The Daily - Submarines and Shifting Allegiances

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

The recent U.S.-British deal to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines might look relatively inconsequential. But it signifies a close alliance between the three countries to face off against China.It is also notable for another reason: It has greatly angered the French. Why?Guest: Mark Landler, the London bureau chief for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: President Biden’s announcement of a deal to help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines has strained the Western alliance.The U.S. pact with Australia and Britain has put Europe closer to a question it has tried to avoid: Which side are you on?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a U.S. deal to sell submarines to Australia has unleashed claims of backstabbing and betrayal from a close U.S. ally. Astead Herndon spoke with our colleague, Mark Landler, about why, despite that, the United States is determined to press ahead with the plan.

It's Wednesday, September 22nd. Mark, I have to tell you that when I first heard about this news, about a deal with Australia, I really didn't understand the significance of it. So can you tell me, plain and simple, what is this? What is this deal? Well, it's understandable because it's one of these things where when you first look at it, it doesn't necessarily look like that huge a deal, right? It's a deal between Australia, the United States, and Britain to supply nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. But what makes it really such a landmark is that, in essence, the U.S. and Britain are sharing their most secret nuclear technology with another ally, Australia, to enable them to build and operate a class of submarines that they otherwise would never have access to.

And that really makes it stand out. So it's not only a huge deal in terms of monetary value, it's a really strategically important deal, one that sort of changes the equation, not just over the next five years, but really over the next 25, 30 years. What do you mean? This is Australia being brought into a really uniquely close alliance with the United States and Britain to really face off against China in the Asia Pacific. This is going to be the great geopolitical confrontation of the coming era. And Australia is sort of lining up with the U.S. and Britain to be committed to this new, much more aggressive posture toward China.

Wait, so these submarines that the United States entered into an agreement with to share a military technology with Australia are actually for the purpose of spying on China? That's right. I mean, basically, the issue here is China has become, over the past 10 years in particular, a mighty naval power in its own right. And it has shown very imperialistic ambitions in its own coastal waters and even well beyond, into the Pacific, into the South China Sea. They have their own very large submarine fleet. They have their own very large naval fleet.

And they're really, in a sense, militarizing this entire Asia-Pacific area. And so what the Australians are doing in concert with the U.S. and the U.K. is fielding their own class of very fast, very long range, very hard to detect submarines that can basically patrol the waters of the South China Sea and more broadly into the Pacific and keep an eye on the Chinese and basically watch what they're doing and send a very powerful signal to the Chinese that they're not going to be able to expand into all of this space without someone pushing back on them. Okay, so that all seems like a fairly reasonable, straightforward military alliance. The United States, which has an interest in keeping

tabs on China, partners with Australia around these submarines. So wait, why did this blow up into a controversy? Well, because the French got really mad about this deal. There have been lies. There has been duplicity. There have been lies. There has been duplicity. To say the French got angry actually really understates it. The level of fury was really almost unprecedented for an ally. There has been a major break of trust. There has been contempt. So it's not going well between us, not at all. The French cancelled this big gala that they were going to give

to celebrate US.-French ties in Washington. They recalled their ambassadors from both Washington and the Australian capital, Canberra. We're calling our ambassadors to show our former partner countries that we have very strong discontent, really a serious crisis between us. The French foreign minister referred to it as a stab in the back. I'm really angry. What worries me is the behavior of the Americans. This unilateral, brutal, unpredictable decision looks a lot like what Mr. Trump used to do.

So you're really seeing a level of vitriol that, as I said, is just about unprecedented in relations between the United States and France. The White House can't even secure a phone call to the Élysée Palace. The president will have a call. We're still working on the scheduling of it with President Macron in the coming days. Why exactly are they so mad? Well, because the French had their own deal with the Australians. They were going to sell them non-nuclear powered submarines also over a period of about 20

to 25 years. And losing that deal hurts them in a number of ways. The first way is purely financial. It's a $66 billion deal. It means a lot to their defense industry. So there's a very big economic hit. Secondly, there's the political sting of this for Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. He's running for re-election in six months.

And in French elections, a little bit of anti-American sentiment is not a bad thing. But there's no question, it's also a big humiliation for France on the global stage. And I think most importantly, is that it changes the geopolitical environment. The fact is that you've now got Australia standing alongside the United States and Britain in this major future conflict. And for France to be left on the sidelines of something that big is just something the French found extremely hard to swallow. Well, given everything that you just said, it seems like the U.S. should have been anticipating that France would have been upset by this move. Did the U.S. see this coming? Well, there's no question that the U.S. must have

sensed that this was going to be a problem because after all, they negotiated this deal with the Australians and the Brits under a cloak of secrecy without tipping off the French what they were doing. So that's not something you do when you think no one's going to get upset. That's right. I mean, they obviously knew that when the Australians broke the news to the French that they were pulling out, that it was going to cause a problem. I think it is fair to say, though, that no one in Washington anticipated just how bad this was going to get, how quickly. And you see that in the fact that the White House has been trying to arrange a telephone call between President Biden and President Macron to try to smooth this over. So I think the depth of the French reaction

caught the U.S. off guard. But the U.S. could not have expected that the French were going to take this lying down. So on one hand, you have a level of anger that was larger than even the U.S. anticipated. But on the other hand, they knew they were going to be mad. The U.S. didn't care and still did it anyway. Why do you think that is? Well, this kind of gets to the nub of what's changed over the past several years. I think what's happened here is that the priority of competing against China, of putting together the most powerful possible alliance to counter China's influence in the region, trumps America's historic sensitivities to and care for its relations with its allies in Europe and within NATO. And that is a major shift that is not so much just a shift of one

administration to another. This is something that has been evolving and building over time. And we saw it in a very dramatic way play out with the announcement of one deal and the breakup of another deal. We'll be right back. Mark, you said that there was a geopolitical shift that's been happening around China. Can you explain where that's coming from? What's the origins? Well, think about where we were in the 1980s.

You were looking really at a bipolar world. It was the United States and the Soviet Union. And allied with us in that Cold War confrontation were our NATO allies. So the transatlantic relationship was really the core element of the United States' security strategy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO lost its historic focus. The alliance was built to confront this threat, and that threat suddenly unraveled. And it was replaced by a series of other threats,

predominantly in the Middle East. And so the United States continued to rely very heavily on these European allies. Then, basically, in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, obviously the big economic story was the rise of China. And for a long time, the American relationship with China was primarily framed around trade and economics. But then over time, as I mentioned earlier, to cast its eye around the region and start to colonize parts of the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. So where we see them violating international rules and norms, as we have seen in some cases in the South China Sea.

And so even back in 2010, 2011... We've been very firm, and we've indicated to them that there will be consequences. It was very apparent to the Obama administration, to President Obama, that the real long-term challenge for the U.S. was in China. And he tried to pivot the U.S. away from some of these historic obligations that it had with its European allies and dealing with wars in the Middle East. As we end today's wars, I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia-Pacific a top priority. Toward this coming confrontation, this coming competition with China.

The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay. I remember this. This was a focus of the Obama administration in the foreign policy sphere. They were resetting their relationship with Russia and other parts of the world as it focused ostensibly on China. Did that materialize? Well, that's exactly what they were trying to do. And the problem that President Obama had was that he couldn't quite pull the U.S. out of all these obligations. Remember, in his first year in office, he actually spent a great deal of time deciding to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan to try to turn around that war. He spent some of his

subsequent years dealing with a very difficult effort to extract U.S. troops from Iraq. And then, of course, he faced kind of the aftermath of the Arab Spring, where there was a civil war in Syria that the U.S. was constantly deciding how much it wanted to get involved in. There was a civil war in Libya. The U.S. wound up leading a NATO intervention in Libya. And so while he tried to reset relations with Russia to sort of move Russia off to the side, he really never fully succeeded. The Russians stayed heavily engaged, often in a way that was difficult for the U.S. in the Middle East. And so while the pivot was this kind of very attractive idea, and they invested a great deal of time articulating it, trying to figure out how to put it into practice, it always sort of eluded President Obama because he simply had too many other

pressing engagements. Right. That even though the focus or the intention was there from the Obama administration, there were too many entanglements elsewhere for them to fully follow through in order to focus on China. Right. How did that play out under President Trump? You know, with China, we have a trade deficit with China of five hundred and five billion dollars a year. Think of it. How how stupid can we be? Well, President Trump came in with, in some ways, a very strong China focus of his own. But his focus was very driven by trade. And we're going

to take care of trade. We're going to make great trade deals. We're going to stop with this nonsense. He built his China policy around trying to redress what he felt were these huge inequities in U.S.-China trade. We have power over China because of trade, because they suck us dry. They take our money, they take our jobs, they take everything. We get nothing. So if you recall, he hit China with a series of heavy-duty tariffs, really the first time the U.S. had acted that aggressively against the Chinese. And so the relationship with China got steadily more

frosty, but mostly on the level of trade and economic policy and less on the level of geopolitics. Nevertheless, in their laser focus on the relationship with China, they were in fact kind of continuing a trend that began under the Obama administration, just with a kind of a different public tone, a different public posture, and an emphasis on the commercial relationship rather than the security relationship, the military relationship. But the Trump administration had a lot of their own distractions. Was that Chinese priority a full focus of President Trump's considering so many of the Russia interactions, North Korea, the chaos that was happening on the foreign policy stage during those four years? which were self-inflicted.

President Trump didn't just decide to go after the Chinese on trade. He went after the European Union on trade as well and claimed that the European Union was also ripping off the United States. So he imposed tariffs on European countries as well and actually led to a real souring of the transatlantic relationship. And also, of course, as you point out,

his own relationship with Russia and the questions about Russia and its role in the 2016 campaign cast a shadow over his foreign policy. So he was wrestling with kind of this strange situation with Russia, a worsening relationship transatlantically, and then this trade war with China. So to some extent, both administrations, Obama and Trump, had other distractions that never let them really put the focus on, I think, what both presidents temperamentally wanted to do, which was to keep the focus very much on China. So Obama had distractions, Trump had distractions. So Obama had distractions. Trump had distractions. Where does that leave us now? Biden on the trail talked repeatedly about bringing stability back to foreign policy. And I remember him citing his years as the foreign policy chief of the Democratic Party in the Senate. How has him coming to the White House now affected those priorities? Well, there's a couple of things that are very important to know about Joe Biden when it comes to foreign policy, and you alluded to some of it

just now. Biden is a believer in alliances. You know, in his many years in the Senate, he spent years traveling to Europe, meeting with European leaders. He understands the role of NATO, the history of it, the centrality of it. But he also spent a lot of time traveling to China, and that really helped develop his views and sharpen his views about China's role in the world. And also remember, China during this whole period is acting increasingly threateningly toward its neighbors. It's militarizing more and more of the coastal waters around it. It's committing human rights abuses against Muslims in Xinjiang province. It's cracking down on Hong Kong. So China's looking more and more threatening to its neighbors. I've told them what I've said to many world leaders, that America will not back away from

our commitments, our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. And Joe Biden is a guy with a long history of thinking about China and the centrality of China to American foreign policy. In my discussion with President Xi, I told him, we welcome the competition. We're not looking for conflict. But I made absolutely clear that we will defend America's interest across the board. So when he comes into office, he sort of has two ideas in his head. One, he wants to shore up the alliances that were really shredded during the Trump years. And two, he wants to finally put the full focus of American foreign policy on this competition with China.

I also told President Xi that we'll maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific, just as we do for NATO and Europe. Not to start a conflict, but to prevent one. What does it mean to put the full focus then on China? What did the White House do to make its relationship with the Chinese its full geopolitical priority?

Well, one of the things that Joe Biden was determined to do early on was to finally clear out some of these great distractions that had been distractions for Barack Obama and for Donald Trump. And the most notable one, the most visible one, was he withdrew from Afghanistan. And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States

to continue to funnel billions of dollars and resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely. This is something that Donald Trump wanted to do. This is something that

in his latter years, Barack Obama wanted to do. Joe Biden finally did it. He did it at great cost. It was a messy, painful process. But in doing so, President Biden ended the other great land war that had tormented the United States for 20 years. And the reason he wanted to do it was to clear the decks so that as much American bandwidth

as possible could be focused on this competition with China. So I understand how things like pulling out of Afghanistan are the White House trying to shift its attention fully to China, to try to prioritize that above its other global problems or relationships. But what does that mean for this submarine deal? Why did that changing focus mean that the United States had to piss off France in the process? Well, in a way, it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the world during the 1980s. Europe was the centerpiece of the U.S.'s security policy, the key partner. the key partner. What's changed is that the focus now is so uniquely, so heavily on China, that the U.S. now thinks of Europe more in the context of the competition with China. And that,

in turn, makes the American approach to Europe somewhat more transactional. So it's looking around the world saying, okay, what can you do to help me with this? What can you do to help me with this? And in the case of this submarine deal, the Biden administration calculated in a fairly cold-blooded transactional way that getting involved in a submarine deal with Australia with nuclear-powered submarines just made a lot of sense. It was an important play for the Biden administration in this competition with China. And if France has to get thrown under the bus in the process, c'est la vie.

And I think what happened here and what made it so difficult for the French to accept is that they brought a transactional approach to an ally with whom the U.S. has had, you know, close ties for hundreds of years and probably felt that it was immune from this kind of treatment. This is the kind of treatment you might expect of the U.S. with a small country in the Middle East or in Africa or in Latin America. You wouldn't necessarily expect the U.S. to treat one of its oldest

and closest allies this way. So France is saying, you do this to other people, you don't do this to us. But you're saying that the United States in this moment, you know, that's not their priority. That's right. And I'm sure that President Biden will spend a lot of time in the coming days and weeks trying to make the point that we still do care about you. You're still our allies. But I think it is fair to say that what the United States is saying to everybody

is, in effect, you've got to choose. You're either with us in this competition with China or you're not with us. And if you are with us, you're going to be willing to kind of do it our way. And when you talk about Europe, it's a very complicated question because some countries are

more inclined to line up with the U.S. with fairly little debate. Other countries are somewhere in the middle. And then there are countries like Germany that actually have very important, large commercial relationships with China that actually have a somewhat different view of how to engage with China. And so there is the potential for a divergence of interest. There's a potential for some Europeans to view China differently than the United States. And I think the other subtext to what we've seen over the past few weeks with this deal is the United States kind of posing this question to Europe. You know, are you with us or are you not with us?

And countries have to decide how much they want to line up with the U.S. and what they're willing to tolerate in order to be part of this effort. So the picture that you're painting here seems to be a world of small distinctions, where the United States is not fully abandoning its relationship with Europe or France or its allies. We're not going to war with some of our longstanding partners. But that it does seem to be that in this new era, where the United States is almost exclusively focusing its energy on opposing China, that it's asking these allies to come along with them in a very specific way. And the United States is treating them somewhat more transactionally. Yeah, that's exactly right. And there are a lot of people in

Europe that anticipated this. I mean, let's be clear, this has not come as an enormous surprise. Europeans are good students of the world and geopolitical balance. I think what surprised them a little bit is how sudden this was. So remember, President Biden comes into office, he withdraws from Afghanistan, he doesn't really bother consulting the Brits or the French or the Germans on the timing and logistics of that withdrawal, puts Britain in particular in a very bad spot. They were the second largest NATO contributor of troops to Afghanistan. And he treats them basically like bystanders. So that's embarrassing for Boris

Johnson. Boris Johnson looks like a winner in the submarine deal, but he's clearly a loser in the way he was treated on Afghanistan. And then here we are just a month later, and suddenly it's the French that are treated rather casually by the United States. So I think what's really surprised and upset people in Europe is they probably expected a president who would invest more time in trying to shore up the alliance. Instead, they got a president who appears to be in a pretty big hurry to tee up his China strategy and doesn't mind treating the Europeans fairly roughly in the process of doing that.

And so really, this is the dawn of the Pacific century, of this new era of confrontation and competition between the West and China. And these are some of the birth pains of that new age that we're witnessing. Have you trademarked Dawn of Pacific Century? You should. I wish I could say it was mine, but many smarter people have used it before me.

Thank you for this, Mark. I really appreciate your time. Thanks, Ested. thank you for this mark i really appreciate your time thanks sister mr president secretary general my fellow delegates to all those who dedicate themselves to this noble mission of this institution, it's my honor to speak to you for the first time as President of the United States. On Tuesday, in his debut speech to the United Nations General Assembly, President Biden outlined his plan for the United States to reclaim its place as a leader on the global stage.

I stand here today for the first time in 20 years of the United States not at war. We've turned the page. In the speech, Biden argued that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has freed it up to focus on fighting America's authoritarian rivals and to promote democracy. All the unmatched strength, energy, and commitment, will, and resources of our nation are now fully and squarely focused on what's ahead of us, not what was behind. I know this. As we look ahead, we will lead.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday night, the House of Representatives passed a bill designed to avert a government shutdown and a default on American debt by funding government operations through early December and by raising the U.S. debt ceiling. But the legislation has little chance of passing in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes and faces strong resistance from Republicans. Unless Congress takes action by September 30th, critical government functions could cease on October 1st. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson,

Nina Potok, and Chelsea Daniel, with help from Muj Zaydi. It was edited by Paige Cowan and Rachel Quester, and engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.