Australia says Macron is overreacting after it signed a secret submarine deal with the US and UK: 'We didn't deface the Eiffel Tower'

• Australia scrapped a $66 billion French submarine deal in September in favor of a US-UK deal.
• Emmanuel Macron said Sunday he knew Australian PM Scott Morrison lied to him about the deal.

Australia said French President Emmanuel Macron was overreacting about its scrapped submarine deal with France, saying: "We didn't deface the Eiffel Tower."

Relations between France and Australia blew up in September after Australia announced that it had signed a submarine deal with the US and UK, despite being preiovusly committed to a $50 billion submarine partnership with a French defense contractor.

Paris received only a few hours' notice, according to The New York Times, and, as a result, Paris recalled its ambassadors to Australia and the US.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, called the abandonment of the France-Australia deal "a stab in the back."

Speaking to a reporter at the G20 summit in Rome on Sunday, Macron said he knew that Prime Minister Scott Morrison lied to him about the deal.

"I don't think, I know," he told the Sydney Morning Herald reporter Bevan Shields.

-Bevan Shields (@BevanShields) October 31, 2021

Morrison denied lying to Macron and Barnaby Joyce, Australia's deputy prime minister, said Sunday that Macron was overreacting.

"We didn't steal an island, we didn't deface the Eiffel Tower, it was a contract," Joyce said, the Associated Press reported.

President Joe Biden expressed sympathy for Macron during a meeting in Rome on Friday, telling the French president that the US had been "clumsy" in its handling of the new submarine deal.

Macron, Morrison, and Biden will next cross paths at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow which began on Sunday.

The submarine deal between Australia, the UK, and the US - known as AUKUS - is an attempt to balance the threat posed by China.

Biden said on September 15 that the partnership would ensure "peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific over the long term."

However, Zhao Lijian, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said the following day that the partnership "seriously undermined regional peace and stability, intensified the arms race, and undermined international nonproliferation efforts."