France Withdraws From UK Defence Summit Over Submarine Deal

France has withdrawn from the proposed talks with the United Kingdom over a new security deal between Australia sealed with Britain and the United States.

Gatekeepers News reports that Paris is unhappy after Australia suddenly pulled out of a 2016 contract worth at least $66bn (£48bn) to build nuclear-powered submarines and instead, struck a new deal with the UK and the U.S.

Although, UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has assured France that there is nothing to worry about concerning the deal, France’s Defence Minister Florence Parly’s meeting with UK Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, which is scheduled to hold in London this week, has been called off.

A former British ambassador to France, Lord Ricketts, who was billed to co-chair the two days meetings, confirmed that the meeting has been “postponed to a later date”.

French Foreign Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian has described Australia’s new deal as a “stab in the back” that constitutes “unacceptable behaviour between allies and partners”.

Also, French President Emmanuel Macron has ordered the recall of the French ambassadors to Washington and Canberra.

Britain PM, Johnson who spoke on a flight to New York, where he will take part in the UN General Assembly, said France should not “worry” about the alliance, insisting that Anglo-French relations were “ineradicable”.

Johnson said Britain and France had a “very friendly relationship”, which he described as being of “huge importance”.

“Our love of France is ineradicable,” he told reporters.

“Aukus is not in any way meant to be zero-sum, it’s not meant to be exclusionary. It’s not something that anybody needs to worry about and particularly not our French friends.”

In its defence, Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison rejected accusations that the country had lied, saying France should have been aware it was prepared to break the deal.

Morrison on Sunday said: “Ultimately, this was a decision about whether the submarines that were being built, at great cost to the Australian taxpayer, were going to be able to do a job that we needed it to do when they went into service and our strategic judgement based on the best possible of intelligence and defence advice was that it would not.”