British imperialists are salivating at what they think the prospects are for the AUKUS agreement. Dr. Robin Niblett CMG, Director and Chief Executive of Chatham House/Royal Institute for International Affairs, the Queen’s premier think tank, crows in an analysis published this morning that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has done the right thing and that France and the EU have, in his view, blown it. (https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/09/aukus-reveals-much-about-new-global-strategic-context)
“Australia’s decision to break off the $66 billion contract it signed with France in 2016 to purchase a new fleet of diesel electric submarines underscores the heightened level of concern in Canberra about China’s growing naval capabilities,” Niblett writes. “Despite all the industrial, legal, and diplomatic disruption, the Australian government has decided only the stealthy nuclear-powered submarines developed by Britain with U.S. support can provide the genuine naval capability it needs long-term.”
“Next, in helping Australia resolve this conundrum, the British government has revealed the versatility of its new foreign policy,” Niblett goes on. “Part of the reason U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson eschewed the concept of a formal foreign policy and security treaty in the post-Brexit deal with the European Union (EU) was to pursue freely new ventures such as the recent ‘G7-plus’ summit in Cornwall, and enhanced cooperation among the Five Eyes allies. AUKUS reveals that this approach can produce real results.”
Niblett shows that AUKUS is really about Global Britain and the containment of China. “The AUKUS announcement showed that China’s growing hard power is now eliciting a genuinely tough and structural political-military reaction,” he says. “Across the Atlantic, it also allowed President Biden – flanked ‘virtually’ by the British and Australian prime ministers – to send the global message that America is indeed back, just three weeks after the ignominious retreat from Afghanistan and chaotic exit from Kabul.”
At the same time, he thinks the Chinese will be quaking in their boots. “For many in China, AUKUS now confirms their belief that the U.S. and its principal allies are determined to contain China’s rise in its own ‘backyard’, where it believes it has the right to flex its muscles. For others, it will confirm Xi Jinping has overreached and China is now paying the price of his more assertive strategy,” he claims. “Either way, the Chinese are on notice that the ambivalent nature of the Obama pivot to Asia has given way to a more determined pivot under Biden.”
Over at The Spectator, John Keiger, a former professor of French history at the University of Cambridge, invokes Lord Palmerston to explain why the French were left out of the deal and why (in his view) it was inevitable. “Compared to the present it is a poignant historical example of how, to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, diplomatic and military alliances are never permanent, only interests. France, after all abandoned its western allies in 1966 when it withdrew at short notice from NATO’s integrated military command. Today at the core of all this turmoil is the rising power of China. It is a historical truism that rising powers force diplomatic and military realignments,” Keiger writes.
“What the three Anglosphere states in the Aukus pact have put together is a loose, flexible and nimble arrangement for managing Indo-Pacific security directly. This is something that is second nature to states of a culture that General de Gaulle always referred to as ‘Anglo-Saxon,’” Keiger goes on, obviously relishing this apparent victory of the British Empire. “It is just the kind of arrangement that is anathema to the formal, rational and legalistic method of the French and their cultural offshoot the EU, whose modus operandi was best demonstrated by the glacial formalism applied to the Brexit negotiations.”
