Coercive Diplomacy

In 1914, concerned about the High Seas Fleet and worried that Turkey would join the Central Powers, the British government seized Sultan Osman I and Resadiye, a pair of dreadnoughts under construction in British yards. These battleships would become HMS Agincourt and HMS Erin, serving in the Grand Fleet until the end of World War I.

In 1980, out of concern about the direction of Iranian Revolution, the United States decided to void a sale of four advanced Spruance-class destroyers to Tehran. These destroyers became the Kidd class, serving in the USN with distinction until their eventual sale to Taiwan, where they remain in service.

And so this is certainly convenient timing:

A French-built helicopter carrier Vladivostok has set sail from the French Atlantic port of Saint-Nazaire on its first sea trial. The warship is part of a 1.2-billion-euro deal ($1.6-billion) that marked the biggest-ever sale of NATO weaponry to Moscow. The Vladivostok is on track to be delivered by the last quarter of this year, said spokesman Emmanuel Gaudez of DCNS, a state-backed naval shipbuilder manufacturing the warships along with South Korean-controlled shipbuilder STX. A sister ship, the Sevastopol is scheduled to be delivered about a year later. 

The two carriers will be delivered to the Russian Pacific Fleet in 2015 and 2016. Under the contract, France shall build each Mistral ship within 36 months. The first of them, the Vladivostok, is to arrive in St. Petersburg from Saint-Nazaire, France, in December 2014. The vessel will receive its additional Russian systems at the Severnaya Verf shipyard in St. Petersburg, and then be handed over to Russia’s Pacific Fleet in November 2014.

For various reasons, a suspension of delivery is unlikely to happen. The French are committed economically to the deal, which has supported French shipbuilding. However, as the first ship is nearly complete and the second well under way, some of the French stakeholders (primarily labor)have already been appeased. With the recent displays of Franco-US friendship, and of Franco-US cooperation in Africa, I have to wonder whether the French could be convinced to delay or suspend delivery as a response to the Russian conquest of Crimea. And especially given that the second ship is named Sevastopol, the optics of transferring LHAs to the Russian Navy right now are genuinely terrible.