French President Emmanuel Macron has accused Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison of lying to him about the frustrated sale of submarines to Australia for the creation of an alliance between Canberra, the United Kingdom and the United States, known as AUKUS .
Australia’s decision to cancel a billion-euro deal to buy twelve submarines from France and to negotiate this defense pact with the United States and the United Kingdom has triggered a serious diplomatic crisis between these countries.
«I have a lot of respect for your country . I have a lot of respect and a lot of friendship for his people. I am simply saying that when there is respect, you have to be sincere and behave consistently with it, ”said Macron, who met Morrison on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
After being asked by journalists from the Australian newspapers ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’ and ‘The Age’ if he thinks Morrison was dishonest with him, he said: ” I don’t think so, I know.” It has also avoided assessing Morrison’s commitment to purchase these nuclear submarines at the end of an 18-month review period.
In response, Morrison has denied that he lied to Macron in their meeting in June at the Elysee and stressed that during his visit he transferred to Paris that the submarines to be delivered by the French company Naval Group did not meet Australian needs.
” I was very clear that conventional submarines were not going to be able to satisfy our strategic interests and that we were going to make a decision following our national interests,” he explained, before emphasizing that he did not address the AUKUS issue because “it is not something of the that you are having open conversations about it.
Let me be very clear. The decision that I have taken as Prime Minister, the decision that my Government has taken, was in the national interests of Australia ”, he said. These decisions are difficult . Of course, they have caused disappointment and an impact on relations with France ”, he has settled.
Macron himself had his first telephone conversation with Morrison since the outbreak of the crisis on Thursday, in which he regretted that the “relationship of trust” between the two countries had been broken. Thus, he said that it was a “unilateral decision” that gave rise to “another project yet to be finalized.”
For his part, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, acknowledged to Macron that the crisis unleashed by the frustrated sale of submarines was the consequence of “an awkwardness” by the White House, in a gesture that the French president accepted as the point of departure for the strengthening of the bilateral relationship with a look “towards the future.”
Joe Biden acknowledged that it was “awkward.”
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, acknowledged last Friday before his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron , that the crisis unleashed by the frustrated sale of submarines to Australia was the result of “an awkwardness” by the White House, in a gesture that the Gallic president has accepted as the starting point for the strengthening of the bilateral relationship with a look “towards the future.”
“What we (the United States) did was clumsy . We didn’t do it very gracefully, ”Biden said during his first face-to-face meeting with the French president after Australia broke a billion-dollar deal with a French shipping company to favor an alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom instead. United, the so-called AUKUS agreement.
The French Government immediately called its ambassadors for consultations while the French Foreign Minister , Jean-Yves Le Drian , considered this agreement as “a stab in the back” , especially for French interests in the Indo-Pacific region, where more than a million compatriots. Since then, the United States has apologized to its historic ally through various channels, which the US president has reiterated on different occasions.
