Tangle - France's spat with the U.S.

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

Late last week, the United States announced that it would work with Australia and the United Kingdom in a new defense partnership, one in which the U.S. would hand over its nuclear-powered submarine technology to Australia. The security coalition is called AUKUS. Once Australia made the new pact with the U.S. and United Kingdom, it also abandoned a $66 billion submarine defense deal it had with France. In response to the new security arrangement, and the loss of the defense deal, French President Emmanuel Macron took the unprecedented step of recalling the French ambassadors to the U.S., signaling a tension between the two countries that has not been seen since they first formed an alliance over two centuries ago.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Please consider supporting this podcast by clicking here. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're talking about this little spat between France and the U.S., two of the oldest allies on the planet.

Pretty interesting foreign policy developments over the last couple weeks. We're going to explain what's going on, what's happening, and give you guys some views from not just the right and the left in America, but also from Australia and from France and some of the places involved here. As always, before we jump in, some quick hits. Number one, bipartisan police reform talks crumbled yesterday with negotiations at a stalemate over predictable key issues like qualified immunity. Number two, Democrats have introduced a bill in Congress to provide $1

billion for Israel's Iron Dome defense system just days after progressives had the funding removed from a stopgap spending bill. Number three, Joe Biden's envoy to Haiti has resigned, citing mistreatment and deportations of Haitian refugees on the border. Number four, Joe Biden's envoy to Haiti has resigned, citing mistreatment and deportations of Haitian refugees on the border. Number four, the Environmental Protection Agency has ordered a slash in climate-warming chemicals used in air conditioning and refrigeration. Number five, existing home sales in the U.S. fell in August as price growth slowed, the first signs that the housing market may actually be cooling off. All right, today's main story is on France and more specifically why France, our oldest ally, is pretty mad at us right now. Late last week, the United States announced that it would work with Australia and the United Kingdom in a new

defense partnership, one in which the U.S. would hand over its nuclear-powered submarine technology to Australia. The security coalition is called AUKUS, A-U-K-U-S, which is, you know, a combination of the abbreviations of the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia. Australia made the new pact with the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and at the same time, it abandoned a $66 billion submarine defense deal it had been working on with France. In response to the new security arrangement and the loss of the defense deal, French President Emmanuel Macron took the unprecedented step of recalling the French ambassadors to the U.S., signaling a tension between the two countries that has not been seen since they first formed their alliance over two centuries ago.

The broader context for AUKUS is that the Indo-Pacific region is becoming a major security focus for the U.S. and its allies as China's power and influence continues to rise. Major territorial disputes in the South China Sea, which is one of the most valuable shipping lanes on the planet, have become more common lately. China is building military outposts throughout the region, and the U.S. has wanted to respond with a stronger security presence and better alliances. This deal is a part of that plan and that pivot of a focus to the Indo-Pacific region. To France, though, the deal was seen as a betrayal, not just because of the lost defense contract, but because of its deep ties to the region. More than 1.6 million French

people live in French territories in the South Pacific, the island-heavy region east of Australia, that includes some 7,000 soldiers who are permanently deployed there. France's submarine contract with Australia, signed in 2016, was part of a broader plan for strategic autonomy in the South Pacific. The United States' decision to strike the deal with little consultation with France and France's reaction has drawn all sorts of commentary about the future of their relationship, the new security allegiances globally, and Biden's foreign policy. On Wednesday, Biden and Macron spoke by phone for the first time since the dust-up, and Macron announced that France was planning to send its ambassador back to the U.S. The two also made plans to meet in Europe at the end of October.

Below, we'll take a look at some reactions from across the political spectrum, both in the U.S. and abroad. There's actually quite a bit of agreement on this, so before we jump in, we'll talk about that. There's actually quite a bit of agreement on this. So before we jump in, we'll talk about that. In yesterday's podcast, we discussed how Biden's speech in front of the U.N. was received critically both by the left and the right. Now, they were critical for different reasons, but similarly on today's issue, there's actually a lot of common ground. Many on the left and right are both happy about the new security arrangement to challenge China, but also disappointed in the lack of communication with France and the way security arrangement to challenge China, but also disappointed in the lack of communication with France and the way France reacted to the deal. So first, we'll start

off with what the right is saying. So the right is mostly supportive of the deal because it represents a strong stand against China. Henry Olson called the deal a masterstroke in a Washington Post op-ed. He said that nuclear power subs have significant advantages over diesel-powered vessels. They do not need to surface to recharge batteries, for example, and the boats Australia is likely to receive from the U.S. never need to refuel. Those Virginia-class submarines can also launch up to 16 Tomahawk missiles, giving Australia a small offensive capability that China would need to account for in the event of any conflict. Those boats could also theoretically be armed with nuclear weapons, though Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison unequivocally stated his country would not acquire such weaponry. This masterstroke is exactly what the United States should be doing to combat China, Olson said. As powerful as China is, it cannot match the combined capabilities of the U.S. and its allies. U.S. diplomats should be directed to firm

up those alliances and increase allies' military capabilities. The more that Asian democracies are Walter Russell Meade added context on how this impacts Macron and France specifically, given that Macron is up for a tough re-election fight. It is, to begin with, a massive humiliation for Emmanuel Macron just as the next French election campaign begins to heat up, Mead wrote. President Macron and his government were blindsided by development of vital importance to French interests and international standing. The French foreign ministry has accused the AUKUS powers of backstabbing and even treachery, but it's the business of a country's diplomatic, military, and intelligence establishments to prevent such surprises. The French don't elect their presidents to be hapless patsies, horn-swoggled by stupid Americans, provincial Australians, and the unspeakable Brits.

But this is bigger than Mr. Macron, he wrote. The submarine contract was a centerpiece of Paris's strategy for the 21st century. Building on its military strength, diplomatic acumen, and technological sophistication to defeat Japan in the original competition for the Australian submarine contract, France felt it had established a position of lasting influence in the heart of the Indo-Pacific. The collapse of this glorious dream hits the French hard and triggers deep-seated fears of decline. line. All right, so those are just a couple takes from the right. Here are a couple takes from the left. The Washington Post editorial board said the deal is a major boost in military capability on the pro-U.S. side of the regional balance. The board said that it was

unsurprising to see the Chinese government newspaper, the Global Times, accuse the United States of losing its mind to rally its allies against China. But in fact, the Washington Post editorial board said, the news represents strong and overdue pushback against both Beijing's economic harassment of Canberra and its broader naval bullying in the Indo-Pacific region. French objections gloss over pre-existing Australian unhappiness with France's execution of the two countries' sub-building arrangement, but the Biden administration should take them seriously. In moving its foreign policy focus from the Middle East toward greater power competition with China, the United States needs its transatlantic allies, of which France is arguably

the most militarily capable. Additionally, the U.S. must head off any impression that its strategy in the Pacific rests only with English-speaking allies, or that it has no geoeconomic component. In that respect, the Biden administration is right to follow up the AUKUS announcement with a September 24th White House meeting between President Biden and the leaders of Japan and India, as well as Australia, the so-called Quad. Lionel Laurent said that the Anglosphere is happy to downplay France's anger as a mix of sour grapes and electoral theater, but warned that it could go much deeper. The promise of a return to consensus-building and multilateralism in transatlantic relations

after Donald Trump's presidency is withering on the vine, Laurent said, the messy American withdrawal from Afghanistan only a few weeks ago being an example. Memories of Trump aren't just French, but European. Paris will keep Europeanizing this conflict as it takes up the EU-rotating presidency, to varying degrees of success, Laurent said. Trade talks with Australia will likely hit a brick wall. A new U.S.-EU partnership on trade and technology will also suffer, and simmering Brexit tensions with the U.S. will probably keep flaring up. Nothing on its own to make the White House lose sleep, given its focus on a foreign policy that can be sold to the American middle class,

but hardly conducive to progress on global issues like climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the rise of China. Not least because Australia will now have to wait even longer to renew its submarine fleet. All right, and here are a couple views from abroad, which I thought would be interesting just to bring in. Solveig Hoffman is the editorial director of Le Monde, and she said, this is more than just bruised egos. This diplomatic bombshell has crudely exposed the unwritten rules of great power competition in which France cannot be a player unless it carries the weight of the European Union behind

it, Kaufman wrote. The past week has been about 21st century geopolitics and the brutal adjustment of old alliances to new realities. France considers itself a resident power in the Indo-Pacific region, a crucial battleground for the rivalry between America and China because it possesses several islands and maintains four naval bases there. It developed its own strategy for the region in 2018 and has been pushing since then for the European Union to come up with a similar project. Ironically, the European Union's Indo-Pacific strategy was presented on the very day the deal known as AUKUS became public. The plan was, of course,

drowned out by the uproar. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Sam Roggeveen, an expert on Australia defense and foreign policy, said Australia is taking a big risk with America. Australia seems to be assuming that America will remain engaged in Asia for the long haul and will be prepared to face down China if necessary. But it shouldn't, Roggeveen wrote.

He then went on to list many of the gripes Australia has with China. Australia has been subject to economic coercion from China against its exports, such as barley and coal. Chinese hackers were implicated in a breach of the Australian Parliament's website in 2019. Its security agencies report widespread espionage and interference activities, and its ministers have been frozen out by their Chinese counterparts. Last year, a Chinese diplomat even released a list of 14 grievances Beijing holds against Australia, a document that featured in deliberations at the Group of Seven summit in June. Like the United States, Australia's government has watched with increasing alarm the rapid and

extensive buildup of Chinese military capabilities, particularly its naval force. The Biden team has agreed because it too is worried about China. But there's a difference. The United States is in Asia by choice. Australia has no such luxury. All right. And that brings us up to my take. Obviously, a little bit of an interesting format here, not just the right and left, but including some views from abroad. I'll just start. I mean, look, this is not my area of expertise. You know, I know a lot about

American foreign policy, obviously, but the Indo-Pacific region is something that I'm learning about as well as a lot of these new alliances are sort of unfolding on the fly. And I think I probably read some of these takes above with as much fascination as some of you guys listen to them. But I do think there's something obvious and significant here that's worth putting in bold print. This alliance is really marking a new era of American military and trade focus. era of American military and trade focus. It's clear to the U.S., the U.K., France, China, Australia, that the future of the global power centers is in this Indo-Pacific region. Regardless of where they stand, the conflicts of the future do not appear to be forming in the Middle East or Europe or Northern Africa. They're more likely to be going in the oceans surrounding Australia,

Japan, Taiwan, China, and the other island nations scattered across the South Pacific. That the United States would make this deal, knowing full well the damage it'd do in France, is proof of Biden's commitment to showing strength against the Chinese and clear evidence that he plans to realign the U.S. with every ally it can muster. There's no surprise that Biden has gotten more praise for this from his conservative critics than just about anything else he's done to date. It represents a major shift in our focus and one Trump and conservatives before Trump had been calling for. It's going to be fascinating to see the kinds of alliances this diplomacy forges, especially given the top Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is a known China hawk too.

That means now the Democratic president and the most powerful Democrat in the upper chamber of Congress are both aligned with a majority of Republican opinion to focus on China as our top adversary. This is no small thing. It really brings together some people who you might not typically think of as being united on an issue as important as this. As for France, it's hard to do anything but shrug. Of course, there's more to this than Macron just electioneering, but there's also no doubt that a little anti-American sentiment can go a long way in a French election, and I'm sure Macron's playing that up a bit. The fact that he and Biden have seemed to already have made up with a phone call and the French ambassadors heading back to the U.S.

and a meeting scheduled in Europe for the end of October tells you all you need to know, in my opinion. There are bigger fish to fry than the French feelings about their place in the global power centers, and the billions in lost defense revenue has just as much to do with Australia's unhappiness with their current deal with France as it does with any backstabbing from the U.S. We're going to move into our reader question for today, which comes from Dara in Las Vegas, Nevada. Dara said, what are your thoughts on where crypto is headed from a regulatory policy and political direction? Wow, a big question. It's tough to answer such a broad ask succinctly, but I expect heavy crypto regulation and a lot more institutional interest in the next five years. For starters, Congress tends to hate things that are new or that they don't understand.

Obviously, cryptocurrencies have also been used to facilitate all sorts of illicit activities, and members are already seizing on that to call for more regulation and SEC involvement. In Joe Biden's attempts to raise money for his infrastructure bill, we saw legislators attempt to milk the crypto cow for cash. I expect that to continue. And I think cryptocurrencies are going to become a bigger and bigger political football going forward. On a personal note, you know, I've been in the space, as they say, quote unquote, of crypto probably since like 2015, when a friend first introduced me to Ethereum and explained the blockchain and all that good stuff. Seeing crypto become mainstream so quickly has been mind boggling for me. One interesting

thread of the story is that crypto is going to become more and more important to younger Americans, especially wealthy ones who invested in cryptocurrencies early on. I'm 30 years old. A lot of people my age have money in crypto. I know that for a fact. And I think that's going to have a big effect on the politics of this in the coming years. Those people are going to become voters. They're going to become important voters. There will be a real opening for Democratic or Republican caucuses to champion crypto and win over that powerful voting block with crypto-friendly policies. So it's not clear at all to me which party will do that or how that will break, but I think it's an important thread to keep an eye on. Specifically, I would watch

a couple of things on each side. One, do Republicans contextualize crypto as something that needs to be protected from government intervention or something that is helping facilitate crime. Whichever direction they go on that will kind of indicate what their feelings are and how they plan to regulate it. On the Democratic side, I think the question is, are they going to contextualize crypto as an avenue to close the wealth gap or as a treacherous threat to the climate because of how much energy mining cryptocurrency uses? Those seem to be the kind of competing narratives on the right and the left, and whichever one kind of pans out will have a huge impact on the industry going forward. Okay, and that's it for our reader question.

Today's story that matters is pretty interesting. Thousands of green cards could be going to waste thanks to a backlog in the U.S. immigration system. While many tech workers have waited years to get a green card which would grant them permanent legal status in the U.S., pandemic-related processing delays will keep them waiting even longer. Because the U.S. makes a certain number of family-based and employment-based green cards available each year, they sometimes roll those cards over into the next year. But

nearly 100,000 extra green cards have still not been granted that are available, and if they don't get the application sorted by fiscal year end, September 30th, those cards won't carry over for a second year. That means they could basically just go to waste. Axios has a great story about this today, and they have a quote from Google Senior Vice President of Global Affairs, Kent Walker, who said, the idea that we will leave tens of thousands of these applications unfilled at a time when businesses around the country are having a hard time finding qualified workers seems illogical. So that's your story that matters. Definitely something to keep an eye on going forward. A few great numbers for you today. 1778, that's the year France recognized the independence of the US, which is also widely considered as the beginning of their allegiance

and allyship to each other. So you could book that at about 250 years. 29%, that is the rise in the murder rate in the year 2020, the largest single year increase since the FBI started tracking the data in 1960. 12.7% was the rise in the murder rate in 1968, which was the previous largest one-year change. 40,000 is the number of Afghans who are now being offered temporary housing globally by Airbnb, and 42% is the percentage of military spending across all of Asia that is done by China. All right, and today's have a nice day story or feel good news to send you off. The girls on Afghanistan's national soccer team have safely arrived in Portugal where they were granted asylum. Members of the team had

been waiting anxiously to find out if they and their families could flee the country safely and on Sunday they finally got word that they had been booked on a charter flight to Portugal. The girls aged 14 and 16 have been trying to leave Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrawal and many people have been watching anxiously waiting to find out what would happen to them. Late Sunday night, they finally landed in Lisbon with a world of new opportunities in front of them. I'm very glad to hear those girls are safe. All right, thank you guys so much for tuning in. As always, if you want more, please go check out readtangle.com. Also a quick heads up. You can now support this podcast. I highly encourage you to do so. We need it to keep things running. But if you go into the episode description, there's a link to our anchor page where you can make just a small monthly pledge.

Doing that, giving us a five-star rating. Those things are literally the only way we can keep this going. So I really encourage you to give it a look, help us out. Thank you so much. And we'll see you guys next week. and Brady Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. So based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior chinatown follows the story of willis woo a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond chinatown when he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime willis begins to unravel a criminal web his family's buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight interior chinatown is streaming

november 19th only on disney plus