France and Germany are increasingly struggling to adapt to the modern world - not that you'd know it from following the UK media
Source- Daily Telegraph - 19/09/21
Imagine, for a moment, that a major new defensive alliance centred on the crucial Asia-Pacific region had just been formed without British involvement, but featuring France instead.
Now imagine the reaction of our broadcast media if a joint press conference were held between Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Australian premier Scott Morrison, launching 'Afrus' (Australia-France-United States).
Such a turn of events would surely be greeted as just the latest in a series of catastrophes attributed to Brexit. Media correspondents would flock to explain that every piece of diplomatic architecture protecting UK interests had been smashed. Twitter would swarm with blue-tick accounts pouring opprobrium on Boris Johnson and congratulating themselves on their foresight.
And to be honest, it would be hard to argue a convincing case to the contrary - being publicly sidelined by three of your most important allies, each based on a different continent, is a serious blow. In global diplomacy terms, it's the equivalent of bitchy Gretchen's immortal line from high school rom-com Mean Girls - “you can’t sit with us!".
So now let’s take a merciful step back into the real world, where this week saw the launch of Aukus (Australia-UK-US). Instead, it was France who lost a defence mega-contract and got NFI’d (Not Flipping Invited). Logic tells us that the story here must therefore be all about a first order crisis for France encompassing its identity, relevance and prestige across the free world, right?
Wrong. The BBC's top-line take talked of the UK and US suffering a “global backlash” towards their new undertaking. The entirety of the BBC argument seems to hinge on China finding the new alliance an unwelcome challenge - which is kind of its main point – and on France fuming about being out in the cold.
Even the headline of today’s follow-up report on the BBC News website implies the story is a crisis for Britain rather than for France - “Aukus: Truss defends security deal amid criticism” - though it does at least accurately report the new British Foreign Secretary’s words in the Sunday Telegraph today.
When France withdrew its ambassadors to Australia and America in protest, while leaving its ambassador to the UK in place, other media outlets soon found an alternative anti-British spin. An Elysee Palace briefing claiming this was because the UK was too insignificant a country to waste ire on went viral. “When the cooking in a restaurant is not first class, you sack the chef, not the guy who washes the dishes,” one French government source was quoted as saying.
Throughout the Brexit negotiations many UK broadcasters had a tendency to lap up and magnify negative stories about Britain emanating from EU sources. It seems old habits die hard. Yet a more rational reading of events is that Britain has done rather well to be at the heart of the new defensive alliance while also maintaining full diplomatic relations with a humiliated but still important neighbour.
And what about the idea, near-universally parroted by broadcast media correspondents, that the advent of Democrat President Biden was bound to lead to closer ties between the US and EU, while marginalising post-Brexit Britain?
In fact, here we are in 2021 hosting the G7 and COP26, for good or ill, still a permanent member of the UN security council, at the heart of Nato, a key member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing club and now part of a new triumvirate spearheading western resistance to the spread of Chinese Communist influence too.
Far from the decision to opt for national independence impeding Britain on the world stage, White House press secretary Jen Psaki implied that France being a member of the EU may have been a factor in its exclusion, telling reporters: “There are a range of partnerships that include the French and some partnerships that don’t, and they have partnerships with other countries that don’t include us.”
Despite its humiliation and its extended tantrum in response, when the dust settles France will remain the EU’s pre-eminent military power. But that is a measure of how low the EU countries have sunk in terms of international realpolitik. Germany, for instance, finds itself contemplating the fact that effectively contracting-out defence matters to its traditional ally in the EU engine room has left it way out of the loop.
Anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that the most pressing debate to come out of the Aukus controversy should be about whether the EU countries are ever going to be able to deliver a diplomatic punch equivalent to their (still-considerable) economic weight.
Our broadcast newsrooms may still push the idea of Little Britain. But in fact it is Little Europe where the real crisis lies.
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