After the United States and Britain pledged to provide Australia with nuclear submarines
Cold war between China and Okos countries
Biden and Morrison during a virtual conference to sign the agreement.
EPA
A cold war looms between China, America, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Getty
picture
China asked the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia to abandon the "Cold War" mentality, or risk harming its own interests, after the three countries unveiled a new defense cooperation agreement, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced this trilateral security partnership, called "Ocos." On Thursday, in Canberra during a virtual address with US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a coordinated display of diplomatic force clearly targets China, the rising power in the Indo-Pacific, and the agreement includes an 18-month plan to supply Australia with powered submarines. nuclear.
The agreement attracted a strong political reaction at home in Australia and the United Kingdom, as well as from France, whose current $90 billion (£65 billion) submarine contract with Australia has expired. It is widely understood that the arrangement was a response to Beijing's expansion and aggression in the South China Sea and Taiwan, and Biden spoke of the need to maintain "a free and open Indo-Pacific" and to address "the current strategic environment" in the region.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the decision by the United States and the United Kingdom to export highly sensitive nuclear-powered submarine technology to Australia constituted a case of "extremely irresponsible" double standards.
The instinctive reaction of many analysts to the new military relationship between the US, UK and Australia was to ask: How would China respond to such a move?
There are no surprises, and as much as this is naturally defensive, every foreign policy decision must be calibrated against the response of the other parties.
Far fewer analysts, however, took another, albeit more troublesome, route. Over the past decade, China has engaged in one of the fastest peacetime military buildups in modern history, focused on expanding and modernizing its navy and air forces.
China now has a larger naval fleet than the United States, and is largely concentrated in the surrounding seas, while Washington's forces are spread all over the world, and China launched 18 new ships in 2016, while the United States had only five, and the enhanced capabilities of the Chinese Air Force also became It is escalating more than ever, especially as part of Beijing's efforts to pressure Taiwan to agree to some form of unification.
The Chinese Communist Party tabloid Global Times previously reported that Chinese fighter jets will soon begin regular flights over Taiwan and the waters between it and the mainland, although much of that airspace is nominally under Taipei's control.
China has built huge new islands in the South China Sea, and turned them into military bases, to assert its territorial claims there, and new silos are being built in western China, and they are likely to contain missiles as part of an expanded nuclear deterrence. A military clash with India shocked strategists in New Delhi, who still don't understand why Beijing decided to end the long-negotiated separation of forces there.
Which brings us back to the kinds of questions that countries in a region that are now engaged in a massive arms race should be asking, and let's start by asking the question that many in Australia have been asking: How will China react to this three-way move by America, Britain and Australia?
Instead, when Beijing deployed its military buildup, did Chinese leaders and strategists ask themselves how the United States and its allies like Japan and Australia would respond?
With Thursday's announcement in Washington, London and Canberra, the answer to that question is becoming clearer.
In the United States, competition with China became the chief organizing principle of political, military, scientific, and commercial institutions, which were otherwise divided and devoid of any purpose.
As for Australia, a close ally of the United States, it has begun to reshape its military, economic and trade policies, mostly with a bipartisan conviction that Beijing intends to shape the region according to its own strategic designs. The succession of the resigned Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga.
In Japan’s case, there are two flashpoints: Taiwan, its former colony, with which it maintains deep ties, and the Senkaku and Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, which Tokyo controls, but Beijing claims as its own, (Taiwan also claims the islands, but that’s another story). .
Beijing will not make concessions on any regional issue, as President Xi Jinping has said in recent years that China will not give up “an inch of territory left behind by our ancestors.” US allies and bases in the region, in other words it is purely defensive.
There is an element of truth to this assumption. The United States has been the most powerful country in Asia since 1945, and China has benefited for years from the stability provided by the American military while developing its economy, but no country the size of China and its history can accept playing a secondary role in Asia, once To become strong enough to respond.
Beijing will not be satisfied with the declaration of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and will undoubtedly mock Canberra as a vassal of Washington, and it does so with Japan, as well as for reviving Tokyo's crimes against China during its invasion and occupation in the 1930s and 1940s.
But Ping's hard line, combined with the undisputed political system at home and abroad, means that in the process Beijing has antagonized many of its neighbors in the region.
It is not surprising, then, that democracies such as Australia and Japan are looking for options to address the rise of China. In various respects, South Korea, and many Southeast Asian countries, are indispensable to the United States in all their calculations, and Australia appears as a country willing to respond, often, in a positive way. Clumsy, against China, it has paid the price before, and it looks like this price will escalate in the coming years.
But it is increasingly clear that Beijing will have to fight many battles, and punish many opponents, on its way to achieving what Bing calls the “China Dream.” As if anyone needs a reminder, Thursday’s decision makes the fault lines even clearer.
Richard McGregor ■ Fellow of the Lowy Institute
France recalls its ambassadors from the United States and Australia for consultations
France recalled its ambassadors in the United States and Australia for consultations, against the background of the dispute that arose over a failed submarine deal, which was to be exported by France to Australia.
And Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced, yesterday evening, that this exceptional step is taking place at the request of President Emmanuel Macron, and the minister added that Australia’s decision to abandon the purchase of French submarines, which was held in 2016, in the interest of a new partnership with the United States And Britain, represents unacceptable behavior between allies and partners, and the minister stressed that the consequences will affect the essence of French alliances and partnerships, as well as the importance of the Indo-Pacific region to Europe.
On Thursday, Australia announced that it would acquire nuclear-powered submarines as part of a new security alliance with the United States and Britain.
The anger in Paris over Australia's decision to abandon plans to buy a fleet of French-made submarines was not just anger over a defense contract, cost overruns and technical specifications, but also cast doubt on the transatlantic alliance to confront China.
The Okus deal made the French political class rage over "the one-sided politics of Joe Biden and Trump, the two-faced Australian government, and the usual British perfidy".
British Defense Minister Ben Wallace asserted, in an attempt to calm the row, that "nothing was done behind someone else's back", but this did not calm the Paris outcry. The big one.”
Most recently in August, Parley held a summit with her Australian counterpart, Peter Dutton, in Paris, and issued a lengthy joint statement, highlighting the importance of their joint work on submarines, as part of a broader strategy to contain China in the Indo-Pacific region, and given Dutton's failure to Telling his French counterparts what happened, during months of secret negotiations with the United States, the French's only conclusion is that he may have been kept out of the negotiations, or that he was too forgetful, or too reticent to reveal what was going on.
There was no advance warning to France in this regard, but rather heard live on television, in a video link between the White House, Canberra and London, that its contract was about to be cancelled.
To make matters worse, Biden timed the announcement the day before the European Union published its long-planned Indo-Pacific policy.
The European Union said it had not been consulted in advance, although Pentagon officials said otherwise.
Australia said it had given France many warnings that design delays could force it to look elsewhere by September, and that France's Naval Group was in fact given until September, to review its plans for the next two years of the project.
But in reality, Australia was already working on Plan B with the US, and for France Biden showed, not for the first time, that he puts the American national interest first.
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