Never did the US president Joe Biden imagine that he would be compared to his former chair, a republican, Donald Trump on any day of his tenure but the day has come. The government of France on Thursday accused Biden of stabbing them in the back and acting like his predecessor.
France said that the way Biden pushed aside Paris from a lucrative defense deal that it had earlier signed with Australia for submarines reminded them of Donald Trump. The recent deal between the US, Britain, and Australia says that they will have a security partnership for the Indo-Pacific for Australia to acquire US nuclear-powered submarines.
But this would mean that the previous ongoing deal between Australia and France where the island nation was to get French-designed submarines worth $40 billion.
The French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian did not hold back when the deal scrapping was confirmed. He said, “This brutal, unilateral, and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr. Trump used to do.” He also added that this is not the way the allies treat each other.
The Australia-France deal goes back to 2016 when Australia had selected French shipbuilder Naval Group to dedicatedly make them a new submarine fleet worth $40 billion so that it could replace Collins submarine which was close to two decades old.
Until very recently, which is to be precise two weeks ago, the Australian defense and foreign ministers had confirmed that the deal with France is still very much in place but this announcement certainty took France by surprise. French President Emmanuel Macron also lauded the cooperation between the two that has been going on for decades in June.
Le Drian said, "It's a stab in the back. We created a relationship of trust with Australia and that trust has been broken.”
Relations between mAcron and Biden also do not seem to go where they were expected, especially given the fact that Trump and Macron never got along with their ideologies. It was expected that with Biden, things will change but the experts say that they deteriorated further.
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