Critical to stretch contract’s rewards

President Joe Biden’s announcement Thursday of a new deal by which the United States and Britain will help Australia build at least eight nuclear-powered — but not nuclear-armed — attack submarines ranks among the bolder foreign policy strokes of recent years. This long-term transfer of highly sensitive technology means a decisive tilt by Canberra toward the United States in the competition with Beijing as well as a major boost in military capability on the pro-U.S. side of the regional balance.

Unsurprisingly, the Global Times, a Chinese government newspaper, accused the United States of “losing its mind trying to rally its allies against China.” But in fact, the news represents strong and overdue pushback against both Beijing’s economic harassment of Canberra and its broader naval bullying in the Indo-Pacific region.

Precisely because it is such a departure from the status quo, however, the “AUKUS” deal creates risks as well as benefits. The former must be minimized if the latter are to be maximized. First, the United States must assuage France, which was furious at both Washington and Canberra because the new deal ends a $66 billion plan for French companies to build Australia 12 diesel-powered subs. The French on Friday took the extraordinary step of recalling their ambassadors to both the United States and Australia, having earlier accused Canberra of a “stab in the back” and likened Biden’s conduct to that of his predecessor, Donald Trump. President Emmanuel Macron is plainly seething even more than he — among other European leaders — already was about having been only minimally consulted before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

French objections gloss over preexisting Australian unhappiness with France’s execution of the two countries’ sub-building arrangement, but the Biden administration should take them seriously. In moving its foreign policy focus from the Middle East toward great-power competition with China, the United States needs its transatlantic allies, of which France is arguably the most militarily capable.

The lure of “strategic autonomy” is already strong in the European Union, especially in Paris, as is the temptation to somehow straddle the U.S.-China rivalry, by preserving lucrative trade while paying lip service to human rights and security issues. And yet the E.U.’s latest Indo-Pacific strategy statement had called for a beefed-up naval presence in the region, a valuable tendency the United States may now find more difficult to encourage.

Additionally, the United States must head off any impression that its strategy in the Pacific rests only on English-speaking allies, or that it has no geoeconomic component. In that respect, the Biden administration is right to follow up the AUKUS announcement with a Sept. 24 White House meeting between President Joe Biden and the leaders of Japan and India, as well as Australia - the so-called Quad.

Also potentially impactful would be serious U.S. re-engagement with the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, involving numerous Asian and Latin American nations as well as Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

That deal promised to knit together the United States and its friends in the region, until Trump, with the support, alas, of Democrats, abandoned it. Pacific Rim countries proceeded with their own version of TPP, and now China — as part of its response to AUKUS — has applied to join. The United States needs an answer to that, too.