PARIS — Vice President Kamala Harris and French President Emmanuel Macron covered plenty of ground during a two-hour meeting on Wednesday but avoided the elephant in the room: France’s anger over the United States’s role in scuttling its multibillion-dollar submarine contract with Australia.
“They actually didn’t talk about submarines,” a senior administration official told reporters on a call Thursday.
FRANCE FUMES AT US-AUSTRALIA NUCLEAR SUBMARINE DEAL
What Harris, who President Joe Biden tapped to sort out the U.S.’s own border issues, did discuss with Macron was migration issues in Eastern Europe. There, Belarus has shuttled migrants into Poland, Latvia, and Ukraine in what the U.S. and Europe have described as a “hybrid attack” against European democracies.
“It came up in the context of a broader and quite extensive discussion” about Central Europe and Ukraine, the senior official said.
A National Security Council official said Wednesday that Washington was preparing “follow-up sanctions” to hold Belarus leaders accountable for the aggression.
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko must understand that his government’s behavior “comes with a price,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, following talks with Biden at the White House.
Harris and Macron also discussed cooperation between the countries in space, a particular interest for the vice president who was tapped earlier this year to lead the National Space Council, along with counterterrorism issues in the Sahel, and Indo-Pacific security.
The vice president told reporters on Thursday that Macron “has expressed his intention to join the Artemis accord,” referring to an American-led effort to put people back on the moon by 2024.
“As the head of the Space Council, I can tell you we’re very excited about the prospect of that and the work that we can do together,” she said. Harris declined a question from reporters about U.S. inflation, which hit a 30-year high on Wednesday.
The submarine rift was top of mind for French officials, however, with relations between Paris and Canberra worsening in recent weeks.
The $66 billion contract abandoned by Australia meant losing French jobs in the lead up to Macron’s reelection campaign.
In the wake of the announcement, French officials had described Washington’s deal to share nuclear submarine technology with Australia as “a stab in the back” and as something former President Donald Trump “would do.”
By Wednesday, a White House effort to claw its way back into French favor appeared to be working. Harris and Macron ignored repeated questions from reporters on the issue before and after their sit down.
Harris did not respond to an ask in advance of the meeting of whether she would need to “make amends” for the breach.
“I’m very happy to be in Paris,” she responded.
Later, the French president appeared to laugh under a medical mask in response to a shouted question that asked, “Do you forgive America?”
After meeting with Biden in Rome last week, Macron had told reporters that the countries were working to patch things up.
“We are building the trust again. Trust is like love,” the French leader said before adding, “Declaration is good, but proof is better.”
Biden called the U.S. handling of the matter “clumsy.”
Earlier, Macron said they were looking ahead.
“We clarified together what we had to clarify,” he said in response to a question of whether they had patched up the relationship.
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“What really matters now is what we will do together in the coming weeks, the coming months, the coming years.”
Harris echoed this forward-looking sentiment in her brief public remarks at the top of the meeting. The vice president called it the start of a “new era” for cooperation between the two nations, including on a broad range of defense and security issues.
