The decision by the Biden Administration to declare that it would build nuclear submarines with Australia and the United Kingdom rather than conventional submarines with the French was significant and controversial and leads into some very complex matters even though that decision is only a very short blip on the political horizon and will have no impact on the midterms. First off, that decision would have seemed unnecessary. Ever since Henry Kissinger negotiated the Shanghai Communique in 1972, it might have seemed unnecessary to present a significant military force to confront the Chinese by having nuclear subs stay indefinitely on station between China and Formosa, something conventional submarines apparently can't do. The Kissinger plan was that China and the United States would become economically interdependent and so not likely to face up in a war. The two powers avoided the containment policy that relied on military power to keep the Soviet Union under control until it had matured enough as an economic nation and had put aside its totalitarian political and social system so that it would no longer be a belligerent party. Maybe all the submarine sabre-rattling is overdone because it only means that there has to be an additional force to help guide the two superpowers through the inevitable antagonism that results from the fact that the two are so powerful, but it is still unnerving in that the United States was in a Cold War in the Twentieth Century that lasted from 1949 until 1989 and that except for particularly adroit mutual management and a lot of luck, the two superpowers might have gone on to a nuclear war, and the fear of that shrouded two generations. We don’t want that again. I went through it the first time and the prospect of it by younger people may not appreciate its gravity.
The second issue or puzzle was why Australia decided to break off its negotiations for conventional submarines so as to make a new deal with the UK and the Americans to build nuclear subs. The ostensible reason is that the French subs would be obsolete by the time they were launched and that it was the Australian decision to decide what to do and because the United States was willing to lease secret technology to the British because the two countries had cooperated with one another about nuclear secrets for seventy years. But that doesn’t wash. French nuclear technology is quite advanced. They have been running nuclear power plants safely for a few generations and could have shifted to nuclear submarines if the Australians had asked, but the Australians didn’t and no information was supplied to the French except hours before the new deal was made. Rumor has it that the Australian-French deal had been on the rocks for a while. The French were late on their developments and were also cancelling the Australians workers set to be used in Adelaide, the “home port” for the enterprise. But these matters could have been cleaned up.
It is difficult to believe that the Australians were free actors and the Americans were not the ones behind the new arrangement. Why dump the French, who were very annoyed at having lost a very major contract and why was it given to the British? Perhaps the French deal went sour because the British needed the deal even more. Now out of the European Union, they needed to quickly create ties with their transatlantic partners for a big deal and technology was an answer, perhaps leading up to a big trade deal with the United States and the other English speaking peoples that include not just the three partners in the deal but also New Zealand and Canada. The economic reason seems paramount because these nations were already allied politically and militarily and so there was no question that Australia and the rest would side with the United States in a confrontation with China. There was no need to bind the deal politically, just have the Australians pay for it, partly to Great Britain, rather than have the Americans carry the freight for the nuclear subs. Let the French just go to their European Union colleagues and let them together create their own nuclear submarine force, though the Europeans have been reluctant to ante up more money for defense, something Trump whined about, but where Biden may well have found a way to encourage the Europeans to pay more for their own armaments. That still doesn’t explain why the United States did not sever the deal with the French more gently, but John F. Kennedy, after all, had been brutal with the Brits when Harold MacMillian, the British Prime Minister at the time, had to eat humble pie when the United States decided to scrap a joint fighter deal with the Brits and go it alone. The Brits are the junior partner and aren’t allowed to forget that, as became clear when Tony Blair went along with the Iraq War because he had to. Moreover, Biden, as a character, is impatient and peremptory. He ended the Afghanistan War abruptly even if this was a correct decision and may have felt the same with the nuclear submarine deal. Anyway, the tiff with the French won’t last.
There are deeper and more troubling issues. The United States was faced with a very different adversary when it faced off at the Formosa Straits in the late Forties and the early Fifties when the Seventh Fleet kept the Chinese from invading Taiwan. China had no navy and no major air force to contend with the U.S. defense of the island province of Formosa. (The Chinese Mig-17’s the Chinese used in Korea came from the Soviet Union). China was in no position to challenge the United States except when MacArthur sent the United Nations directly up to the Yalu River that separated North Korea from China and the Chinese may have felt there was no choice but to invade, the confrontation between the Vietnamese and the Americans. Also the result of the Americans invading the country after having refused to honor an honest election in South Vietnam, as had been agreed upon when the French left.
Commentators see a different matchup in the current situation. China is about to overtake the United States as the major economic power in the world. The two countries have similar land masses but the United States has 330 million people while China has 1.4 billion people and so outmatches the United States just as the United States outranked the collective economies and numbers of Japan and Germany and so the Axis was likely to be defeated. Moreover, add to the Americans the aforesaid mention of the English speaking peoples and even the European Union, including France, which, push come to shove, would line up with the United States. So the democracies would outweigh the Chinese and the Russians, the Africans, the Latin Americans and the Africans irrelevant, with India on the side of the West but biding its time to avoid a nuclear threat.
But you never know what will happen with the original lineups. A few offensive victories by Robert E. Lee might have all of us still whistling Dixie and, probably, a continuing Jim Crow system, even if the slaves had been freed. We might be speaking Russian or German. A war is always a gamble and we haven’t won a significant war since Korea. And nuclear opposition would have to do with arsenals already available rather than take time to develop weapons because of economic and organizational power accomplished over time. It would have to do with maneuvering in time tight quarters where anything might happen. Let’s hope that this juncture of the French submarines is evolutionary rather than warlike, a matter of economic dickering between allies on military contracts rather than a prelude to war. It only portends that the English Channel is deeper than the Atlantic and is becoming even more so, the English people from Kent west going to Seoul, both South Korea and Japan having adopted the American model, and down to New Zealand and up past Alaska. The reordering of nations is a long standing phenomenon while a nuclear war would not be.
Joe Biden, as I have said before, is clear if not original. He has conventional Liberal views on climate change, voting rights, and the extension of economic entitlements and wants jobs, jobs and more jobs. He is also very clear about foreign policy. He sees Afghanistan as irrelevant. What matters, as he said in the United Nations today, and what he has repeatedly reiterated, is that there is a competition between the authoritarian countries and the democratic ones, the line up similar to the nuclear standoff that is developing in the next generation. I hope this competition is taken to be symbolic and political and cultural and structural rather than a non-metaphorical war.