Furious 🇫🇷 foreign minister Le Drian this morning on the 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇦🇺 deal: a "knife in the back", "betrayal of confidence", "allies don't do this to each other". Rare to hear quite this sort of language. France (which had its own conventional submarine contract with 🇦🇺) is very angry https://t.co/DJgLbZjCbR
— Sophie Pedder (@PedderSophie) September 16, 2021
France is now braced to lose out on a multibillion-dollar submarine supply deal with Australia, which its foreign minister called “a stab in the back,” while the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy was upstaged on the day it was launched.
As POLITICO’s Stuart Lau, Jacopo Barigazzi and David Herszenhorn report:
“It was doubly infuriating for the EU camp that Brexit Britain was the only European ally invited to the top table.”
Wrt the sub, there were issues with the submarine contract from the beginning, including spiralling costs and security concerns. In other words, this is partly of France's own making!
