France recently recalled its ambassadors from the USA and Australia due to Australian government’s decision to cancel the agreement with France on the purchase of conventional French submarines, which it replaced with a new agreement on the purchase of American nuclear submarines. In order to modernize its defense force Canberra allocated 270 billion Australian dollars in the next decade. This strategic move by Canberra was described by some of Australia’s most prominent geostrategy and international relations experts as “the crossing of Rubicon”, as this decision clearly heralds Australia’s future strategic orientation as it has openly sided with Washington. The decision came after the Australian government had for decades balanced its economic dependence on China that Australia’s economy relied upon and which made Australia the only country to avoid two recessions that hit the rest of the world, with its security dependence on America. The decision to purchase nuclear-powered submarines is therefore a key element stemming from the recently formed military alliance (AUKUS) between the US, the UK and Australia. The new strategic alliance signals the establishment of completely new relations in this strategically important part of the world where the fate of war and peace and the global order may well be decided in the future.
The new strategic alliance was formed at a time when Washington and Canberra are marking the 70th anniversary of the formation of a mini-NATO in Oceania known as the ANZUS Treaty (security agreement signed by Australia, New Zealand and the United States). However, the shortcoming of ANZUS is that this agreement was unilaterally applied during its existence, in which Australia and New Zealand blindly followed Washington in all its military campaigns, sending their military forces to the battlefields in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and Afghanistan. But the pact did not test America’s readiness to protect its allies because there was no opportunity or need for it.
The formation of AUKUS, especially the exclusion of France in its formation process, caused a serious crisis in the ranks of NATO. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian characterized Canberra’s decision as “stabbing in the back”. “We have established a relationship of trust with Australia and that trust has been betrayed,” the French foreign minister said. This is not just another failed business deal. Rather, it is a serious political crisis that some analysts see as a trigger that caused deep disagreements and threatens to fuel divisions within the NATO alliance, which could ultimately result in NATO’s irrelevance, in the emerging new American ‘cold war’, this time around with China. It also confirms the consistency of the US global strategy completely independent of who sits in the White House, and points to Washington’s determination to seriously oppose its potential rival for primacy in Asia and the only serious US rival with the capacity and ambition to establish regional hegemony in East Asia in an attempt to weaken the US military presence and and push the US out of this part of the world that Beijing sees as its own backyard (near abroad) and sphere of influence of the People’s Republic of China. The decision to exclude France as a leading European ally and partner of the United States from key partnership with Australia at a time when the United States is facing the most serious challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, whether it is a value system which Americans and their allies increasingly call rules-based international order, even though they themselves often violate the rules established by international consensus within the framework of the United Nations (UN) or international conventions from which they often exclude themselves as indispensable nation, signals a lack of consistency which this time around broke over the back of France which along with Germany, represents the backbone of the European Union and the NATO alliance.
US President Joe Biden’s decision to form a new alliance is a continuation of a series of previous decisions by Washington to correct its global position, in the spirit of the latest assessments of the threat to US global domination. The chaos caused by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the American agreement for the Taliban to regain power in Kabul, does not only point to a deepening gap between the United States and Europe, but also confirms the fact that Europe is becoming less important for the US global interests. Some observers of U.S. foreign policy even recognize the ideological and institutional irrelevance of the West in widening the gap between Washington and Brussels. France, has most recently committed to building a European security infrastructure independent of that of the United States. Being pushed to the margins as a major power in the Pacific France could become even more convinced of the correctness of its proposals on European strategic autonomy from the dictates of Washington.
Washington is building its strategy on the basis of global scenarios and challenges imposed by the growing rivalry of the United States with China, which requires a shift of focus from Europe to East Asia and the Indo-Pacific. Today, the United States has less and less interest, the will and capacity to seriously engage in solving European problems in the way it did during the Cold War with Moscow, when the possibility of Soviet military and ideological communist expansion to the West’ was seen as an existential threat. Accordingly, the Biden administration is today reconfiguring its policy and global relations and is in a hurry to build a new military-security architecture in East Asia, which some observers call the new Asian NATO. This architecture is complex and multidimensional, and it is difficult to simplify as it is based on a network of different, even independent mini-alliances, that are still somewhat complementary, due to complexity of Asian countries and their political systems, their cultural characteristics and different attitudes towards Washington and China.
In addition to pro-American security alliance UNZUS, and the latest Anglophone alliance AUKUS, there are other less binding defense agreements such as the Five Power Defense Agreement (FPDA), signed between the Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia in 1971. Under this agreement, the signatories undertake to consult each other in the event of aggression against any of them in order to consider the appropriate measures to be taken in that case. In addition, the quadrilateral agreement between Japan, the US, Australia and India (QUAD), initiated by Japan, and ignored by Australia for virtually 14 years, in order not to disrupt the then extraordinary economic relations with China, has recently been resurrected. Although this is not an open military agreement (so that its members would not further irritate Beijing, it is clear that this is an alliance whose role, in addition to economic relations, trade and humanitarian cooperation, may ultimately become self/fulfilling prophecy as it is viewed by China as a containment policy.
QUAD is also opposed by Russia, which has constructive relations with signatory countries other than the United States, especially with India, which it still supplies with weapons. Due to the lack of open military dimension to the alliance (which was vigorously opposed by traditionally neutral India), as New Delhi has not given up on the strategically important Russian S-400 anti-aircraft system, Washington perhaps was additionally pushed to choose Australia as its key ally in the far east. According to some American geopolitical experts, no country is able to replace the strategically important role of Australia for the US global primacy, for several reasons. First, Australia relies on two great oceans, Pacific and the Indian Ocean, an indispensable factor in America’s new Indo-Pacific strategy which has ambitions to dominate space from California to Kilimanjaro in East Africa or as some popularly described this geographical space “from Hollywood to Bollywood”.
In Australia, southwest of Alice Springs there is the Pine Gap, an American satellite surveillance base jointly operated by Australia and the United States. Since 1988, it has been officially called the Pine Gap Joint Defense Facility (JDFPG). The station is run by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the US National Intelligence Service (NRA). Pine Gap represents an indispensable part of NSA’s global interception efforts and includes the ECHELON program. Without this American-Australian spy signal base in the middle of the Australian desert no American war on terrorism in the Middle East could have been prosecuted. In addition, Australia is far enough away from China to be able to afford the role of a perpetual adversary and even an enemy of China and seems to be quite ready to bear the high economic cost of its consequences today due to partial Chinese economic retaliation following the Australian confrontation with Cinema. Canberra accused China of illegally interfering in Australia’s domestic politics and of espionage, spreading malignant influence and infiltrating in Australia’s political, business, academic, cultural and media space. By doing so, the Australian government claims, China has violated its sovereignty. China denied the accusations. Critics of Canberra’s confrontational policy toward China however, argue that these “overreactions that are not based on real facts but staged-managed, cleverly planned and strategically designed to incite hostilities and unwarranted hysteria towards China, and allegedly backed by some US military interests. Are designed to prepare the Australian public for a policy of confrontation and military conflict with China on the US side”… The policies promoted by the Canberra government are reportedly prevalent within Australia’s permanent intelligence, security, state, media and military bureaucracies, but are opposed by serious public, political and academic figures, including some former prime ministers such as Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd, longest serving former NSW premier and former foreign minister Bob Carr, some members of the Academy of Social Sciences, business figures and others.
It was to be expected that America would choose India as its primary ally for the confrontation with China, which almost entered a new war with China last year in the Himalayas in the border region of Kashmir (Ladakh) controlled by India and the Aksai Chin region controlled by China. However, although the American confrontation with China suits New Delhi, India adheres to its nominal policy of military neutrality and its proximity and length of border with China makes it an unreliable partner for America, because it is in the interest of countries sharing a long common border and some cultural features to maintain as much as normalized relations. Therefore, Australia was chosen as the most optimal partner of the USA as a reliable platform for confrontation with China. Australia hopes that the new nuclear submarines will ensure strong deterrent policy and will make it a less desirable target for possible Chinese retaliation in the event of an armed conflict.
After the fiasco with French submarines, it is obvious that Europe is generally not playing the desired role in the new configuration of global relations. The exclusion of France, and thus the EU and NATO, from the latest security agreement and strategic alliance of the Anglo-Saxon countries (AUKUS) is quite logical, since according to US calculations, Washington could hardly trust and rely on Europe as an effective ally in confrontation with Cinema. We wrote earlier that the EU has signed a historic investment agreement with China (Comprehensive Investment Agreement – CAI), while ignoring US concerns and outrage. Washington now appears to be retaliating against France, risking the alienation of a key NATO ally and a deeper confrontation with Paris, which could also affect relations between the two countries in Francophone Africa, where France has the exclusive right to preserve its special historical interests, and where interests of Washington, Paris and Beijing in the new scramble for Africa’s mineral resources intertwine and clash.
It is clear that the United States is looking for allies who are willing to take on the obligation of unquestioning obedience and readiness to enter into a confrontation with China if necessary. The EU, on the other hand, is looking for ways to avoid this, trying to pursue its interests independently of the US. Although the EU shares some concerns about a potential Chinese threat, Brussels does not want to build military alliance based on a fierce military confrontation with Beijing with which it has broad economic cooperation. The EU has therefore drafted a special document detailing its own Indo-Pacific strategy. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has described China as a great challenge but not as an existential threat to Europe, insisting that NATO must not deny China its rights as if it did not exist at all.
Due to global competition for primacy taking place in East Asia and the Indo-Pacific, the NATO is facing issues related to its priorities. This does not mean that NATO will disintegrate overnight or that it will not play any role in any future confrontation with China. But, it is quite certain that the United States will no longer allocate generous resources to ensure its current military capacity and the relevance of this military alliance. Although, Russia, according to some strategists in the West, still appears as a security threat to Europe and NATO, Washington still does not consider Russia a serious enough threat that can be compared to the challenge that China poses to America today. Although the rivalry between the United States and Russia is still noticeable – it is overemphasized in the media – their animosity can in no way be viewed through the prism of the former Western Cold War with the USSR, and therefore does not require US military engagement. and presence in Europe in the way it had been in the past.
With such a policy pursued by the Biden administration today, American strategists are signaling (whether intentionally or unknowingly it is completely irrelevant) readiness to satisfy some Russian interests in order to show good will and try, as much as possible, to loosen the emerging strategic alliance between Russia and China. The common denominator of this alliance is resistance to Western – primarily American hegemony. US policymakers are fully aware that it will be almost impossible to win Russia over to its side in a potential confrontation with China as the American high diplomacy guru, Dr. Henry Kissinger, once succeeded when he managed to win China over to the Cold War global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, strategic planners in Washington may decide to offer Moscow even some symbolic concessions to keep Moscow neutral in any future Washington-Beijing confrontation.
The new situation creates a fertile climate, including the possibility of normalizing relations between Brussels and Moscow. The normalization of relations between the EU and Russia, however, could further deepen the strategic gap between the US and the EU and distance the two allies. If the current trajectory of their relations continues to move in this direction, the EU could eventually develop an independent strategic approach to global politics and thus a military element independent of Washington. That, if it happens, would inevitably weaken the West’s common front toward Russia and China. It is obvious that both countries, Russia and China, are trying to exploit Euro-Atlantic differences and disagreements in their favor, invoking the justification of strengthening multilateralism in global relations thus predicting the inevitability of an emerging multipolar world in the struggle for supremacy in the anarchic global order.