[curionav]

Politics plays a significant role here:

* next year a new presidential election will take place in France

* Macron may use this contract cancellation as an opportunity to decrease France participation in NATO (technically it could leave the integrated command) as De Gaulle did before him.

This would allow him to capture more votes from the right as he would appears as a strong leader then, acting in continuity with General de Gaulle...

France can not go out of NATO, the alliance with all its drawbacks is just too important for its own defense.

This contract cancellation may end up being in the best interest of both Australia and France:

* Australia changed its mind in the course of the last years regarding what types of submarines it really needs.

* Such change of perspective affected the partnership in between both countries, which could have escalated into a costly commercial dispute where Australia would have acted in bad faith to prevent the French delivering what they did not want anymore.

There are tension in the Asia-Pacific regions in between the US and China, and France like other Europeans countries are too far from home to take a part in this.

[WastingMyTime89]

> France can not go out of NATO, the alliance with all its drawbacks is just too important for its own defense.

France could. It has maintained a strategy of independence regarding its own defense. France has its own nukes, its own nuclear submarines, designs and operates its own fighters, has a nuclear powered aircraft carrier and has some limited capacity of projection. France has no American troops stationed on its soild and apart from the catapults of the carrier, none of their technologies come from the USA.

France has one of the lowest public opinion on NATO in the EU. I think France would be very much in favor of sidelining NATO for a EU force. The issue is the others members of the EU particularly in the east.

> France like other Europeans countries are too far from home to take a part in this.

France has mutiple territories in the Pacitic including New Caledonia which has a border with Australia.

[mmarq]

France, like any other western country, UK included, is heavily dependent on the USA for defence. France’s low opinion of NATO is part of a broader delusional weltanschauung which sees France as an economic and military superpower. It is staged in a parallel universe where the 19th century never ended and the Franco-Prussian war never happened.

[WastingMyTime89]

> France, like any other western country, UK included, is heavily dependent on the USA for defence. France’s low opinion of NATO is part of a broader delusional weltanschauung which sees France as an economic and military superpower.

No, it definitely is not. France defense is entierely built around its hability to launch a nuclear strike. Officialy the doctrine hasn't changed much since the fifties. France maintains the mean to destroy an unspecified number (it was estimated to be at least ten in the fifties) of cities in any country of the world which makes invading France strategically unsound in terms of cost.

France is not the UK. It has little illusion regarding its overall projection power or economic importance. No one in France thinks France is a superpower. That doesn't mean the French view themselves as impotent or insignificant. France remains a modern economy and a regional power which is quite proud of its culture and heritage and thinks it can influence its neighbors and allies for the best in an union which is large enough to stand on its own and defend its own values in an increasingly multipolars world.

From a French point of view, the EU shouldn't have to align itself with the USA or China to exist safely. If that means making concessions to Germany and the northern countries when it comes to how the economy should work and accepting long negociations in Brussels to reach agreements then so be it. That's the price of being an union and it's better than the alternative.