This article appears in the October 1, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
[Print version of this article]
JACQUES CHEMINADE
The AUKUS Submarines:
An Affront, an Opportunity To Pull Ourselves Together
The following is a translation of the statement issued by Jacques Cheminade, president of the French political party, Solidarité & Progrès, on September 17.
If one does not react to an affront and seize the opportunity to rise up, one is condemned to a contemptible submission.
France must react by changing its policy orientation faced with the intervention by the United States and the United Kingdom to break France’s “contract of the century” with Australia. Not only have these three countries betrayed our trust, but they did so without having officially forewarned us.
Thus, American President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and his opposite number Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, appear together in a video conference [on September 15] with the satisfied smiles of those who believe they are attacking people weaker than themselves, to announce their plans.
This is a good opportunity to prove them wrong, by getting to the bottom of things.
Their crime is in the context of AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the creation of a strategic and nuclear partnership against China in the Indo-Pacific area. The Anglo-Saxon countries seem to understand nothing of what has just happened, despite their Five Eyes [the intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the United States], after the NATO debacle in Afghanistan. And to not understand that continuing the policy of permanent confrontation and cold war, to the detriment of their enemies, their allies, and ultimately their own people and nations, will only lead to a much worse disaster: the destruction of each and every nation’s economic capacity with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the risk of a conflict in which humanity would annihilate itself in monstrous destruction.
While I do not want to fall into the trap of quoting Charles de Gaulle every time a major challenge for our country arises, by his words of March 18, 1964, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) that, “The fact that will dominate our future is the unity of our universe,” he also addresses us, saying: “One cause, that of man; a necessity, that of world progress and, consequently, aid to all the countries that wish to develop; a single destiny, that of peace, are, for our species, the very conditions of its life.” I would add today, of its survival.
What initiatives should we take, here and now? France can well provide an example by breaking with the Atlanticism that has proven its nefarious character, clothing itself in a war-like madness propelled forward by nothing other than its own shadow. France must stop playing the “Indo-Pacific” card, which, without China, will only be played against itself and Russia. France need take note that NATO and the Lancaster House Franco-British treaties have lost all meaning. France will have to finally present to the people and nations of the world its own proper raison d’être: a policy of peace through mutual development, a policy beyond the very weight of a handful of submarines. France can instead put itself at the forefront of the fight for a new world economic, financial, and monetary order and discard forever the morass of geopolitics in which every group seeks to win out over the other.
What a great opportunity we have in Afghanistan! To stop people from dying today who are deprived of everything, by organizing—whether in Afghanistan or in Niger or Mali, in Lebanon, in Syria or in Yemen or Haiti—first, humanitarian assistance to avoid the worst, then, a policy of reconstruction and systematic opening up!
To this end, the challenge is for the world’s great powers to change and move from a policy of geopolitical confrontation to a commitment to mutual development for all. France, in which this may now seem impossible—but it is all the more necessary. France is no longer considered a “great power” in statistical terms, but its greatness would be to become a mediator, a catalyst, and an inspiration to help the world get out of its mortal dilemma.
We should not weep over having been betrayed, nor denounce being “stabbed in the back,” with the impotence of those who wish to see nothing happen. Let us find the political will to change the rules of the game! The Schiller Institute has drawn up plans, in the current world situation, for development corridors that must be corridors of peace. It is in this sense that I believe in the life-saving importance of the New Silk Road. I believe that the Chinese, Russian, European, and American people can, and must, work together so that human beings can find a solution in higher terms than we are now offered by most institutions today. It is up to us to believe in this higher possibility, as General de Gaulle, the Free French and the Resistance believed in it, despite the debacle of May-June 1940. And it is up to us to fight for happier days to come, this time truly happy—in France, and in the world.
Without this leap, without running the risk of taking up the challenge, we will suffer both dishonor and war, for having not repaired, rebuilt, and reformed.
