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?????? Hasn't usa always asked europe to pay more money into nato and they always don't?
Americans didn't give a shit when it was just european despots imprisoning their own people for memes. But now that they want to fuck with memes on American platforms, Americans are pissed.
Look at AUKUS (where the Americans and the UK undermined French submarine sales), or the recent Palantir contract in the UK (where the US undermined UK AI development). America wants cheaper, more easily defended vassals, not peers. Paying for a standing army (controlled by the Americans, natch) is expensive and doesn't really have any use except when the Russians are actually literally invading, which isn't really a concern for most of Europe at the moment since the rich nations who fund the thing are on the opposite side of the continent. Development is where the money, influence and power projection is, and the Americans guard it jealously.
None of which is to say that the Europeans don't also shoot them/ourselves in the foot by working hard to destroy their own industries and repel investment at all costs.
As I understand it, the French submarine sale deal wound up being... pretty horrendous, cost-wise. Granted, AUKUS may also wind up being do, but the French deal was not exactly an amazing bargain for Australia.
I’ve heard different stories from different people. The French broadly say that the Australians kept changing their mind on the specs they wanted, the Aussies say the French were costing too much and taking too long. I haven’t done a deep dive myself.
My understanding is that AUKUS happened because the Americans and the UK decided to offer nuclear technology which is usually verboten, basically to split off Australia from France.
Have you ever heard of a major French arms deal that fell through that the French admitted to being the cause of its failure?
At the risk of being flippant, I can't remember any deal that fell through when one of the parties admitted to being the cause of its failure.
There are entire volumes of 'self'-critiques of the problems in American foreign military sales practices that undercut American competitiveness below what it 'could' be. The American arms deal failures tend to be in the form of 'the other party went elsewhere rather than sign a deal' rather than 'the deal fell apart after being signed,' but there's no shortage of Americans placing the blame on the American side for partners making arms deals with countries like China.
Not publicly, though, surely? Not when the failure of the deal is extremely embarrassing?
Very publicly. You can google 'issues with American FMS' to get entire thinktank and policy reports on systemic issues that would be moritifying admissions from other states.
Again, the American failure state tends to be 'people go elsewhere rather than sign the deal' rather than 'the deal already signed falls through.' But a potential deal falling through before it is signed is what leads to, say, Turkey buying the Russian S-400 air defense system, because it wasn't getting traction for more NATO-compatible air defense systems, which in turn led to Turkey being suspended from the F-35 system, which is its own saga.
Or the purchase by Middle Eastern american allies of Chinese c-UAS systems, instead of American equivalents, since the US was prioritizing US and European ally orders over Arabs- an understandable choice on both ends, but American critics (when they can be found) will blame the US prioritization rather than the Arab need and urgency.
Or the current-year saga of various European, especially French, lobbying to lock the US out of the European arms market in the European rearmament spending. This is done with the rather popular, and not undeserved, line of argument that Trump-like Americans might suspend agreed-upon weapon deliveries to pressure European states into security concessions... because that is exactly what Trump did to the Ukrainians after the white house summit fracas, and what parts of the DoD tried to do (though that was a rogue administrative power play that got rolled back hard). A lot of Americans, let alone others, will place more blame on the American side than the Europeans, regardless of other arms trade frictions.
Or the displacement of the US by China as Pakistan's military aid patron. A quick google search suggests China now provides something like 80% of Pakistan's military imports. While there is a considerable number of Americans who view this as a 'good riddance' dynamic, when someone wants to criticize that sort of dynamic, it tends to be from the American-hypoagent 'Who Lost Pakistan?' as opposed to 'those Pakistanis are so unreasonable.'
Now, none of these may count as 'extremely embarrassing' to you. But that's a social framing that itself may indicate an implicit bias of sorts. It's not extremely embarrassing for the Americans criticizing other Americans for an arms deal failure, because they tend to come from a position of 'but if it had been us, we would have done differently and succeeded.'
And that can easily include 'well, we would have honored the original contract instead of trying to change it after the initial agreement was publicly signed,' if the non-American side claims that the deal fell through because of back-end meddling to change the contract.
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