has bullied Australia, guilty of asking for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus , imposing tariffs, imprisoning Australian citizens and threatening Canberra's political class.
Beijing's aggression suggests to other Southeast Asian countries what treatment awaits them if the expansion of China's economic and military power is unhindered. And the message to all these countries is that the United States rewards resistance to Chinese intimidation and / or sirens. Aukus is an example of Western solidarity in the face of Beijing's divide and rule , which instead seems to be working in distancing the EU from the US.
As John Keiger noted in the Spectator , “What the three Anglosphere states have put together with Aukus is a flexible and agile arrangement to directly manage Indo-Pacific security. A club within another culturally defined club of the Anglosphere, very exclusive, which has existed since the Second World War and which has never had France as a member, the Five Eyes (with New Zealand and Canada) ”.
"While it has a lot to offer in terms of naval projection, nuclear submarines and armaments, intelligence and presence, thanks to its overseas territories in the South Pacific", Keiger reasoned, for its rigidity, "its cultural propensity to define every term , role and eventuality ”, France (but the discourse can be extended to the entire EU with all its indecisions and internal divisions), is not the best partner if the need is to react quickly.
With the presidential campaign at the gates, and Paris about to take over the EU presidency, it is easy to predict that Macron will react to the difficulties by focusing on nationalist and pro-European pride, insisting on strategic autonomy and the EU army.
While Macron seems to have decided to harm himself by literally banging his head against the US wall, Berlin's position is more nuanced, or rather more Byzantine. Ostpolitik is more alive than ever, both against Moscow and Beijing, but you will never hear direct attacks against NATO from the Germans – also because they are aware that they cannot do without them. But after laying the hatchet against the completion of Nord Stream 2 , Washington expects a new approach to the Chinese challenge from Berlin. As military containment is important in the Indo-Pacific, it is important to create an integrated Euro-American commercial and technological area, but the German mercantilist approach, like French Gaullism, is still a major obstacle.
Even the "pro-European" New York Times , which headlined: "The new US alliance against China has put Europe in front of a question it has tried to avoid: which side are you on?"
The time for ambiguity is over. The EU cannot remain neutral in the new Cold War, it cannot continue to collect the economic dividends of China's rise, leaving the United States with the burden of facing the resulting geopolitical challenges. The idea cultivated in Berlin of a “Greater Switzerland” Germany, the strategic autonomy on which Paris and Brussels are insisted, are incompatible with the new US strategic course and, therefore, with the survival of the transatlantic alliance.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/accordo-aukus-europa-scelta-stati-uniti-cina/ on Sat, 25 Sep 2021 06:20:38 +0000.