Emmanuel Macron faces a difficult election: his shift to the right and his pursuit of a neo-liberal agenda have lost him the center-left. He is now openly competing with Marine le Pen for the right-wing [and wrong-wing] voters ahead of the 2022 election.
Continued terrorist attacks in France and mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic have damaged his economic reformer credentials.
A year away from France’s next presidential election, President Emmanuel Macron is fighting for conservative voters, in the face of growing confidence from his
far-right far-wrong rival, Marine Le Pen.
When they have picked themselves up from their humiliation, the French will need to gather their sangfroid and confront some cruel verities.
Number one: there is no sentiment in geostrategy. The French must see there is no point in wailing about having been shoddily treated. Who ever heard of a nation short-changing its defence priorities out of not wanting to give offence? The fact is that the Australians calculated they had underestimated the Chinese threat and so needed to boost their level of deterrence. They acted with steely disregard for French concerns but, when it comes to the crunch, that is what nations do.
The
second painful truth exposed by the AUKUS affair is that the US no longer has any great interest in the outdated behemoth that is NATO. [Presumably because Biden cannot imagine that Putin could take advantage of the US's pivot away from the Atlantic.] Nor does
it the US harbour any particular loyalty to those who have stood by its side. [Vichy France?]
Gaullists in France - and President Emmanuel Macron is one of them -
dream of their country as a fully independent power, exercising its force for good thanks to a
global presence and nuclear-backed military strength. In practice, and not without considerable reserve, France has bound itself to the US-led alliance because that seemed both moral and expedient. But now the questions echo around Paris: Why did we bother? What was in it for us?
Of Macron: "And he made the effort not just with Biden - but with
tRUMP too! [And a truly nauseating spectacle, that was!] All that, and then this. No reward at all. Treated like dogs." [Canceling a contract known to besought with troubles is scarcely being like dogs. Such whiny hyperbole.]
The French will now be re-evaluating their role in NATO. Their military participation in the organisation was
suspended by De Gaulle in 1966 and only
restored by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009. There is no talk, yet, of a second withdrawal. But remember, Emmanuel Macron is the man who described NATO two years ago as "brain-dead". He will not have changed his mind.
The third harsh truth is that there is no obvious other way for France to fulfil its global ambitions. The lesson of the last week is that France by itself is too small to make much of a dent in strategic affairs. Every four years the Chinese build as many ships as there are in the entire French fleet. When it came to the crunch, the Australians preferred to be close to a superpower, not a minipower.
