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In their 2022 article “Moving on After AUKUS: Working with France in the Indo-Pacific,” Gesine Weber and Edgar Tam argued that despite AUKUS roiling France’s relationship with the United States, France had meaningful contributions to offer to the Indo-Pacific region and the non-nuclear aspects of the AUKUS partnership. Three years on, we asked them to reassess their argument.Image: Présidence de la RépubliqueIn your 2022 article “Moving on After AUKUS: Working with France in the Indo-Pacific,” you argued that the timing of AUKUS overshadowed the European Union’s Indo-Pacific strategy that France had lobbied for extensively. Looking back now, was this timing coincidental or reflected deeper strategic miscalculations by Washington about European priorities in the region?It was less about strategic miscalculations than about strategic misunderstanding. The launch of AUKUS occurred in the post-Brexit context, at a time when Europeans were paying more strategic attention to the Indo-Pacific. But most importantly, the launch of AUKUS demonstrated a profound lack of understanding of France’s position in and approach towards the region. Paris has historically dedicated the most time and attention among all European states to the region, especially since Macron’s Garden Island speech in 2018, and has a territorial presence in the region. AUKUS was very problematic in two regards: Not only did it undermine one of the key pillars of France’s strategy — namely a component of the partnership with Australia — but it also pulled away political attention from the launch of the European Union’s Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, which France had extensively lobbied for. Even four years after the start of AUKUS, it is hard to overestimate the extent to which the launch of the pact, and the fact that coordination between the United States and France was almost non-existent, has shaken French diplomats and sparked a full-blown trans-Atlantic