Nice work by Boris Johnson - screwing the relationship with France so that he can help Australia serve the USA by fighting China.
Meanwhile the British media is at pains to point out that the submarines will be nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed. I haven't seen one mainstream news site point out yet that giving nuclear weapons to a non-nuclear power is a breach of the "international rules-based order", specifically of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - but maybe the word "proliferation" has gone on on the index now?
And Tory idiots are saying hey Macron, here's "Global Britain" in your face. Talk about Ruritania and fighting a past war.
They're also saying that Australia was really brave to join the losing side in Vietnam. And they're saying this about five minutes after the British withdrew from Afghanistan, finally admitting there was no chance of them saving Afghanistan from the Afghans.
Nice money for defence contractors, though - and as Keynes said, in the long run everyone's dead.
The only good side to this is that it might mean the end of NATO, which would hardly be untimely given that that alliance has just suffered the biggest military humiliation in its entire ignoble history.
But anything "Australian", cough cough, goes down a treat in the Daily Mail.
Hello, but what's your point. Nnpt says we can give them engines not weapons, and we are giving them engines not weapons. So?
It’s still proliferation, even if it skirts the terms of the non proliferation treaty. The highly enriched fuel for the US/UK boats is suitable for making bombs (ironically, the French nuclear boats use low enriched commercial reactor fuel). https://thebulletin.org/2021/09/the-new-australia-uk-and-us-nuclear-submarine-announcement-a-terrible-decision-for-the-nonproliferation-regime/ … One can only imagine the drops of sweat trickling down the neck of the International Atomic Energy Agency leadership in Vienna when an Australian delegation comes knocking at its door bringing the good news. The agency, which is currently battling to prevent Iran from acquiring enough fissile material to build a nuclear weapon—25 kilograms (0.025 ton) of HEU according to the internationally agreed standard—will have to figure out how to monitor and account for 100 to 200 times that amount without gaining access to secret naval reactor design information. Managing that feat while keeping its credibility intact will be difficult to pull off...
Up until now, there’s been a tacit understanding not to sell nuclear propulsive technology partly for this reason. That has now changed. It far from the only factor likely to drive proliferation over the next decade, but it’s not negligible.
Except that everyone and his dog has plenty of weapons grade material lying around.
The Japanese have multiple metric tons of plutonium, for example.
The only things preventing Iran from getting weapons grade material is the lack of anyone who wants to sell it to them and the fact that every time they try and make it themselves, the Israelis break their toys.
Nice work by Boris Johnson - screwing the relationship with France so that he can help Australia serve the USA by fighting China.
Meanwhile the British media is at pains to point out that the submarines will be nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed. I haven't seen one mainstream news site point out yet that giving nuclear weapons to a non-nuclear power is a breach of the "international rules-based order", specifically of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - but maybe the word "proliferation" has gone on on the index now?
And Tory idiots are saying hey Macron, here's "Global Britain" in your face. Talk about Ruritania and fighting a past war.
They're also saying that Australia was really brave to join the losing side in Vietnam. And they're saying this about five minutes after the British withdrew from Afghanistan, finally admitting there was no chance of them saving Afghanistan from the Afghans.
Nice money for defence contractors, though - and as Keynes said, in the long run everyone's dead.
The only good side to this is that it might mean the end of NATO, which would hardly be untimely given that that alliance has just suffered the biggest military humiliation in its entire ignoble history.
But anything "Australian", cough cough, goes down a treat in the Daily Mail.
Hello, but what's your point. Nnpt says we can give them engines not weapons, and we are giving them engines not weapons. So?
It’s still proliferation, even if it skirts the terms of the non proliferation treaty. The highly enriched fuel for the US/UK boats is suitable for making bombs (ironically, the French nuclear boats use low enriched commercial reactor fuel). https://thebulletin.org/2021/09/the-new-australia-uk-and-us-nuclear-submarine-announcement-a-terrible-decision-for-the-nonproliferation-regime/ … One can only imagine the drops of sweat trickling down the neck of the International Atomic Energy Agency leadership in Vienna when an Australian delegation comes knocking at its door bringing the good news. The agency, which is currently battling to prevent Iran from acquiring enough fissile material to build a nuclear weapon—25 kilograms (0.025 ton) of HEU according to the internationally agreed standard—will have to figure out how to monitor and account for 100 to 200 times that amount without gaining access to secret naval reactor design information. Managing that feat while keeping its credibility intact will be difficult to pull off...
Up until now, there’s been a tacit understanding not to sell nuclear propulsive technology partly for this reason. That has now changed. It far from the only factor likely to drive proliferation over the next decade, but it’s not negligible.
For one thing, both potential reactors are sealed for life.
Nice work by Boris Johnson - screwing the relationship with France so that he can help Australia serve the USA by fighting China.
Meanwhile the British media is at pains to point out that the submarines will be nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed. I haven't seen one mainstream news site point out yet that giving nuclear weapons to a non-nuclear power is a breach of the "international rules-based order", specifically of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - but maybe the word "proliferation" has gone on on the index now?
And Tory idiots are saying hey Macron, here's "Global Britain" in your face. Talk about Ruritania and fighting a past war.
They're also saying that Australia was really brave to join the losing side in Vietnam. And they're saying this about five minutes after the British withdrew from Afghanistan, finally admitting there was no chance of them saving Afghanistan from the Afghans.
Nice money for defence contractors, though - and as Keynes said, in the long run everyone's dead.
The only good side to this is that it might mean the end of NATO, which would hardly be untimely given that that alliance has just suffered the biggest military humiliation in its entire ignoble history.
But anything "Australian", cough cough, goes down a treat in the Daily Mail.
Hello, but what's your point. Nnpt says we can give them engines not weapons, and we are giving them engines not weapons. So?
It’s still proliferation, even if it skirts the terms of the non proliferation treaty. The highly enriched fuel for the US/UK boats is suitable for making bombs (ironically, the French nuclear boats use low enriched commercial reactor fuel). https://thebulletin.org/2021/09/the-new-australia-uk-and-us-nuclear-submarine-announcement-a-terrible-decision-for-the-nonproliferation-regime/ … One can only imagine the drops of sweat trickling down the neck of the International Atomic Energy Agency leadership in Vienna when an Australian delegation comes knocking at its door bringing the good news. The agency, which is currently battling to prevent Iran from acquiring enough fissile material to build a nuclear weapon—25 kilograms (0.025 ton) of HEU according to the internationally agreed standard—will have to figure out how to monitor and account for 100 to 200 times that amount without gaining access to secret naval reactor design information. Managing that feat while keeping its credibility intact will be difficult to pull off...
Up until now, there’s been a tacit understanding not to sell nuclear propulsive technology partly for this reason. That has now changed. It far from the only factor likely to drive proliferation over the next decade, but it’s not negligible.
For one thing, both potential reactors are sealed for life.
Quite a few research reactors used to use 93% HEU, though LEU is becoming more common. Those things are *everywhere*
Has our fit of pique over losing access to Galileo worked out by luck and circumstance? Or was it not a fit of pique but strategic genius?
That's interesting.
It's only this summer that they were proposing to cut Eutelsat out of other projects because of a dual loyalty with perfidious Albion over them having taken a stake in OneWeb.
They'll probably cancel meetings and make some noise for a few weeks, then it'll go back to normal, then it'll ramp up again when the Presidential race starts heating up.
“Some Australians wanted to ring up one week and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.”
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
I thought that we were too insignificant for them to engage in gestures against us.
Yeah, either we matter or we don't? Why are they bothering to even visit the "seventh wheel" or the "dishwasher" let alone elaborately cancel meetings with us?
Is this the greatest tantrum in European history?
What they should do next is recall the French Ambassador to London but not bring him all the way home to Paris, instead they should make him live in a specially designed titanium wicker-basket hanging from a drone-balloon somewhere over Sark to show that they care so little about the UK they can't be bothered to withdraw the ambassador ENTIRELY
I thought that we were too insignificant for them to engage in gestures against us.
Yeah, either we matter or we don't? Why are they bothering to even visit the "seventh wheel" or the "dishwasher" let alone elaborately cancel meetings with us?
Is this the greatest tantrum in European history?
What they should do next is recall the French Ambassador to London but not bring him all the way home to Paris, instead they should make him live in a specially designed titanium wicker-basket hanging from a drone-balloon somewhere over Sark to show that they care so little about the UK they can't be bothered to withdraw the ambassador ENTIRELY
They should withdraw the German ambassador instead. That would put the cat among the pigeons.
I thought that we were too insignificant for them to engage in gestures against us.
Yeah, either we matter or we don't? Why are they bothering to even visit the "seventh wheel" or the "dishwasher" let alone elaborately cancel meetings with us?
Is this the greatest tantrum in European history?
What they should do next is recall the French Ambassador to London but not bring him all the way home to Paris, instead they should make him live in a specially designed titanium wicker-basket hanging from a drone-balloon somewhere over Sark to show that they care so little about the UK they can't be bothered to withdraw the ambassador ENTIRELY
Patel needs to realise (and should have always done) that we can't rely upon the French to solve our problems for us. We couldn't in the past and we certainly can't now.
Any solution to the Channel etc issues needs to be put in place by the UK in spite of France not with the co-operation of France.
And cut off the millions in funding we're sending to France.
Just looking at that clip @Leon posted earlier of Macron and Biden, it looks like Biden has borrowed The Donald's tie. He must have left the cap at home.
Monday’s Daily TELEGRAPH: “Johnson to press US to open up for UK visitors” #TomorrowsPapersToday https://t.co/zEZz5JR9nk
How did Radacanu get in ?
I think the Americans are asking themselves the same question....
What she did was wear a stars and stripes outfit as she went through customs...a nod to them that she was really American, despite what it said on her passport.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
Peak Johnson - bring in a daft campus free speech bill as part of a culture war against the elite. Then exempt Oxbridge colleges from it.
Will the UK’s no.1 university also be exempt? I guess that would be under the remit of the Scottish government.
I think it's just Oxbridge, not Oxbridge reject places like St Andrews or Durham. Perhaps they will broaden it out to any institution with at least three rugby elevens and an invitation-only drinking club?
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
For people like kinabalu who can't understand how the UK can succeed at the best of times, let alone an "isolated" UK led by a "clown" this just doesn't compute . . .
Looks like Bulb are on the edge? Reddit reckons they’d be the largest supplier ever to go bust should it happen, and that they have so many customers the other big suppliers would have difficulty taking them on. Government bailout incoming?
I thought that we were too insignificant for them to engage in gestures against us.
Yeah, either we matter or we don't? Why are they bothering to even visit the "seventh wheel" or the "dishwasher" let alone elaborately cancel meetings with us?
Is this the greatest tantrum in European history?
What they should do next is recall the French Ambassador to London but not bring him all the way home to Paris, instead they should make him live in a specially designed titanium wicker-basket hanging from a drone-balloon somewhere over Sark to show that they care so little about the UK they can't be bothered to withdraw the ambassador ENTIRELY
Patel needs to realise (and should have always done) that we can't rely upon the French to solve our problems for us. We couldn't in the past and we certainly can't now.
Any solution to the Channel etc issues needs to be put in place by the UK in spite of France not with the co-operation of France.
And cut off the millions in funding we're sending to France.
Withdrawing funds already committed would be unnecessarily provocative; we might as well see if the money makes any difference at all and, if you're right and it doesn't, not throw any more good money after the bad.
Going forward, I think it highly likely that the migrant crisis will only be solved through patrolling the Channel with a lot of extra boats, collecting all the migrants the French can't or won't stop, and sending them directly to be flown out for offshore processing. Nothing else will deter them from coming in ever-increasing numbers.
If the Government isn't prepared to put in place the necessary practical and legal framework for doing this, then the only realistic alternative is to grant them all leave to remain and distribute proportionate shares to every local authority in the land for resettlement, on the basis that most of them are never likely to leave and we might as well start integrating them and seeing if we can't get them into useful work or education. More practical by far than expecting the hopeless Home Office to attempt to file huge numbers of deportation cases that will all spend years grinding their way through the increasingly logjammed courts.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Canada. 13 polls. Just under 25k sampled. Lowest and highest scores removed. Sep17 to 19. Not sure how many more to come.
Lib 31.3 (-1.8) Con 30.7 (-3.6) NDP 20.0 (+4.0) PPC 6.8 (+5.2) BQ 6.7 (-0.9) GP 3.3 (-3.3)
Not much change, in what has been a pretty static election over the past two weeks. 9 Lib leads, 4 Con. Pollsters herding now. Interestingly, EKOS, who I was pointing out as providing much of the average Tory lead a few weeks ago, with some big blue scores, are now giving the largest Lib leads. Justin favourite for most seats. Majority not out of the question, but unlikely. Tory most seats can't be discounted. Majority can. Just isn't happening. No great enthusiasm for either main party. All for PPC and NDP. How these voters vote may prove key.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Need to get Canada in there
The three Commonwealth monarchies would be a good counter-weight to the Great Republic
NZ is possibly a lost cause. What happened to them? We should threaten to ban them from World Rugby until they come to their senses
Looks like Bulb are on the edge? Reddit reckons they’d be the largest supplier ever to go bust should it happen, and that they have so many customers the other big suppliers would have difficulty taking them on. Government bailout incoming?
Is there something about this whole energy supplier issue that reminds somewhat of the banking crises? A lot of relatively small suppliers being able to offer “too good to be true” deals, without having any statutory requirement to hedge sufficiently against potential changes in market wholesale prices? (Although unlike the banking crisis the large players are generally unaffected). Or is the real culprit just the attempt be Government to regulate prices without consideration of the costs this imposed?
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Yes, that's always been something worth aiming for. The UK, Australia and Canada together have a reasonably big population (130m) and along with the US we're fairly well aligned in world view. What's interesting about AUKUS is it replicates a lot of what the informal and formal bits of the special relationship do. Boris has been very canny IMO and made the Anglosphere alliance a reality.
The more I think about it the clearer it is that this was a very purposeful snub to the French and more widely the EU. Boris has taken advantage of a US president exasperated with the EU and pushed a Boris Brexit policy idea at the highest level. The timing of the announcement, the harsh way it was done without pre-briefing European allies, the depth of military secret sharing and then the post announcement briefings from London and Washington about it being hashed out at the G7 feels as though the US is telling the EU that playing both sides is no longer going to be acceptable.
I thought that we were too insignificant for them to engage in gestures against us.
Yeah, either we matter or we don't? Why are they bothering to even visit the "seventh wheel" or the "dishwasher" let alone elaborately cancel meetings with us?
Is this the greatest tantrum in European history?
What they should do next is recall the French Ambassador to London but not bring him all the way home to Paris, instead they should make him live in a specially designed titanium wicker-basket hanging from a drone-balloon somewhere over Sark to show that they care so little about the UK they can't be bothered to withdraw the ambassador ENTIRELY
Patel needs to realise (and should have always done) that we can't rely upon the French to solve our problems for us. We couldn't in the past and we certainly can't now.
Any solution to the Channel etc issues needs to be put in place by the UK in spite of France not with the co-operation of France.
And cut off the millions in funding we're sending to France.
Withdrawing funds already committed would be unnecessarily provocative; we might as well see if the money makes any difference at all and, if you're right and it doesn't, not throw any more good money after the bad.
Going forward, I think it highly likely that the migrant crisis will only be solved through patrolling the Channel with a lot of extra boats, collecting all the migrants the French can't or won't stop, and sending them directly to be flown out for offshore processing. Nothing else will deter them from coming in ever-increasing numbers.
If the Government isn't prepared to put in place the necessary practical and legal framework for doing this, then the only realistic alternative is to grant them all leave to remain and distribute proportionate shares to every local authority in the land for resettlement, on the basis that most of them are never likely to leave and we might as well start integrating them and seeing if we can't get them into useful work or education. More practical by far than expecting the hopeless Home Office to attempt to file huge numbers of deportation cases that will all spend years grinding their way through the increasingly logjammed courts.
I agree. Sadly, both your solutions require a good deal more expense. Cue Mr. Farage. Who won't be asked what his solution is. Much easier, and more politically beneficial, to just blame the French.
I thought that we were too insignificant for them to engage in gestures against us.
Yeah, either we matter or we don't? Why are they bothering to even visit the "seventh wheel" or the "dishwasher" let alone elaborately cancel meetings with us?
Is this the greatest tantrum in European history?
What they should do next is recall the French Ambassador to London but not bring him all the way home to Paris, instead they should make him live in a specially designed titanium wicker-basket hanging from a drone-balloon somewhere over Sark to show that they care so little about the UK they can't be bothered to withdraw the ambassador ENTIRELY
Patel needs to realise (and should have always done) that we can't rely upon the French to solve our problems for us. We couldn't in the past and we certainly can't now.
Any solution to the Channel etc issues needs to be put in place by the UK in spite of France not with the co-operation of France.
And cut off the millions in funding we're sending to France.
Withdrawing funds already committed would be unnecessarily provocative; we might as well see if the money makes any difference at all and, if you're right and it doesn't, not throw any more good money after the bad.
Going forward, I think it highly likely that the migrant crisis will only be solved through patrolling the Channel with a lot of extra boats, collecting all the migrants the French can't or won't stop, and sending them directly to be flown out for offshore processing. Nothing else will deter them from coming in ever-increasing numbers.
If the Government isn't prepared to put in place the necessary practical and legal framework for doing this, then the only realistic alternative is to grant them all leave to remain and distribute proportionate shares to every local authority in the land for resettlement, on the basis that most of them are never likely to leave and we might as well start integrating them and seeing if we can't get them into useful work or education. More practical by far than expecting the hopeless Home Office to attempt to file huge numbers of deportation cases that will all spend years grinding their way through the increasingly logjammed courts.
Agreed 100%.
If you accept that the Channel is an incredibly dangerous place to be crossing in a dinghy, then there are only two viable humane resolutions to the Channel crossings.
1: We need to offer anyone and everyone who wishes to cross the Channel a safe and legal way to do so, without a visa, without a passport and without any restrictions whatsoever. A complete carte blanche available to everyone, which could potentially easily number over a million people as it did when Merkel did this. Although Merkel never actually offered safe passage either, so it could be even more.
2: We say that anyone who crosses the Channel illegally gets a one-way ticket to somewhere like Rwanda and completely eliminate the pull factor.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Yes, that's always been something worth aiming for. The UK, Australia and Canada together have a reasonably big population (130m) and along with the US we're fairly well aligned in world view. What's interesting about AUKUS is it replicates a lot of what the informal and formal bits of the special relationship do. Boris has been very canny IMO and made the Anglosphere alliance a reality.
The more I think about it the clearer it is that this was a very purposeful snub to the French and more widely the EU. Boris has taken advantage of a US president exasperated with the EU and pushed a Boris Brexit policy idea at the highest level. The timing of the announcement, the harsh way it was done without pre-briefing European allies, the depth of military secret sharing and then the post announcement briefings from London and Washington about it being hashed out at the G7 feels as though the US is telling the EU that playing both sides is no longer going to be acceptable.
Earlier in his career, Biden was very critical of the weak response to Milosevic so maybe he developed an aversion to the EU at that point.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Need to get Canada in there
The three Commonwealth monarchies would be a good counter-weight to the Great Republic
NZ is possibly a lost cause. What happened to them? We should threaten to ban them from World Rugby until they come to their senses
New Zealand is (a) very dependent on China economically and (b) a nuclear-free zone that maintains no fully functional military alliances (the old ANZUS pact being partially suspended over the nuclear issue.) They're doing their own thing nowadays, and are particularly focussed on ties with other Pacific island states - that whole region being quite geographically distant from China, of course. How this works out for them in the long run probably depends on how well-disposed Chairman Xi is feeling towards them, and how careful they are not to upset him.
I suppose that Canada might come along for the ride in future, but we have to remember that the first major project of this new AUKUS thingy is to furnish the Australian navy with nuclear submarines. This is specifically for Australia and there's no indication that the Canadians view acquiring nuclear submarines as relevant to them.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Yes, that's always been something worth aiming for. The UK, Australia and Canada together have a reasonably big population (130m) and along with the US we're fairly well aligned in world view. What's interesting about AUKUS is it replicates a lot of what the informal and formal bits of the special relationship do. Boris has been very canny IMO and made the Anglosphere alliance a reality.
The more I think about it the clearer it is that this was a very purposeful snub to the French and more widely the EU. Boris has taken advantage of a US president exasperated with the EU and pushed a Boris Brexit policy idea at the highest level. The timing of the announcement, the harsh way it was done without pre-briefing European allies, the depth of military secret sharing and then the post announcement briefings from London and Washington about it being hashed out at the G7 feels as though the US is telling the EU that playing both sides is no longer going to be acceptable.
Earlier in his career, Biden was very critical of the weak response to Milosevic so maybe he developed an aversion to the EU at that point.
It's definitely within the realms of possibility. I think ultimately the US now looks at the EU as a body without the will to spend blood and treasure defending freedoms but would like to benefit from the freedoms that other nations spend blood and treasure to win.
Well, there you go. That's quite some feat. St A's only little!
A mere 27 years after becoming a Cambridge reject, it's nice to have confirmed what I always suspected: that I ended up in a superior institution, after all. Happy days.
This what happens when you sell fixed, and buy variable. I.e., the price of wholesale electricity is not fixed, but the price at which you sell to consumers is. Suppliers could could have hedged (i.e. forward bought electricity), but they instead decided to take a chance to earn some extra profits.
Why has the price of wholesale electricity gone through the roof?
Well, that’s a classic knock on effect of Covid.
The price of electricity is (largely) set by the price of natural gas. Because that is the marginal producer.
Now, 18 months ago, as Covid hit, demand for electricity and natural gas collapsed. This resulted in a massive pull back by onshore oil and gas drillers. The number of rigs drilling in the US dropped by two-thirds.
In the old days, this wouldn’t have mattered so much. In the old days, oil and gas projects were long-term, and a drop in investment would only show up in production some time later. With onshore unconventionals, that’s not true any more. These new wells have pretty short lives. If you stop drilling, then the natural gas (and oil) stops flowing.
The market then did what it was supposed to do. The price of natural gas stabilised as drilling capacity got taken out the market.
This year, Covid is on the way out, and demand for natural gas is rising. The problem is that some people who worked on rigs got other jobs. And so, the rig count is taking more time to rise than one would expect for the current price of oil and gas. And this is feeding through to even higher natural gas prices.
Of course, this will overshoot the other way now. As natural gas prices get high and stay high, oil & gas companies will feel more confident in investing in production. And it’s not like we don’t know where the gas is. So this is a short term problem. But a very painful one for some energy companies.
My irritation here is that this is not a difficult market to hedge. Some things don’t have active futures markets, and so intermediaries are taking big risks. Energy isn’t like that. You want to sell an MMBTU in 2024 - you can do that. Suppliers got greedy. They thought - why bother hedging, when I can take extra profit. But they forgot that if they called it wrong they wouldn’t have a business.
When do you expect prices to fall?
I’m locked in until November and wondering when to refix (I like certainty for budgeting purposes) or whether I should ride the tiger down for a bit.
I'm always slightly nervous about making calls about things which aren't my day job anymore.
But, my wild out of my ass guess is that natural gas prices peak early in 2022. There are quite a few big LNG projects that have been Covid delayed and which should start to impact the market next year. It only takes a few "excess" cargos in the market to really push the price of imported gas down.
Thanks
But I thought making calls about things which weren’t your day job is what this site is all about?
Looks like Bulb are on the edge? Reddit reckons they’d be the largest supplier ever to go bust should it happen, and that they have so many customers the other big suppliers would have difficulty taking them on. Government bailout incoming?
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Need to get Canada in there
The three Commonwealth monarchies would be a good counter-weight to the Great Republic
NZ is possibly a lost cause. What happened to them? We should threaten to ban them from World Rugby until they come to their senses
New Zealand is (a) very dependent on China economically and (b) a nuclear-free zone that maintains no fully functional military alliances (the old ANZUS pact being partially suspended over the nuclear issue.) They're doing their own thing nowadays, and are particularly focussed on ties with other Pacific island states - that whole region being quite geographically distant from China, of course. How this works out for them in the long run probably depends on how well-disposed Chairman Xi is feeling towards them, and how careful they are not to upset him.
I suppose that Canada might come along for the ride in future, but we have to remember that the first major project of this new AUKUS thingy is to furnish the Australian navy with nuclear submarines. This is specifically for Australia and there's no indication that the Canadians view acquiring nuclear submarines as relevant to them.
Canada is much more concerned with Russia in the Arctic. Look at a globe rather than a map. Vancouver runs off wealthy Chinese money.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
Well, there you go. That's quite some feat. St A's only little!
A mere 27 years after becoming a Cambridge reject, it's nice to have confirmed what I always suspected: that I ended up in a superior institution, after all. Happy days.
Putting St Andrews ‘top’ is surely a Unionist ploy to placate Nats
In all the most respected rankings - THES, QS, etc - it barely grazes the global top 100, and is about 15th in the UK at best. It must also annoy Glasgow and Edinburgh
Well, there you go. That's quite some feat. St A's only little!
A mere 27 years after becoming a Cambridge reject, it's nice to have confirmed what I always suspected: that I ended up in a superior institution, after all. Happy days.
Putting St Andrews ‘top’ is surely a Unionist ploy to placate Nats
In all the most respected rankings - THES, QS, etc - it barely grazes the global top 100, and is about 15th in the UK at best. It must also annoy Glasgow and Edinburgh
But if it keeps the Nats happy…
It seems to be about student satisfaction and the fact Oxbridge admitted a higher than average number who achieved their predicted grades last year with the Covid grade inflation so has had too many on site
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
I don't think there will be a "western alliance" in the traditional sense but something more like a return to multipolar balance of power diplomacy.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Need to get Canada in there
The three Commonwealth monarchies would be a good counter-weight to the Great Republic
NZ is possibly a lost cause. What happened to them? We should threaten to ban them from World Rugby until they come to their senses
Don't forget the sixth Anglophone nation: Ireland!
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
I don't think there will be a "western alliance" in the traditional sense but something more like a return to multipolar balance of power diplomacy.
Which has always been what Russia, and also a number of Middle Eastern and West-Asian nations, most want.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Need to get Canada in there
The three Commonwealth monarchies would be a good counter-weight to the Great Republic
NZ is possibly a lost cause. What happened to them? We should threaten to ban them from World Rugby until they come to their senses
Don't forget the sixth Anglophone nation: Ireland!
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
I don't think there will be a "western alliance" in the traditional sense but something more like a return to multipolar balance of power diplomacy.
Which has always been what Russia, and also a number of Middle Eastern and West-Asian nations, most want.
If you want to balance China, do you need a weak Russia or a strong Russia?
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
How many blue wall seats is Ed Davey targetting and what has he got to.offer them?
I don't think anybody is going to give away state secrets, Mr Root. You can guess as much as you like, but you will almost certainly be wrong.
The answer to the second question is honesty, competence, fairness, responsibility, commitment - you know, all the qualities that one looks for in a good government.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
I don't think there will be a "western alliance" in the traditional sense but something more like a return to multipolar balance of power diplomacy.
Which has always been what Russia, and also a number of Middle Eastern and West-Asian nations, most want.
If you want to balance China, do you need a weak Russia or a strong Russia?
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Need to get Canada in there
The three Commonwealth monarchies would be a good counter-weight to the Great Republic
NZ is possibly a lost cause. What happened to them? We should threaten to ban them from World Rugby until they come to their senses
Don't forget the sixth Anglophone nation: Ireland!
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Well, there you go. That's quite some feat. St A's only little!
A mere 27 years after becoming a Cambridge reject, it's nice to have confirmed what I always suspected: that I ended up in a superior institution, after all. Happy days.
Putting St Andrews ‘top’ is surely a Unionist ploy to placate Nats
In all the most respected rankings - THES, QS, etc - it barely grazes the global top 100, and is about 15th in the UK at best. It must also annoy Glasgow and Edinburgh
Don't know much about this, but the exit poll suggests 45% for UR. Would I be wrong in thinking that is a pretty dismal result for Vlad?
I've often been fascinated with the idea of how much effort various despotic or authoritarian regimes put into elections, which may depend in part on how much genuine support they are able to muster (some will manage to have a fair amount). But do you just hound opposition or proscribe laws to make it difficult for them, ballot stuff, or just make up results entirely, and if so how much do you give to yourself, how much can you practically influence or control things if you are making the effort for some amount of actual voting?
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Rumsfeld was right.
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Rumsfeld was right.
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
The EU is a substantial chunk of the free world in itself, in economic, cultural, demographic, and diplomatic terms. It will decide who it wants to co-operate with, not anyone else.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Rumsfeld was right.
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
The EU is a chunk of the free world itself, in economic, cultural, demographic, and diplomatic terms. It will decide who it wants to co-operate with, not anyone else.
It will decide who it wants to co-operate with.
And if it wants to co-operate with China, or Russia, then it can prioritise mercantilism over liberty.
The rest of us can and will move on without them if so. And thank goodness we're not tied down to such a deadweight anymore.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Rumsfeld was right.
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
The EU is a chunk of the free world itself, in economic, cultural, demographic, and diplomatic terms. It will decide who it wants to co-operate with, not anyone else.
It will decide who it wants to co-operate with.
And if it wants to co-operate with China, or Russia, then it can prioritise mercantilism over liberty.
The rest of us can and will move on without them if so. And thank goodness we're not tied down to such a deadweight anymore.
Civilisationally, compared to most of the world, they are "us".
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Rumsfeld was right.
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
The EU is a chunk of the free world itself, in economic, cultural, demographic, and diplomatic terms. It will decide who it wants to co-operate with, not anyone else.
It will decide who it wants to co-operate with.
And if it wants to co-operate with China, or Russia, then it can prioritise mercantilism over liberty.
The rest of us can and will move on without them if so. And thank goodness we're not tied down to such a deadweight anymore.
Civilisationally, compared to most of the world, they are "us".
Not as much as Australia and others that we co-operate more with.
If they wish to prioritise selling dishwashers to Beijing over taking sides in conflicts then that's their prerogative. They're a fraction of the globe that we happen to coincidentally be located close to, our closest friends and allies are spread all over the planet.
And in the 21st century this small planet of ours is all interconnected so parochial concerns over geography don't matter. A few thousand miles distance doesn't provide any shelter in this day and age.
My solution is individual toilet cubicles everywhere (floor to ceiling). Safe space if you want it with others, or private space for yourself. Toilet/changing room problem solved.
Massively reduces capacity
We solved it at my gaff by departing the urinals into a different room, making the gents cubicles unisex and keeping the ladies as they were
Don't know much about this, but the exit poll suggests 45% for UR. Would I be wrong in thinking that is a pretty dismal result for Vlad?
I've often been fascinated with the idea of how much effort various despotic or authoritarian regimes put into elections, which may depend in part on how much genuine support they are able to muster (some will manage to have a fair amount). But do you just hound opposition or proscribe laws to make it difficult for them, ballot stuff, or just make up results entirely, and if so how much do you give to yourself, how much can you practically influence or control things if you are making the effort for some amount of actual voting?
Don't know much about this, but the exit poll suggests 45% for UR. Would I be wrong in thinking that is a pretty dismal result for Vlad?
I've often been fascinated with the idea of how much effort various despotic or authoritarian regimes put into elections, which may depend in part on how much genuine support they are able to muster (some will manage to have a fair amount). But do you just hound opposition or proscribe laws to make it difficult for them, ballot stuff, or just make up results entirely, and if so how much do you give to yourself, how much can you practically influence or control things if you are making the effort for some amount of actual voting?
It does seem curious. According to that exit poll they have fallen from 54 to 45 %. Which is a bit of a slap for the regime.Why not just fix it to say 51%? They clearly have some support. After banning and jailing opponents. So why take the hit?
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Rumsfeld was right.
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
The EU is a chunk of the free world itself, in economic, cultural, demographic, and diplomatic terms. It will decide who it wants to co-operate with, not anyone else.
It will decide who it wants to co-operate with.
And if it wants to co-operate with China, or Russia, then it can prioritise mercantilism over liberty.
The rest of us can and will move on without them if so. And thank goodness we're not tied down to such a deadweight anymore.
Civilisationally, compared to most of the world, they are "us".
Not as much as Australia and others that we co-operate more with.
If they wish to prioritise selling dishwashers to Beijing over taking sides in conflicts then that's their prerogative. They're a fraction of the globe that we happen to coincidentally be located close to, our closest friends and allies are spread all over the planet.
And in the 21st century this small planet of ours is all interconnected so parochial concerns over geography don't matter. A few thousand miles distance doesn't provide any shelter in this day and age.
Collectively the AUKUS nations represent 11.731 million square km of landmass, 420 million people, $25.66 trillion of GDP and the world's foremost military and espionage expertise.
Collectively the EU nations represent 4.476 million square km of landmass, 446 million people, $15.17 trillion of GDP and besides France who are self-engaged at best very little in the way of credible military expertise.
Only someone so incredibly parochial as to only pay attention to the closest section of the map would not realise that AUKUS is far more serious than the EU ever could be when it comes to our Defence.
Its rather tragic finding leavers so desperate to cling to the life raft of this submarine deal which is basically just benefiting the USA but clearly they are still digging around for an alleged benefit of Brexit .
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Rumsfeld was right.
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
So we've reached the "mine's bigger than yours" stage of this now? In that case, New Zealand > United Kingdom.
Oops.
And NZ aren't willing to stand up to China etc which is why they're getting ignored and left behind and why AUKUS has been set up rather than doing this within Five Eyes.
Just the same as the EU, Germany etc being bystanders to the world moving on without them too.
My solution is individual toilet cubicles everywhere (floor to ceiling). Safe space if you want it with others, or private space for yourself. Toilet/changing room problem solved.
Impose a new cost on businesses because men in dresses are upset. Great.
Thanks for your unhelpful, immature, and inflammatory input on the debate. You’re just as bad as Twitter trans-activists.
That's what this is. Men, mostly white, have decided they want access to female only spaces and are trampling over women's rights to get there. As we know white men don't understand the concept of not getting their way in life so here we are with this ridiculous situation of suggesting lesbians are bigots for not wanting suck cocks or thinking that blokes who put on a dress and tell everyone else they're actually women can waltz into female only spaces.
Sex and gender are different. This is the kind of bullshit that makes the British left unfit for government.
I stand by my original comment. You can argue “sex and gender are different” without resorting to anti-trans slurs
Nope, I'm fed up of it. I'm fed up of women being harassed by the men in dresses because they want to preserve female only spaces. I'm fed up of the death threats to women who speak out, disgusted that an elected representative was unable to attend their own party conference because they feared physical violence from the men in dresses.
There's no middle way here. Women's rights must be preserved at any cost. They are hard won and the men in dresses need to deal with it by taking off the dress or committing to the sex change process. Self ID gender recognition is wrong and it's another expression of white male privilege trampling over hard won women's rights, reversing decades of progress.
Shame that no one came out to help the Catholic adoption centres when they were forced to choose between providing adoption services to gay couples and closing.
Spoiler: they closed. And lots of kids were worse off.
Xavier Bertrand, one of Barnier's rivals for the Republicans nomination, says that France should respond by opening talks with China and Russia to avoid being America's valet.
Yes. There's another tweet (I'll try and find it) where a senior French journalist quotes a top French mandarin at the Quai d'Orsay who says "It is time for us to consider an alliance with the Chinese, though there is a problem with the nature of the Chinese regime"
I mean, WTAF. "A problem?" There's nationalist pique and then there is moral insanity
To be fair to the French, this tweet was followed by hundreds of French people saying Shut up you stupid cretins, deal with the humiliation, China is horrible
Sensible French people are not joining in this madness
One of my colleagues on Friday (the French one who pointed out that France insisting everything be in French would be a sticking point) was adamant that this wouldn't lead to France going down the antagonist role or any alliance with Russia or China. He's right. There's some understandable anger over having this deal nicked from them, anger over being left out of what is the most significant military alliance since the foundation of NATO and fear that they, along with the EU, are being sidelined by the US because EU foreign policy wrt China is a mess of German appeasement vs France's more muscular stance. The latter, IMO, is the big one. The anger over lost money subsides, the fear won't go away.
I think they are pissed about the alliance, but they are more furious about the submarine order.
€90bn is almost 4% of French GDP. It's equivalent to FOUR YEARS of Thales revenues.
I'm with Max, I don't think it's the lost euros that are sending them mad
If you dig into the deal it wasn't all going to France (a lot, ironically, was going to Lockheed Martin in the USA) and of course it was going to be spread over decades. It's not tens of billions vaporising in a day
The loss of the deal will sting, but France has a big defence industry, and they can absorb this. Maybe some jobs will be lost, they will recover
The thing that is making them behave so oddly is the idea they will be completely cut out of the New World Order. France will be without a global role as the West finally aligns against China. That goes against every French instinct. They've had a role in major power politics for 10 centuries
It's why they will eventually calm down and seek an associate membership status allied to Aukus but with special privileges, saving their pride. Or they will finally succeed in persuading the EU to lock and load?
Those are their choices, I can't see them "allying with Putin or Xi" even if they are still blisteringly angry and humiliated as of today
Not only that of course but it hurts their pride that the "isolated" Royaume-Uni whom Macron was open mocking at the G7, with claims that Biden was taking their side, were the ones who co-ordinated and arranged this at the time of the G7.
Yes, that definitely stings. While Macron was banging on about sausages and yet another insular EU squabble the grown ups were making plans to take on China.
That's what Macron's biggest fear and his main source of anger. France wasn't in the room. No one thought to invite them. Biden is supposed to be punishing the UK, America is supposed to be conducting it's transatlantic relationship via Paris/Brussels. France's post-Brexit world view is being shattered and Macron just doesn't know what to do about it. This is another Suez for them.
The Economist agrees with you.
"Another Suez". But this time Britain is on the *winning* or at least not-humiliated side.
Yep, what stings France isn't the loss of the deal, but what the loss of the deal represents. In 2016 France saw an opportunity to end two centuries of Anglo dominance of the Western order, they did that via promoting the EU as a body with a foreign policy and by trying to peel away US-UK allies. Up until maybe the past week it looked like it was working, now it very certainly isn't.
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it. “Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.” In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning. The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958. The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration. But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Downing Street briefs that the Muscly Magnificent was muscly and magnificent. Well I never.
The Americans have been saying much the same all weekend. Biden was initially only up for the submarine deal, Boris went for the big victory and negotiated it up to a defence pact that has redrawn the western alliance.
In the long term it could give form to a less US-dominated Anglosphere. Aukus is inherently more balanced and future-oriented than the needy ‘special relationship’.
Only in the sense that it includes Quantum Computing and AI, the latter in particular being a British strength. We're still very many years off that being strategically important, however, and the vast disparities vis-a-vis the US's capacities to face off against China are the same as all other ones post-Suez. In the main this is a US-Australian resource sharing deal that Johnson has shown some rare cunning in jumping into the middle of. In the long-run it will be poor news for the western alliance, unless one or more key continental countries become involved.
What "western alliance" are you talking about?
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. France and Germany are simply the key democratic powers across a vast Eurasian landmass. If their relationship with North America weakens, other powers across this huge area are strengthened.
It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
This is the sort of cheerful, slightly parochial fantasy which reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's, in which France and Germany simply represent stasis and "blocks to progress". The unavoidable fact is that they are the key players in the EU, whose borders stretch to Ukraine and the Black Sea, and whose support for and doubling up by a US presence is key to the whole landmass.
Rumsfeld was right.
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
So we've reached the "mine's bigger than yours" stage of this now? In that case, New Zealand > United Kingdom.
Oops.
And NZ aren't willing to stand up to China etc which is why they're getting ignored and left behind and why AUKUS has been set up rather than doing this within Five Eyes.
Just the same as the EU, Germany etc being bystanders to the world moving on without them too.
So you're backing away from the size thing now you've discovered that Ardern is packing more Johnson than Johnson?
No don't be stupid. The point was not that 'size' matters, just that the EU doesn't even have 'size' on its side. The EU don't have anything on their side when it comes to geopolitics.
My solution is individual toilet cubicles everywhere (floor to ceiling). Safe space if you want it with others, or private space for yourself. Toilet/changing room problem solved.
Impose a new cost on businesses because men in dresses are upset. Great.
Thanks for your unhelpful, immature, and inflammatory input on the debate. You’re just as bad as Twitter trans-activists.
That's what this is. Men, mostly white, have decided they want access to female only spaces and are trampling over women's rights to get there. As we know white men don't understand the concept of not getting their way in life so here we are with this ridiculous situation of suggesting lesbians are bigots for not wanting suck cocks or thinking that blokes who put on a dress and tell everyone else they're actually women can waltz into female only spaces.
Sex and gender are different. This is the kind of bullshit that makes the British left unfit for government.
I stand by my original comment. You can argue “sex and gender are different” without resorting to anti-trans slurs
Nope, I'm fed up of it. I'm fed up of women being harassed by the men in dresses because they want to preserve female only spaces. I'm fed up of the death threats to women who speak out, disgusted that an elected representative was unable to attend their own party conference because they feared physical violence from the men in dresses.
There's no middle way here. Women's rights must be preserved at any cost. They are hard won and the men in dresses need to deal with it by taking off the dress or committing to the sex change process. Self ID gender recognition is wrong and it's another expression of white male privilege trampling over hard won women's rights, reversing decades of progress.
Shame that no one came out to help the Catholic adoption centres when they were forced to choose between providing adoption services to gay couples and closing.
Spoiler: they closed. And lots of kids were worse off.
Echos of Niemoller
They could have chosen to provide adoption services without being discriminatory bigots. That was an option.
My solution is individual toilet cubicles everywhere (floor to ceiling). Safe space if you want it with others, or private space for yourself. Toilet/changing room problem solved.
Impose a new cost on businesses because men in dresses are upset. Great.
Thanks for your unhelpful, immature, and inflammatory input on the debate. You’re just as bad as Twitter trans-activists.
That's what this is. Men, mostly white, have decided they want access to female only spaces and are trampling over women's rights to get there. As we know white men don't understand the concept of not getting their way in life so here we are with this ridiculous situation of suggesting lesbians are bigots for not wanting suck cocks or thinking that blokes who put on a dress and tell everyone else they're actually women can waltz into female only spaces.
Sex and gender are different. This is the kind of bullshit that makes the British left unfit for government.
I stand by my original comment. You can argue “sex and gender are different” without resorting to anti-trans slurs
Nope, I'm fed up of it. I'm fed up of women being harassed by the men in dresses because they want to preserve female only spaces. I'm fed up of the death threats to women who speak out, disgusted that an elected representative was unable to attend their own party conference because they feared physical violence from the men in dresses.
There's no middle way here. Women's rights must be preserved at any cost. They are hard won and the men in dresses need to deal with it by taking off the dress or committing to the sex change process. Self ID gender recognition is wrong and it's another expression of white male privilege trampling over hard won women's rights, reversing decades of progress.
Shame that no one came out to help the Catholic adoption centres when they were forced to choose between providing adoption services to gay couples and closing.
You've lost me there....is there evidence of gay couples abusing the privileges of adoption?
In 1951 the US excluded UK from its treaty with Australia and New Zealand saying it would be a "white man's pact" whilst Canberra thought London offered nothing to defend the continent. Times have changed...
...One reason US used to exclude UK from ANZUS was "then we will have to include France." On this one policy Boris Johnson has righted one of Winston Churchill's greatest and most painful post-war defeats by getting the UK involved in US-Australia security....
It's so striking because there are few metrics where you see the 21st century UK becoming *more important* to a commonwealth country's security than it was under post-war Churchill. You are forced to admit British nuclear capacity builders would be proud:
I can't be the only person distraught that Farron isn't the LibDem leader right now.
We all remember how he got himself into knots over homosexuality, I would love to see him get into similar... issues... over trans rights.
IIRC the knot Farron got into scuppered the entire liberal edifice. The big point about liberalism is that it allows a huge public space for difference of opinion while maximally allowing people to act feely and minimising the number of things that are either compulsory or forbidden by law.
Farron, while not wanting to criminalise gay sexual activity, personally had a difficulty with it on the same religious grounds that millions, probably billions, of people do (though not me). Curiously liberals found this difficult. Liberals really seem to struggle with liberalism.
Thing is, you can deduce from the NT that God hates queers, but it's not easy. Gotta know what you are looking for
Matthew 25:34-46 is pretty specific about what behaviour gets you sent to heaven, and what to... the other place.
Edit to add. The people who get to go to heaven are:
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.
Basically, be good to people less fortunate than yourself.
Since I still seem to be here, and we are talking about Oz wine, and approaching cheese-on-toast and wine time.
I only buy about 40-50 bottles a year, and currently I have pivoted my Laithwaites order away from Europe to new world.
Any more recommendations for new world wines?
General and not a specific recommendation but I have long enjoyed Australian Shiraz but in the last couple of years have come to really enjoy Argentinian Malbecs too. Not a specific brand or bottle recommendation, but if you've not tried it then I'd recommend trying it.
A problem is that the best wine from unusual/surprising places in not exported. I've had stunning Chardonnays in Bulgaria, but you can't get them outside Bulgaria....
I was given a very nice magnum of Bulgarian Stallion… surprisingly good
Comments
The Japanese have multiple metric tons of plutonium, for example.
The only things preventing Iran from getting weapons grade material is the lack of anyone who wants to sell it to them and the fact that every time they try and make it themselves, the Israelis break their toys.
https://twitter.com/thelorryist/status/1439361631872602112
It's like very good Chinese propaganda and it gives me The Nerdy Brit Nat HORN
https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1438993000500244483?s=20
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/09/texas-doctor-alan-braid-abortions-clinic-sb8.html
https://twitter.com/politicsforali/status/1439690815413145606
https://twitter.com/statedept/status/1439695797789020166
Excellent paragraph
“Some Australians wanted to ring up one week and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.”
Geopolitics as farce. Superb
Their dream was to have an EU, led by France, be at the very least, equal with the US, whereas the fact that no-one thought to invite them puts them back in their box.
EDIT: This extract from the Guinad article on the cancelled UK-Frog summit is also hilarious.
British defence sources argued that it was left to the Australians to break the news to the French, but it seemed there were divisions in Canberra about the best way of going about it.
“Some Australians wanted to ring up one week, and say we’re so sorry, we’re putting out the diesel submarine contract, and ring up the next week, and say we just want you to know that we found a better submarine and it’s British,” the defence source said. “There was another school of thought that said: don’t do it like that. They’ll see through it and it will be worse because it will look duplicitous.”
In the end, neither side won. The French were not told before details began to leak to the Australian and US media on Wednesday morning.
The UK has argued that it simply was responding to a request from Australia to seek secret nuclear propulsion technology for its submarines in March this year, technology shared between Britain and the US under a defence agreement that dates back to 1958.
The defence source said that having secured British support, the Australians then went to the Biden administration.
But the claim of relative British passivity is undermined by other briefings from Downing Street, which have said that Johnson was eager to widen the nuclear submarine deal into something deeper in the aftermath of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Should we interpret her outfit as a nod to the union jack ;-)
Is this the greatest tantrum in European history?
What they should do next is recall the French Ambassador to London but not bring him all the way home to Paris, instead they should make him live in a specially designed titanium wicker-basket hanging from a drone-balloon somewhere over Sark to show that they care so little about the UK they can't be bothered to withdraw the ambassador ENTIRELY
Peak Johnson - bring in a daft campus free speech bill as part of a culture war against the elite. Then exempt Oxbridge colleges from it.
Any solution to the Channel etc issues needs to be put in place by the UK in spite of France not with the co-operation of France.
And cut off the millions in funding we're sending to France.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6MvVppnEto
Many happy memories of St Andrews but the golf course not the University
What she did was wear a stars and stripes outfit as she went through customs...a nod to them that she was really American, despite what it said on her passport.
Going forward, I think it highly likely that the migrant crisis will only be solved through patrolling the Channel with a lot of extra boats, collecting all the migrants the French can't or won't stop, and sending them directly to be flown out for offshore processing. Nothing else will deter them from coming in ever-increasing numbers.
If the Government isn't prepared to put in place the necessary practical and legal framework for doing this, then the only realistic alternative is to grant them all leave to remain and distribute proportionate shares to every local authority in the land for resettlement, on the basis that most of them are never likely to leave and we might as well start integrating them and seeing if we can't get them into useful work or education. More practical by far than expecting the hopeless Home Office to attempt to file huge numbers of deportation cases that will all spend years grinding their way through the increasingly logjammed courts.
Lib 31.3 (-1.8)
Con 30.7 (-3.6)
NDP 20.0 (+4.0)
PPC 6.8 (+5.2)
BQ 6.7 (-0.9)
GP 3.3 (-3.3)
Not much change, in what has been a pretty static election over the past two weeks. 9 Lib leads, 4 Con. Pollsters herding now. Interestingly, EKOS, who I was pointing out as providing much of the average Tory lead a few weeks ago, with some big blue scores, are now giving the largest Lib leads.
Justin favourite for most seats. Majority not out of the question, but unlikely.
Tory most seats can't be discounted. Majority can. Just isn't happening.
No great enthusiasm for either main party.
All for PPC and NDP. How these voters vote may prove key.
The three Commonwealth monarchies would be a good counter-weight to the Great Republic
NZ is possibly a lost cause. What happened to them? We should threaten to ban them from World Rugby until they come to their senses
Genuinely interested by the way. You won't catch me dissing my alma mater
The more I think about it the clearer it is that this was a very purposeful snub to the French and more widely the EU. Boris has taken advantage of a US president exasperated with the EU and pushed a Boris Brexit policy idea at the highest level. The timing of the announcement, the harsh way it was done without pre-briefing European allies, the depth of military secret sharing and then the post announcement briefings from London and Washington about it being hashed out at the G7 feels as though the US is telling the EU that playing both sides is no longer going to be acceptable.
Who won't be asked what his solution is.
Much easier, and more politically beneficial, to just blame the French.
If you accept that the Channel is an incredibly dangerous place to be crossing in a dinghy, then there are only two viable humane resolutions to the Channel crossings.
1: We need to offer anyone and everyone who wishes to cross the Channel a safe and legal way to do so, without a visa, without a passport and without any restrictions whatsoever. A complete carte blanche available to everyone, which could potentially easily number over a million people as it did when Merkel did this. Although Merkel never actually offered safe passage either, so it could be even more.
2: We say that anyone who crosses the Channel illegally gets a one-way ticket to somewhere like Rwanda and completely eliminate the pull factor.
I suppose that Canada might come along for the ride in future, but we have to remember that the first major project of this new AUKUS thingy is to furnish the Australian navy with nuclear submarines. This is specifically for Australia and there's no indication that the Canadians view acquiring nuclear submarines as relevant to them.
A mere 27 years after becoming a Cambridge reject, it's nice to have confirmed what I always suspected: that I ended up in a superior institution, after all. Happy days.
But I thought making calls about things which weren’t your day job is what this site is all about?
Look at a globe rather than a map.
Vancouver runs off wealthy Chinese money.
In all the most respected rankings - THES, QS, etc - it barely grazes the global top 100, and is about 15th in the UK at best. It must also annoy Glasgow and Edinburgh
But if it keeps the Nats happy…
Putin's United Russia 38%
Communist Party 25%
LDPR nationalists 9%
(Russia doesn't seem to do liberalism)
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-ruling-pro-putin-party-wins-parliamentary-vote-early-resultsexit-poll-2021-09-19/?taid=6147b1bbad296e0001f93bc2&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
The strength of NATO has always been the USA and the UK first and second. With the rest of Europe either too small to make much difference but trying to pull its weight (rare), or large enough to do so but not bothering (France and Germany).
Yes France had a major military, unlike Germany, but they were never engaged with NATO that strongly. De Gaulle effectively pulled them out in the sixties and they only rejoined in 2009. So hardly reliable partners even during the Cold War we coped without them being key players.
If the 'worst that happens' is that France returns to its isolationist nature it maintained for over four decades, while the 'best that happens' is that the USA, UK, Aus and ultimately other likeminded nations cooperate closer than we were doing in recent years then that is extremely good for our alliances.
That alliance just won't be very Europe-centric.
Would I be wrong in thinking that is a pretty dismal result for Vlad?
The answer to the second question is honesty, competence, fairness, responsibility, commitment - you know, all the qualities that one looks for in a good government.
Friendly with HRVY, who is presumably a silly-season mobile phone app from 2007.
France and Germany are the key democratic powers over a tiny fraction of the global landmass. If they stop engaging with the world, the world will move on without them.
We can't compel European countries to pull their own weight. They haven't for decades; pretty much the only thing uniting Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden was pointing this out.
We need to stop overly worrying about what a bunch of freeloading nations that want to take the benefits of freedom but not spend their treasure and blood defending it think - and pay more attention to those who are willing to fight for - and fight against - what we hold dear.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/19/beto-orourke-greg-abbott-texas-governor-matthew-mcconaughey
It doesn't matter if they are "key players in the EU", the EU is a piddly little corner of the globe. The EU's landmass is not even 60% of Australia's landmass.
If the EU nations don't want to fight for the free world, we need to rely on partners who will.
And if it wants to co-operate with China, or Russia, then it can prioritise mercantilism over liberty.
The rest of us can and will move on without them if so. And thank goodness we're not tied down to such a deadweight anymore.
If they wish to prioritise selling dishwashers to Beijing over taking sides in conflicts then that's their prerogative. They're a fraction of the globe that we happen to coincidentally be located close to, our closest friends and allies are spread all over the planet.
And in the 21st century this small planet of ours is all interconnected so parochial concerns over geography don't matter. A few thousand miles distance doesn't provide any shelter in this day and age.
We solved it at my gaff by departing the urinals into a different room, making the gents cubicles unisex and keeping the ladies as they were
They clearly have some support. After banning and jailing opponents. So why take the hit?
Collectively the EU nations represent 4.476 million square km of landmass, 446 million people, $15.17 trillion of GDP and besides France who are self-engaged at best very little in the way of credible military expertise.
Only someone so incredibly parochial as to only pay attention to the closest section of the map would not realise that AUKUS is far more serious than the EU ever could be when it comes to our Defence.
Just the same as the EU, Germany etc being bystanders to the world moving on without them too.
Said, of course, with admiration and affection
Spoiler: they closed. And lots of kids were worse off.
Echos of Niemoller
...One reason US used to exclude UK from ANZUS was "then we will have to include France." On this one policy Boris Johnson has righted one of Winston Churchill's greatest and most painful post-war defeats by getting the UK involved in US-Australia security....
It's so striking because there are few metrics where you see the 21st century UK becoming *more important* to a commonwealth country's security than it was under post-war Churchill. You are forced to admit British nuclear capacity builders would be proud:
https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1439670627615580163?s=20