U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said in a French television interview that President Joe Biden “had not been aware” of the French's anger over its exclusion from a security partnership, known as AUKUS, between the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

The AUKUS deal, discussed and finalized by the Americans alongside their British and Australian counterparts, involved the sharing of highly sensitive nuclear propulsion technology with Australia, including providing the Indo-Pacific nation with eight nuclear-powered submarines.

The finalized deal, announced last month, nullified a submarine contract between France and Australia that would have provided Australia with only conventional-style submarines — the cost of which ranged anywhere from roughly $35 billion to up to $90 billion, according to conflicting reports.

France reacted angrily for being left out of the partnership, going so far as to make the unprecedented move of pulling its ambassador from the U.S. The country's minister of foreign affairs called it a “C'est vraiment un coup dans le dos,” which roughly translates into “a stab in the back.”

Kerry said in the interview Monday with BFMTV that Biden “literally had not been aware of what had transpired," when he was asked by French journalists if he told Biden it was not the right move.

I don’t want to go into the details of it, but suffice it to say that the President, my president is very committed to strengthening the relationship and making sure that this is a small event of the past and moving on to the much more important future,” Kerry said.

The European Commission was also shell shocked with the deal. “The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the ‘AUKUS’ deal between the U.S., Australia and the UK are being described by some as a ‘wake-up call for Europe’,” the commission said in a Sept. 21 news release.

EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was appointed to her current position by the French government under President Emmanuel Macron, said earlier this month that it was “probably time to pause and reset our E.U.-U.S. relationship.”

Kerry said in the interview on French TV that “President Biden looks forward to meeting with President Macron,” and that our ability to work with France “is much, much stronger than any of these differences of the last few days.” Kerry added that he’s “absolutely confident that the bigger issues we have to work on,” including nuclear weapons, cyber warfare, climate change, economic dislocation of the world and the challenges of the less developed world, “can’t get lost in a, you know, a momentary event that, um, I think we will get past very quickly.”