Friday, 29 October 2021 (YJC)_ US president has admitted that the US acted in a "clumsy" manner regarding the AUKUS security pact.
President Joe Biden has admitted that the US acted in a "clumsy" manner regarding the AUKUS security pact, and assured Paris that Washington does not have an older or more loyal ally than France.
Sitting alongside French President Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Rome on Friday, at their first face-to-face meeting since the AUKUS dust-up began last month, Biden insisted that he was "under the impression that France had been informed long before that the [French-Australian sub] deal would not go through."
"To use an English phrase, what we did was clumsy, not done with a lot of grace," Biden said.
The US president stressed that "there is no place in the world where we can't work together," and insisted that "we have no older, more loyal and decent ally than France."
Macron called the meeting with Biden "an important meeting" following two telephone conversations held in September and October, and stressed the need to "look ahead to the future" after agreeing to a "common effort, a political response and strengthened cooperation between the US and France."
Last month, relations between France and the United States slipped to lows unseen in decades after Washington, London and Canberra signed a security pact which robbed the French military industry of a submarine contract with Australia worth tens of billions of dollars.
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