France tries to delay EU-Australia trade deal amid Aukus fallout | France

France is seeking to enlist European Union support to delay a planned EU-Australia trade deal, as part of a plan to punish Australia for what it regards as serial deceit and subterfuge by Canberra before it cancelled the contract for 12 attack-class French submarines.

The A$90bn (£48bn) submarine contract was the centrepiece of French-Australian cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, but the Australians have instead opted to form a US-UK-Australia pact dubbed Aukus, and build eight nuclear-powered submarines likely to be delivered between 2030 and 2040.

The EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, weighed into the diplomatic row on Monday, saying France had been treated unacceptably by the US, Australia and the UK and that many questions remained unanswered. EU foreign ministers were due to discuss the crisis on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York.

The next round of EU-Australia trade talks – the 12th – are due next month, and it remains to be seen how deeply other EU states wish to become embroiled in the fallout from the French loss of a commercial contract.

The Australian trade minister, Dan Tehan, denied that the security row would spill into the planned free trade deal with Australia’s third largest trading partner. “It’s just very much business as usual when it comes to our negotiations on that free trade agreement,” he said. “Everything points to the fact that it’s in both the European Union and Australia’s interests that we continue that FTA.”

France has recalled its ambassadors to Washington and Canberra in an unprecedented protest and its armed forces minister, Florence Parly, currently in Mali, has postponed a planned meeting this week with the British defence secretary, Ben Wallace. A planned phone call between the US president, Joe Biden, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, requested by Biden has not yet been put into diaries.

Macron, facing re-election next year, was remaining silent about the commercial and diplomatic humiliation inflicted on his country, which has effectively left the French strategy for the Indo-Pacific, based on cooperation with Australia and India, in tatters.

But lawyers acting for the French government and the state-backed Naval Group are already preparing a massive compensation claim that will turn on the flexibility and break clauses written into the contract first signed in 2016.

Other French options include selling nuclear-powered submarines to India, or persuading the US, Australia and the UK to let them join the Aukus security pact, and even play a role in building the submarines.

Boris Johnson insisted that the pact, due to extend beyond submarine manufacture to AI and robotics, was not intended to be exclusionary. “The UK and France have a very, very important, indestructible relationship, and of course we will be talking to all our friends about how to make the Aukus pact work so that it is not exclusionary, not divisive, and it really does not have to be that way,” he said.

He claimed the pact was just a sensible way to share certain technologies. “But that does not mean in any way mean that we wish to be adversarial to anyone else.”

Ben Wallace,…