A GERMAN VIEW ON AUKUS: Snookered by Anglo-Saxons: The Europeans have misread Biden and misjudged Johnson. A bad combination.
Why is the UK part of this shift, and not France? The US considers France and the EU unreliable with respect to China because of their special relationships. Germany and France have pushed the EU-China comprehensive agreement on investment just before Biden’s inauguration. Germany runs massive export surpluses with China that it wants to protect. Armin Laschet and Olaf Scholz are both in favour of extending the bilateral relationship. Europe has also left a door open to Huawei for its 5G networks. It was only the UK that really cut the links. The Chinese ambassador in the UK reacted with unbridled fury. His colleagues in Paris and Berlin, by contrast, stayed quiet. I assume that they have received reassurances through back-channels.
The UK is clearly the junior partner in Aukus. But it is the only European country the US can trust in the pursuit of its strategic interests in the Indo Pacific.
Given the quality of US leadership, I’m not sure how junior. Plus:
The UK’s strategic realignment was not inevitable. It is to a large extent the result of how the EU conducted the Brexit talks. The EU leadership never missed an opportunity to criticise Brexit. Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council, aligned himself to the second referendum campaign in the UK. The EU could have, but did not, support MPs in the UK who sought compromise, like Kenneth Clarke or Stephen Kinnock.
The second mistake, even worse than the first, was the intent to force the EU’s regulatory system on the UK as a price for a free trade deal. At no point did the EU even consider what kind of strategic relationship it wanted with the UK after Brexit. The EU let anger over Brexit get in the way over rational decision-making.
The enormous cost of this stupidity is slowly becoming apparent. The UK will not flood the EU with cheap goods, as France had feared. The UK’s strategy is more subtle. It will gradually cut off from European security policy. It will also cut off from the GDPR data protection regime and financial regulation. The UK has invested more into artificial intelligence than any EU member states. It is a permanent member of the UN security council and the G7. What on earth was the EU thinking?
And no, Biden is not going intervene on the EU’s behalf in the current standoff over Northern Ireland. EU leaders have always underestimated Boris Johnson. And they always overestimated Joe Biden.
Well, it’s easy to overestimate Joe.
Also: “The EU’s diplomacy is driven by emotion and a superficial understanding of US politics, and UK politics for that matter. Why did the EU place so much hope, so publicly, into regime change in Washington last year? Donald Trump was loud and crass, but all he ever did to the EU, other than insult them, was impose tariffs. Europe never experienced anything nearly as hostile as Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan or the Aukus deal. But all of this was perfectly foreseeable.”