Is Britain some sort of offshore American base? Has the mother country become, as mothers sometimes do, over time, dependent on the daughter? Have we Brits, in short, contracted out our foreign policy to Washington?
That seems to be the general view in France. Sources at the Elysee say that they recalled their ambassadors from Washington and Canberra but did not bother with London because Britain was the monkey rather than the organ grinder.
Their European minister, Clement Beaune, said that the AUKUS pact, the three-way naval deal among Australia, Britain, and the United States, showed that the British were content with “accepted vassal status.” He did not explain why, if the deal involved vassalage, the French were so cross at being left out of it — but never mind.
The accusation goes back at least to 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower pulled the plug on an Anglo-French military intervention aimed at halting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s confiscation of the Suez Canal. Britain and France drew radically opposed lessons from that rebuff. The British concluded that there had been a catastrophic breakdown in communication and that the struggle against Soviet expansionism depended on the two Anglophone powers working more closely together. The French, by contrast, concluded that the U.S. could not be trusted and set out to lead an alternative European alliance. The Treaty of Rome, the foundation of what became the European Union, was signed the following year.
The same dynamic was visible in the aftermath of the Afghan debacle. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sought to convince the U.S. to remain engaged with the world, while French President Emmanuel Macron revived his plan for an autonomous European defense, armed and equipped — mais bien sur — by French companies.
Are the French right? Have the British, and, by extension, the Australians, become appendages of the U.S., at least for defense purposes? That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. But there is surely a more plausible explanation, namely that the English-speaking democracies often act in concert because they react in similar ways to the same challenges.
Culture is a product of institutions. A shared political heritage inculcates shared values. Anglosphere peoples support, because their institutions have taught them to support, private property, neutral courts, personal autonomy, representative government, and the elevation of the individual over the collective. They become indignant at injustice. They dislike bullies. They are prepared to deploy proportionate force in order to uphold the rules — not always, but more often than any rivals.
Let us recall what prompted the Australian decision to cancel its order of diesel-powered French submarines and become only the seventh state in the world with nuclear-powered vessels. Why did they feel they needed the upgrade? Because, bluntly, they live in a rough neighborhood.
I used to assume that capitalism and the internet would eventually lead to political liberty in China. I was wrong. Beijing has learned how to turn the internet into a tool of authoritarian control. Companies such as Weibo, Tencent, and Alibaba do the state’s work, as propagandists and as monitors of behavior. The combination of facial recognition technology and spyware has created a terrifying panopticon state.
That state has expansionist aspirations. It maintains hostile territorial claims against every neighboring state except, significantly, for Russia, with whom it recently patched up its last dispute. The vastness of China’s maritime ambitions means that it even wants territories currently claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei.
Not since Japan in the 1930s has a single power had such designs for conquest in the Pacific region. Back then, most Americans thought that, if they kept their heads down, the quarrel would pass them by. Subsequent administrations have not repeated that error.
When Australia called for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, China responded rather revealingly with massive economic and diplomatic embargoes. Neither Britain nor the U.S. can be neutral in such a situation. A Leninist dictatorship that brutalizes its people and confines its Muslim population in concentration camps is seeking to dominate its neighbors. One of those neighbors, a parliamentary democracy with long-standing claims on our friendship, asks for support. What are we supposed to do?
Macron has not behaved like an ally. He has twice threatened an energy blockade against Britain, backed an export ban on Italian-manufactured vaccines that Australia had legally purchased, and supported a deal that gave China better investment access to the European Union than the Anglosphere nations have. It is hardly surprising that those nations do not turn to France when freedom is in the balance. Yet the French may benefit despite themselves from the resolve of the Anglo-Saxon powers. Not, it must be said, for the first time.
