“There was lying, there was duplicity, there was a major breach of trust.” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian did not mince words a day after the announcement of AUKUS, a new Australia-United Kingdom-United States security partnership, on Sept. 15, 2021. The new pact scrapped the submarine deal concluded between France and Australia in 2016, which had become the cornerstone of French strategy in the Indo-Pacific. Within a few days, the entire French administration — from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of the Armed Forces — was fulminating. Paris recalled its ambassadors to Canberra and Washington, a first in bilateral French-American history. Suddenly, relations between France and the United States faced a major crisis.
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