Clash with US and France is a politico-diplomatic disaster for Morrison
Peter Hartcher
November 2, 2021When the great strategist Sun Tzu wrote that “all warfare is based on deception”, he meant the deception of the enemy.
Scott Morrison is in the unhappy position of being accused of deceiving Australia’s friends. Not just one but two.
French President Emmanuel Macron at the G20, taking questions from Australian journalists.Alex Ellinghausen
Within two days, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, and the US President, Joe Biden, separately said or implied that Morrison had misled or deceived them. And they said so publicly.
For the Prime Minister to have a public clash with the leader of one ally over an alleged deception is uncomfortable yet contestable. There are two sides to every dispute, after all.
To have public clashes with two at the same time is a politico-diplomatic disaster. It’s then a three-sided argument, and the other two sides are united against Morrison.
It’s harmful to Morrison’s personal credibility, to the standing of his government, to Australia’s reputation and to the common cause that the three nations have pledged to serve – to show that democracies can work together to defeat China’s destabilising grabs for territory and hegemony.
In fact, China is the only winner from this first-class fiasco. Xi Jinping must be laughing up his sleeve.
The Franco-American ganging-up on Morrison has given the Australian Labor Party a free kick, and they’re taking it. “We need more friends. We need more partners now, not fewer,” opposition foreign affairs spokesperson Penny Wong said on Monday.
At the centre of the ruckus is Morrison’s decision to cancel the government’s $90 billion contract for French-designed conventional submarines in favour of submarines powered by US nuclear technology.
Labor doesn’t disagree with the decision. Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has committed a Labor government to proceeding with it. Labor’s criticism is all about the manner of it.
Illustration: Dionne GainSMH
The nuclear-powered subs were to be a potent manifestation of the new Australia-UK-US security partnership, AUKUS. It was a serious strategic moment, and it was taken very seriously in Beijing. A professor at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, Li Haidong, said the tripartite partnership “could be described as the iron triangle in the Western camp”.
But just six weeks after the triumphal announcement, the iron is already a little rusty after exposure to the realities of Indo-Pacific salt water. Australia has six ageing conventional subs, the Collins class, due for replacement. China has 66 subs. It is expected to build another 10 by the end of this decade, six of them nuclear.
Before the announcement, Australia had a contract for the supply of 12 French-designed submarines. Now it has no contract with anyone to supply any subs whatsoever.
The first of the new French-designed subs was expected in around 10 to 12 years. Now, if the in-principle deal with the US and UK can be made concrete, it will be 20 to 25 years before the first nuclear-powered arrives.
France’s Macron had a little fun with this. He jeered at the fact that for the next 18 months the only thing Canberra has is a committee to discuss with Washington and London how to make the decision work: “You have 18 months before a report. Good luck.”
Before the announcement, Australia was relieved that a growing number of capable Pacific powers was standing with it against Beijing’s coercion and aggression. That included not only the US, Japan and India but also Britain, France and Germany.
That great convergence of concerned democracies is now looking a bit ratty, and Scott Morrison is the rat in the spotlight.
On Monday, Macron accused the Australian Prime Minister of lying about the submarine contract. He’s said Morrison let him think it was intact even as he was breaking it. Asked by correspondent Bevan Shields if he thought Morrison had lied to him, Macron said: “I don’t think, I know.” Morrison denies lying.
Two days earlier, Biden and Macron together spoke to the media in Rome. Biden said that the US hadn’t intended to blindside France when it agreed to the AUKUS subs deal, which had the effect of displacing the French contract with Canberra.
Biden said: “I was under the impression certain things had happened that hadn’t happened … I was under the impression that France had been informed long before that the deal was not going through. I, honest to God, did not know you had not been.”
You don’t need to be clairvoyant to see who had given him that impression: the Australian government. In other words, Biden was taking sides with Macron. Both are claiming they’ve been misled by Australia. This has allowed Washington and Paris to reconcile at Morrison’s expense.
This doesn’t mean they’re both necessarily telling the whole truth. Just that it’s very hard for Morrison to refute a stereo accusation of deceptive conduct from two powerful speakers at once.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Peter Jennings thinks it’s all too cute. “It’s stretching credulity to think the French were not aware of significant concerns the government had over the contract. Several months before the AUKUS announcement, Morrison had asked his officials for a Plan B – it was in all the newspapers.” Macron, he says, is striking out at Australia to deflect domestic criticism of a lost deal.
As for the US: “I appreciate that Biden has to smooth things over with the French, but I thought his response tells you more about the dynamics of decision-making in the White House. There’s a pattern emerging here. How much is Biden on top of things?” Jennings implies that either Biden was not informed by his own officials, or that he had been, and it slipped his mind. Biden recently misstated US policy on Taiwan, only to have his officials clean up the mess.
But, as Jennings points out, Australia could have handled the entire situation better. “If it looks like our foreign policy is all a bit rough and ready, it’s because we have not invested in our diplomatic capability for a long time. We should quietly ask ourselves whether we have the diplomatic smarts to match the new level of strategic capability” that AUKUS is designed to deliver.
“Acquiring some diplomatic smarts would be a damned sight cheaper than a nuclear sub.”
And if we think our diplomatic skills are good enough, we’re only deceiving ourselves.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.
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