Why Britain and France Hate Each Other
Watching the fallout from the great Anglo-American heist of France’s submarine contract with Australia, you could be forgiven for concluding that London and Paris are polar opposites in every way: whether in their leaders’ personalities, grand strategies, economic models, or social mores. The irony is that the row over the new Australia-U.K.-U.S. defense pact, or AUKUS, reveals how fundamentally similar they really are.
For Paris, the submarine episode is proof of London’s “permanent opportunism” and preference for junior status in a partnership with the United States over any meaningful association with Europe. It is as if nothing has changed since Winston Churchill exploded in frustration at Charles de Gaulle on the eve of D-Day to say that if Britain were ever forced to choose between Europe and the open seas, it would always choose the latter. In the French view, Boris Johnson’s pursuit of a “Global Britain” outside the European Union is merely the latest expression of this deep and undignified national instinct. And for Britain, in turn, Paris’s reaction to AUKUS just exposes France’s latent anti-American chauvinism, its fixation on long-lost grandeur, and its cynical strategy to use the EU as a vehicle for its doomed goal of returning to global relevance. This British view was summarized by Johnson in Washington this week when he said, in a way seemingly designed to further wind up Emmanuel Macron’s government, “Donnez-moi un break.”
Yet you have to pause for only a moment to see that, far from being diametrically opposed, France and Britain are more similar than
