Looks like a case of going with a supplier that best meets their needs

 France's rage over Australia choosing the US over France to supply some attack submarines has receive abundant coverage. France has recalled its US ambassador. It's caused difficulties with France's relations with Britain as well.

But according to the Australians, it came down to a question of how to best meet their security needs:

France would have known Australia had “deep and grave concerns” that a submarine fleet the French were building would not meet Australian needs, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Sunday after the contract's cancellation set off a diplomatic crisis.

France accused Australia of concealing its intentions to back out of the 90 billion Australian dollar ($66 billion) contract for French majority state-owned Naval Group to build 12 conventional diesel-electric submarines.

President Joe Biden revealed last week a new alliance including Australia and Britain that would deliver an Australian fleet of at least eight nuclear-powered submarines.

Morrison blamed the switch on a deteriorating strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific. He has not specifically referred to China’s massive military buildup, which has gained pace in recent years.

“The capability that the Attack class submarines were going to provide was not what Australia needed to protect our sovereign interests,” Morrison said.

“They would have had every reason to know that we have deep and grave concerns that the capability being delivered by the Attack class submarine was not going to meet our strategic interests and we have made very clear that we would be making a decision based on our strategic national interest,” he added, referring to the French government.

France responded to the contract cancellation, which Morrison has said will cost his government at least AU$2.4 billion ($1.7 billion), by recalling its ambassadors from Australia and the United States.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Saturday denounced what he called the “duplicity, disdain and lies” surrounding the sudden end of the contract and said France was now questioning the strength of the alliance.

The fact that the switch results in lost opportunity for many French businesses just doesn't stack up against these concerns, from Australia's perspective. It would be a shame if a major rift in the Western world came down to a mater of protectionism.

Saturday roundup

Incredibly powerful column at Townhall today by Ryan Bomberg entitled, "I Am the 1 Percent t Used to Justify 100 Percent of Abortions."

I am that 1 percent. 

My biological mother was raped, yet she rejected the violence of abortion. I was adopted and loved instead. I’m not the “residue of the rapist”, as Senator Vivian Davis Figures described those like me who were conceived in rape. I’m a human being with equal worth to anyone planned. I couldn’t control the circumstances of my conception. Could you, senator? 

As an adoptee who grew up wanted and loved in a multiracial family of 15 and as an adoptive father with four children, I’m here to say there’s another side of this painful issue. There are others like me who were conceived in the violence of rape, like my friend Rebecca Kiessling, an attorney and passionate defender of life. There’s the former Miss Pennsylvania, Valerie Gatto, Trayvon Clifton, Monica Kelsey, Jim Sable, Pam Stenzel, and many more whose stories offer a different perspective than mainstream media’s myopic pro-abortion view. There are women who became mothers from rape who courageously chose life, like Jennifer Christie, Liz Carl, and Rebekah Berg. 

Incisive essay by Dan McCarthy at The American Mind entitled "The Poisonous Religion of the Ruling Class."  A taste:

Multiculturalism is a substitute for organic identities connected to neighborhoods, religion, and class: real friends, places, and economic conditions. The group identities with which multiculturalism is concerned are actually ideological identities in racial, cultural, or sexual disguise. Evidence of this is to be seen in the fact that white liberals are more devoted to multiculturalism than the non-elite members of any minority typically are.
Multiculturalism means more in the faculty lounge than it does on the streets, and its evangelists who proclaim the faith and condemn heretics hail overwhelmingly from the ranks of the educated. Multiculturalism unites and militarizes the members of an educated class whose education chiefly concerns their own fitness to rule—on account of their greater enlightenment and moral sensitivity, of course, but also their recognition of the fitness to rule in other rulers. They respect the right idols, the right kinds of authority for their class.
Multiculturalism is a class ideology, but not in a purely economic sense: it binds a group that is distinct in its position within the social hierarchy together and provides it a common spirit. It is the religion of the ruling class. Google provided a telling illustration of this when it tried to suppress the Claremont Institute’s criticism of multiculturalism. Google is not weak, oppressed, or lacking in power, wealth, and social standing—just the opposite.
The U.S. has a highly democratic society with an expansive view of social equality. A religion or group ideology that emphasizes hierarchy is therefore bound to provoke outrage. Multiculturalism avoids that by being a belief system which Google executives and university administrators, government officials and millionaire celebrities alike can enforce in the name of the weak, rather than a transparent assertion of their own social superiority. More specifically, multiculturalism uses racial and sexual identities as weapons in a war against class enemies: the historically guilt-ridden Protestant middle, which remains guilt-ridden whether or not it’s Protestant anymore; the uneducated (and therefore deplorably uncatechized); and the dwindling number of elite Americans who remember what self-governing liberty is supposed to be.
Beyond supplying a mythology of justification for power and camouflaging class warfare, multiculturalism, crucially, identifies an enemy. The enemy is white, Christian and Jewish, heterosexual, “cisgendered,” bourgeois, and consciously or habitually conservative. In short, the enemy is what were once the country’s mainstream and typically majority identities—and in fact, still are. This definition of the majoritarian enemy makes sense if multiculturalism is understood as a small and elite class’s effort to assert and maintain power over a larger populace that would otherwise resist its rule.

Well, well. Walmart announces price increases.

Vodkapundit observes that, for all the favorable numbers for Joe Biden, his fierce opponents in the Democrat party are awfully vocal about finding him unacceptable.

Steven Hayward at Power Line reports on an eye-opener from Down Under.

Australia held a national election yesterday which all of the polls predicted for weeks would be won handily by the Labour Party. The ruling Liberal Party (which is the conservative party in Australian politics because they still understand the historic meaning of liberalism) has been in office for over a decade, and had struggled as ruling parties often do when they grow stale in office. In fact leadership fights within the Liberal Party had left it in chaos heading into the election campaign. The pollsters and the media called it an “unlosable election” for Labour.

But in a stunning upset, the Liberal Party has won the election. It sounds a lot like our 2016 election, no? Apparently lots of voters told the pollsters one thing, but voted differently in the voting booth. (Update: Keep in mind that Australia has mandatory voting—you get fined something like $50 if you don’t cast a ballot—so this upset can’t be a polling error, since polling ought to be simpler in such circumstances. The upset can’t be because of a sampling or weighting error as sometimes happens in our elections. It means lots of people really did lie to pollsters. Good for them.)

The most interesting angle to this upset is that the Labour Party went all-in on climate change.  

Sounds like we should add Australia to the list - The Netherlands, Finland, and Alberta - enumerated in the post below about Western countries / provinces eschewing climate hooey.

 

Saturday roundup

The congregation of an Episcopal church in a little hamlet in the hills of southern Indiana gets played for saps:

A few days after the election of Donald Trump, a church community in Indiana was shocked to find that someone had spray-painted ugly and un-Christian things on their church.

St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom, Ind., was vandalized with Nazi slogans, anti-gay slurs, and Donald Trump graffiti on November 12, 2016 -- but it wasn't from a hateful Trump supporter.

After a six-month investigation, the Brown County prosecuting attorney’s office determined that it was the congregation’s own organist—a Hillary Clinton supporter and gay activist—who did the deed. The culprit, 26-year-old George Nathaniel Stang of Bloomington, is also the person who first reported the vandalism to police last November.

It was immediately thought to be a hate crime because the small Episcopal Church is a progressive congregation that welcomes gays. The graffiti spray painted on the church walls read “Heil Trump” and “Fag Church.”

But during their inquiries police quickly came to feel that the vandalism was done by someone familiar with the church and began looking at the crime as an inside job. After an investigation, police arrested Stang.

The church organist allegedly admitted to the crime telling police he did it because he wanted to “mobilize a movement after being disappointed in and fearful of the outcome of the national election.”

In a three-page confession entered into court documents, Stand reportedly said he was trying to spark his congregation into activism.

“I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good, even if it was a false flag,” he wrote according to court records. “To be clear my actions were not motivated by hate for the church or its congregation. I, of course, realize now, this was NOT the way to go about inspiring activism.”

Brilliant David French essay at NRO in which he examines the sociocultural cudgels that could be used to explain the death of Bob, a fictional middle-aged American with high blood pressure, a divorce, an inability to stay abreast of changes in his career field and other problems that boil down to the choices he's made in life.

Squirrel-Hair doubles down on his praise for Australia's health care system. If some of his highest-profile water-carriers had either acted like the conservatives they claimed to be or kept their populist-nationalist traps shut, we could have had Ted.

Remember those bad actors from Iran that post-America under the Most Equal Comrade released in order to sweeten the nuke deal? Well, the House Oversight Committee is going to investigate the matter.

Leaked emails are now a feature of the French election. Whodunnit?

Perpetual adolescence, a societal problem that's been addressed at least since 2004 when Joseph Epstein wrote a Weekly Standard piece about it, followed in 2007 by Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up, is still with us. One of the handful of US Senators that could rightly be called great human beings, Ben Sasse, revisits the subject in a WSJ column called "How to Raise an American Adult." He says there are five main components to the project that parents should impart to their offspring: resist consumption, embrace the pain of work (that is, do something dirty and physically demanding even if it takes time away from the extracurricular activities the college you're applying to wants to see), connect across generations, travel meaningfully, and become truly literate.

The new administration's foreign policy so far: a mixed bag reflective of DJT's basic approach to everything

Are contours of an overall DJT administration becoming discernible?

That's a million-dollar question, and the reason goes right back to what everyone - his water-carriers, his opponents on the right, and those on the left who absolutely hate him - has acknowledged from the outset: Squirrel-Hair is not driven by a core ideological consistency.

So even when you get encouraging moves such as National Security Advisor Michael Flynn speaking plainly about Iran, particularly its latest missile test, and mentioning that the previous US administration, along with the UN, had dealt weakly with Iran, there is a problematic element:

The problem is with his performance: By issuing a warning so imprecise — in such a dramatic, public fashion — he has set himself and the United States up for either an embarrassing retreat or a risky confrontation.

Nikki Haley is off to a good start at the UN, speaking of plain speaking:

The new US ambassador to the United Nations used her inaugural statement to the international body to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine.

“I consider it unfortunate that the occasion of my first appearance is one in which I must condemn the aggressive actions of Russia,” Haley said.

“It is unfortunate because it is a replay of too many instances over many years in which United States representatives have had to do that.”

She singled out Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

The remarks may help silence critics of President Trump who have feared he’s too in sync with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“This escalation of violence must stop,” Haley warned.

But then there is the bone-headedness that presents itself when S-H himself gets into the act. The calls to Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Turnbull went badly. In particular, the conversation with Turnbull was supposed to last an hour, but was concluded in 25 minutes. He told Turnbull directly that, of all his talks with heads of state that day, that one was the worst. Also spent part of the time bragging about the magnitude of his election victory. Then tweeted afterward about how the arrangement reached with the prior administration about those refugees on the islands was "a dumb deal" - which it was, but it was a glaring case of misapplied bluntness.

Theresa May seems confident that she has convinced S-H of NATO's crucial role. We shall see. I'm not full-on skeptical, because PM May doesn't strike me as one easily given to illusory conclusions.

And this business about the White House warning Israel to stop announcing new settlements seems inconsistent with prior assurances that the Us-Israel alliance was of a special nature. Then again, the statement just said that Israel should stop announcing them.


There may not be a consistent core driving force at least yet - anything we could call a Trump Doctrine (and that may be too much to ask) - but a tone may be detectable: brash and blunt.  It's just a style that every other player on the world stage is going to have to decide how to react to.

The unsettling thing about it is that it makes predicting any dynamics among all the players vis-a-vis the Unites States rather dicey.