The meeting between the leaders of the US, UK and Australia on the fringes of the G7 summit on June 12 seemed innocuous enough — the resulting four-sentence communique, vowing to “deepen” co-operation in the Indo-Pacific, a footnote to the celebration of western entente after Donald Trump’s exit from the White House.
More consequential for the French delegation was Emmanuel Macron’s first bilateral meeting with Joe Biden that day, before an evening beach barbecue at Cornwall’s Carbis Bay. “The US is back,” Biden told reporters as he sat next to the French president. “Leadership is partnership,” Macron noted.
Paris’s assessment about what happened in England could not have been more wrong — nor its sense of betrayal more intense when it discovered last week that Biden, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison had in fact given a fresh impetus to a strategic alliance that would reshape security in Asia to contain China’s rising military aims. The pact would rip up a French-led $36bn contract to build 12 diesel-powered submarines for Australia and undercut Macron’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.