But France is right on one point. The Aukus nuclear-submarine alliance between the USA, Australia and the UK will have lasting effects on NATO. NATO will not dissolve, but it will play a more peripheral role in the future.
From World War II until the last decade, US foreign and security policy has focused on Europe and the Middle East. Under US Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, it shifted to the Indo-Pacific region.
This begs the question: why is the UK part of this change and not France? The US considers France and the EU unreliable with China because of their special relationship.
Germany and France pushed ahead with the comprehensive investment agreement between the EU and China shortly before Biden took office. Germany has massive export surpluses with China, which it wants to protect.
Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet and SPD candidate Olaf Scholz are both in favor of expanding bilateral relations. Europe has also left a door open to Huawei for its 5G networks. Only the UK has really cut ties. The Chinese ambassador to Britain reacted with unbridled anger. His colleagues in Paris and Berlin, however, remained calm. I assume they have received assurances through back doors.
Britain’s role is changing
The UK is clearly the junior partner in Aukus. But it is the only European country that the US can trust in pursuing its strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific region. For the French, the UK is not the central issue here, but its involvement is the offense. Snookered as they say in England.
For the first time in more than half a century, the US is sharing its submarine nuclear technology with an ally.
(Photo: dpa)
If the UK had still been a member of the EU, this could theoretically have happened, but not in practice. From the UK’s point of view, Brexit opens up strategic options that were previously unthinkable. The UK is also part of the Five Eyes, a group of intelligence agencies that includes the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The UK’s strategic realignment was not inevitable. It is in large part the result of the way the EU conducted the Brexit negotiations. The EU leadership did not miss an opportunity to criticize Brexit.
Donald Tusk, the former President of the European Council, joined the campaign for the second UK referendum. The EU could have supported UK MPs seeking compromise, such as Kenneth Clarke or Stephen Kinnock, but it did not.
The second mistake, even worse than the first, was the intention to impose the EU regulatory regime on the UK as the price of a free trade agreement. At no point has the EU even given any thought to what kind of strategic relationship it is seeking with the UK after Brexit. The EU allowed anger over Brexit to stand in the way of rational decision-making.
EU underestimated Biden and Johnson
The enormous cost of this stupidity is slowly becoming apparent. The UK will not flood the EU with cheap goods as France feared. The UK’s strategy is much more subtle.
It will gradually withdraw from European security policy. It will also decouple from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and financial regulation.
The UK invests more in artificial intelligence than any other EU member state. It is a member of the UN Security Council and the G7. What on earth was the EU thinking?
And no, Biden will not intervene on behalf of the EU in the current stalemate over Northern Ireland. EU leaders have always underestimated Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And they always overestimated Joe Biden. Bad combination.
EU diplomacy is driven by emotions and a superficial understanding of US – and the rest of the UK – politics. Why did the EU put so much hope in regime change in Washington over the past year, and so publicly?
Donald Trump was loud and rude, but all he has ever done to the EU other than insult it was impose tariffs. Europe has never seen anything nearly as hostile as Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan or the Aukus Agreement. But all of this was perfectly predictable.
Is NATO going to break?
The next predictable accident with Washington will be about nuclear participation. The Greens and the Left Party, possible members of the next German coalition, want to get out of the US nuclear umbrella. The SPD still pays lip service to NATO, but the party is against the two percent target for NATO defense spending.
I would expect NATO to wither over time and the transatlantic link to weaken. The EU speaks of strategic autonomy, but underestimates the scope and, above all, the nature of the task.
This would require a federal political union with a federal foreign policy and European defense forces, both independent of the member states. To finance them, such a federal union would need the authority to collect taxes and issue debts.
The inevitable strategic realignment of the UK makes this task even more difficult because it used to play a crucial role in European security – a role Germany will not play.
The adult version of strategic autonomy is a very serious endeavor for which the EU is not equipped. The collective failure to understand Biden’s foreign policy and the need for an alliance with the United Kingdom shows us that the deal has no prospect of success.
The author: Wolfgang Münchau is the director of www.eurointelligence.com
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