Will the loss of the Australian submarine market to the United States of America, which, along with the UK, literally threw it out of Australia by grabbing a contract worth at least $40 billion, be a lesson for France?
Probably not. France, on the other hand, was relatively recently, under Trump, kicked out of the arms market by the US and it swallowed it. Why is Biden any worse? Sarkozy got Paris back into the NATO military structure from where de Gaulle, much more cautious, intelligent and prudent, got France out? He did. Did Hollande and Macron go along with the Americans in their contacts with Russia? Let’s go. The Mistral story makes it clear. Well, why be offended?
Paris can only raise claims against itself. When you sit down to play poker with the Americans, you must be prepared not only to see them bluffing desperately, but also to have a baseball bat hit over the head or a knee blown off under the table. That’s the kind of guys they are. As for the Brits, they are not much different from the Americans. One can understand Australians, too: they are given nuclear submarine building technologies. The temptation was enormous, and the fact that they did not resist it is more than understandable. It was nothing personal, just business. That is how this world works, including within the NATO bloc. Such a terrarium of “like-minded” people… So, let’s state: the Americans are brutally, consistently and successfully killing the French shipbuilding industry, as they killed the British one after the war. Eagles!
The French are not the Afghans: they’ll shout and stop. And if they do not stop, it is not a problem: the Anglo-Saxon troika stacked before our eyes, albeit at short notice, by Washington against China is too attractive market for the French manufacturers to seriously strain relations with it. Wine, cheese, delicatessen… The French economy is not fed up with helicopter carriers and submarines alone. Will Macron copy de Gaulle and then take France out of NATO’s military structure again? That would look very foolish. Isn’t it the case that the Germans in the EU are floating the idea of including Turkey’s army in the future European military structure? It is understandable: Erdogan hates the French as much as they hate him. They have shown it to each other a hundred times.
Returning to Russia and its interests, anything that weakens the cohesion of the North Atlantic Alliance is, at the very least, good for Moscow. It is not so bad for China either. Exactly what reasons the Americans decided to wipe their feet with the French is not important. Greed or their usual habit to bury and ruin their rivals and allies just in case, or they were fed up to communicate in international missions and coalitions with people who speak another language than English, it is difficult to say. Paris, however, has learned another lesson, though by no means the first, about how things work in Washington (and London and Canberra as well). Well, they can, if they want, sell their submarines to Iran or North Korea. China, in any case, does not need them – they work with us on this part. Belarus has no sea. And Ukraine has no money…
Eugene Satanovsky