Sensemaker: Submarine warfare

What just happened

UK energy companies asked for state-backed loans to avoid going out of business because of soaring wholesale gas prices (more below).
Olivia Colman won an Emmy for her portrayal of the Queen in The Crown.
Iran’s top nuclear scientist was killed by Israeli agents with an AI machine gun, a New York Times investigation into the 2020 assassination concluded.

Sometime in the next few days Joe Biden will pick up the phone to Emmanuel Macron. It will be awkward. France and the US have been allies since 1789. Benjamin Franklin was a founding father and the first American ambassador to Paris. Now Macron has withdrawn his ambassador from DC over a cancelled submarine contract – and much more than that. France is reeling from what it sees as a catastrophic breach of trust that will force it to rethink its place in Nato and the world.

The contract was for France to build 12 new attack submarines to help the Australian navy face down China in the South China Sea and the western Pacific. Australia gave Paris only a few hours’ notice last week that it was scrapping the deal for American nuclear alternatives. France is furious.

How bad is it? At least as bad as the rift over Iraq in 2003. The key reference point is the G7 in Cornwall in June. Twice photographers snapped Macron and Biden in warm and intimate exchanges. The body language was all about squeezing Boris Johnson out of the picture. Now Macron knows Biden knew all along that the US was going to replace France as Australia’s $60 billion submarine supplier, and wasn’t saying, and was going to do it in a new alliance with Britain as well as Oz, called Aukus.

Key phrases: Stab in the back, lying, duplicity, contempt, crime, treason. These word choices (by Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, and Jean-Pierre Thébault, the French ambassador to Australia, also headed home) are not easily walked back. France’s ambassador to London has not been recalled but the UK has been relegated in Paris to American vassal status.

Take a step back and it looks even worse: a bold French bid for a geostrategic role in the Indo-Pacific independent of its membership of Nato and the EU has been torn up and thrown in the bin by les Anglos. Biden’s position on the same part of the political spectrum as Macron counted for nothing, nor did the fluent French and Parisian background of his top diplomat, Tony Blinken. France will be reconsidering its place in Nato, and Macron’s frustration with Johnson over Brexit – already acute – may now harden into an idée fixe.

So is this all about security? That’s what Australia and the US say. The American-designed nuclear subs on offer can go further and faster than those France was building, and both countries take China’s growing naval power extremely seriously. China is building warships faster than any other country on earth and has said it will take Taiwan by force if necessary. But see also the tech notes below.

Will Macron get over it? He’ll have to. He doesn’t want to look petulant internationally, but domestically he needs to fume for a while to show he isn’t taking this humiliation lightly and to make sure Australia pays top euro in compensation for the cancelled contract. The next French presidential election is next year.

What is Aukus anyway? It’s the love child of an exploratory phone call last winter from Canberra to London about nuclear submarines, seized upon by Johnson as the potential cornerstone of a new alliance to showcase his post-Brexit global Britain halfway round the world. It’s also the most concrete military manifestation yet of the “Anglosphere” – a concept enthusiastically promoted by some Brexiters as a monoglot alternative to broader international cooperation. It serves all three members by…

handily promoting the UK to America’s principle European ally in the western Pacific;
giving the Pentagon something less depressing than to talk about than Afghanistan;
giving Australia access to a whole new category of naval hardware.

That said…

Tech notes that tend to undermine the Australian position that this was not personal towards France include:

France builds nuclear subs too. This is not surprising given its world-leading position in domestic nuclear power generation, and in fact Brazil operates a French-built nuclear sub. Sources tell Sensemaker the boats being built for Australia were Rubis class submarines that come in conventionally-powered and nuclear-powered versions. So if the longer range and staying power that nuclear propulsion affords was all Australia was after, France could have obliged.

Ditto silence. The diesel-electric subs France was building are quieter than nuclear ones even when charging – that is, when the diesel generators are charging their batteries. When on batteries only they are almost completely silent, which is never the case for a nuclear sub. The catch is battery-only range, which is about two days.

Biden is continuing Obama’s pivot towards Asia. France worries that this amounts to a pivot away from Europe. It shouldn’t be. Another Obama principle was that presidents should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Google surrenders
Paging Sundar Pichai. Please rethink your Russia strategy. Russian opposition groups led by the imprisoned Alexei Navalny were using your technology to help voters in this weekend’s parliamentary elections identify candidates genuinely opposed to the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. Moscow pressured you to block access to the app in question and you caved. Navalny et al then made the same information available on a Google doc and you blocked access to that too. Yes, you have your local staff to consider, and they were reportedly facing the threat of arrest. But you have leverage too. Join us in the real world where democracy is under mortal threat and you, more perhaps than anyone alive, are actually in a position to help. (United Russia won.)

Private orbit
Without wishing to add to SpaceX’s free publicity for the sake of it, it’s worth noting what just happened in orbit. The four-person crew that took off last week and splashed down ($) yesterday off Florida was the first in the history of space travel to make it to space proper and stay there with no government input in the planning, justification or execution. Regulators had to clear the Falcon booster and its Dragon spacecraft as safe, but that was it. There was no taxpayer-subsidised stay in the International Space Station; no Nasa research as a pretext. It has taken 60 years for spaceflight to reach this state of independence, which the Wright brothers achieved for regular powered flight the moment they left the ground. Whether the first humans to depart for Mars do so with a government’s blessing or backing is an increasingly fascinating question.

Breast cancer drug
New hope for about a fifth of women diagnosed with breast cancer: the AstraZeneca drug Enhertu has been found to halt progression of the disease in three quarters of patients even when their cancer has spread to other parts of the body. Enhertu is appropriate only for patients whose cancer produces the HER2 protein, and so far has been used only for patients whose cancer has already metastasised. But in recent trials it was roughly twice as effective as another drug, Kadcyla, raising the prospect of it being used earlier, rather than as a last resort. Analysts told the Times the drug could bring AstraZeneca sales in the “high single-digit billions of dollars”.

Silent ocean
Dozens of barrels of the deadly pesticide DDT have been found off the coast of California, still leaking decades after they were dumped there. The team that found them said there could be half a million barrels in all. DDT was used as an anti-malarial during the war, and afterwards as a pesticide. In 1948 the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller won a Nobel prize for discovering its dual use. But it builds up in the food chain and has since been found to poison fish and birds and – in some studies – to raise the risk of certain cancers in humans. It’s extremely stable, takes generations to break down and is still present at 40 times safe limits in the waters where it has been found leaking under 3,000 feet of water off Catalina Island, west of Long Beach. The LA Times has a compelling scrollable account.

Gazprom squeeze?
Four small UK energy firms are expected to go bust this week because their fixed tariffs are forcing them to subsidise customers as wholesale gas prices soar because of a global imbalance between demand and supply. A fifth, Bulb, which is the sixth biggest energy retailer in the country, is seeking an emergency bailout in crisis talks today with the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng. Two key numbers: £1,600 – the cost of heating an average UK home for a year at current gas prices; and £1,277 – the current cap on what an energy firm can charge, after a recent £139 increase. One possible explanation: a gentle squeeze on supply by Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, which insists it has fulfilled all its obligations but has refused to auction top-up supplies which it could easily provide through its vast network of east-west pipelines. Why might it be doing this? To force Germany to start using the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic, which is now complete but not yet pumping gas.

UK:
20/09 – new foreign secretary Liz Truss meets Iranian foreign minister in New York, 21/09 – Chelsea Flower Show begins in London; BBC executives speak at Commons select committee session on work of corporation, 22/09 – Covid vaccine roll-out for 12 to 15 year olds begins; Chris Whitty speaks at Commons select committee session on vaccination of children; Joseph Kelly appears in court charged with sending grossly offensive messages after death of Captain Sir Tom Moore; inquest takes place into death of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, 23/09 – Cop 26 president Alok Sharma takes part in Washington Post discussion, 24/09 – Boris Johnson speaks at UN General Assembly; High Court deadline for Prince Andrew’s lawyers to challenge legal claim made by Virginia Giuffre against Duke of York; former MP Jared O’Mara appears in court charged with fraud, 25/09 – Labour Party annual conference begins in Brighton

World:
20/09 – Jewish holiday of Sukkot begins at sunset; Canada general election; arraignment takes place in Los Angeles in case of Harvey Weinstein, charged with sexual assault, 21/09 – Jair Bolsonaro and Joe Biden among those set to speak at UN General Assembly, 22/09 – September equinox; Joe Biden hosts global Covid-19 vaccine summit, 23/09 – Nike releases first-quarter results; quarterly meeting of European Central Bank General Council, 24/09 – Ryder Cup golf competition begins in US; Apple iPhone 13 goes on sale, 25/09 – Iceland parliamentary elections; Donald Trump holds rally in Georgia, 26/09 – Angela Merkel steps down as German chancellor; Switzerland holds referendum on legalising same-sex marriage