by David Webb
It may be that the old paradigm—of politics, economics and international relations—can only be overthrown when it becomes definitively untenable. The British elite—not known for forward thinking—are likely to hold on to every sacred cow until the bitter end. These include the notions that we are part of “the West”, that the US is our ally, that it is in our interest to follow the US into every global war, that we are a functioning democracy and that our wars are for democracy and human rights too. It is dispiriting that there seems to be no way of encouraging fresh thinking. Any call for a rethink prompts instant denunciation. In the end, our leaders will be forced to change, but not without jeopardising all of our most vital national interests first. They do this in the name of so-called patriotism, and parade themselves in the newspapers every day with their unreconstructed thinking and supposed analysis.
Politics, economics and international relations are all linked, or interlinked. This is because our promotion of equality and diversity, and the related cause of mass immigration, largely reflects the influence of US “liberalism” (a questionable self-description) on our political discourse. Through our relationship with the US we have imported political causes that can be described as “globalism”—essentially the ideology of the US empire that reached its apogee in the hegemonic moment, 1991-2021 (roughly). With no strategic competitor, the US had a free hand to remodel the world. Countries like the UK that were much more closely tied into the US than most others have faithfully reproduced the entire globalist agenda. Free speech has been attacked, leaders installed with no British ancestry, housing and healthcare policy redesigned around mass—indeed, massive—immigration, with no regard for the impact on the English population, “gay marriage” and “gay adoption of children” have been introduced, transgenderism has become established in all institutions, English children in school have been aggressively taught to hate themselves and to explore their sexuality, and indeed digitally probe their own back passages from the age of six: this is in all respects the California agenda imposed on the country top down. We are told we need to defend “the West” militarily, and even prepare now for war with Russia and China, but if this what the West under US hegemony is, why defend it?
Professor Robert Tombs, a usually admirable academic and observer of events, almost peered over the edge of this issue in 2023 when he cited Lord Palmerston’s statement that a country has no permanent allies:
The recent Nato summit in Vilnius is an occasion to reflect on our place in Europe and the wider world. Lord Palmerston, one of our most effective Foreign Secretaries (and deadly enemy of the Atlantic slave trade) remarked in the House of Commons that Britain had no permanent allies and no permanent enemies, but only permanent interests. Interests we indeed have, and broadly the same as his: an orderly international system in which we can feed ourselves by trade, and support the principles of representative government and individual liberty, the raw materials of a peaceful world. But today we also have the nearest thing to permanent allies, in Nato, which the British public overwhelmingly supports. Nato was largely a British invention, the work of Ernest Bevin in 1949—perhaps Palmerston’s nearest modern equivalent. As a relatively small country, and one (until recently) with a fairly small population, we have always needed allies in time of emergency. … Yet Nato remains the bedrock of our security, and its maintenance the priority of our foreign policy. Thanks to Nato, we are free from direct military threat—as Palmerston never was, as his huge South Coast fortifications prove … now, as almost everyone agrees in principle, we must spend more to face new threats around the world.
He starts by saying a country has—and can have—no permanent allies, and immediately states that in fact Britain does have permanent allies. The idea that we should reconsider our alliances is casually rejected. He then argues we should start spending more on defence as part of this alliance. In fact, Russia and China are not military threats to the UK—a look at the map will show that. Our involvement in the Ukraine—and future involvement in the South China Sea—will be purely a matter of choice. The countries that do seek to prevent us from controlling ourselves are in fact the US and the EU countries, our supposed allies.
Britain specifically joined the Second World War to retain its independence from both Europe and America. This is clear from reading Peter Hitchens’ The Victory Delusion. Yet very quickly—after Dunkirk—it became clear that Britain had involved itself in an enterprise that would lead to the end of the British Empire, although this was not highlighted to the British population. The frontman for the war was Winston Churchill, who claimed the British Empire would last 1,000 years, a claim he cannot possibly have thought true. At a point when Britain had leverage over the United States, which was anxious to join the war and initiate its rise to global influence, Britain struck an incredibly bad deal (a habit we have not shrugged) and ended up transferring huge quantitites of gold and negotiable securities to the US in exchange for armaments. America was an “ally”, but, make no mistake, the US was fighting for its global position after the war, not Britain’s, and Britain ended up “broke” as the Americans say, and forced to abandon its empire.
The “alliance” with the US has always been a very one-sided affair: we get to attend all the summits and make approving noises while the US sets gobal policy. In previous articles, I have described this as similar to the behaviour of Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Any alliance has to be transactional. You could argue that during the Cold War it was a broadly satisfactory arrangement, as the Cold War wasn’t a real war, but that since 1991 we have been dragged into a number of military engagements with no relevance to our security. US influence has also pushed Britain into adopting multi-culturalism and mass immigration, both likely to lose us this country for good by the 2060s.
We were told during Brexit that the US had placed us at the back of the queue for trade deals. True, Donald Trump offered a deal, to which Theresa May responded by rolling her eyes—home-grown treason plays a big part in this—but the fact that other US leaders have put us at the back of the queue ought to pose questions over the alliance with the US. What do we get out of it? Joe Biden visited Northern Ireland to, insultingly, make sure we didn’t “screw around” with the Good Friday Agreement, so determined was he to undermine Brexit. Britain has got into this situation by being a needy poodle that will always beg for reassurance from the US, no matter how poorly the US is actually treating us. As US demographic policy is relentlessly anti-white and anti-WASP, that country will be “majority-minority” by the 2040s. If we are imagining we must be the key US ally for ever, we are in for a rude awakening. Why would a largely Hispanic and black America see Britain as its key ally? There is little evidence of real analysis feeding through into Britain’s foreign policy.
In April, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, described Britian and France as “natural allies”. This from a country that did its best to destroy Brexit—and was successful in doing so. He knows that British leaders will always value backslapping at summit meetings over any real national interests. If France is a natural ally, why doesn’t it oppose the Windsor Protocol governing Northern Ireland? In fact, on June 6th during the D-Day commemoration in France, the French government gleefully imposed passport controls in a field on British paratroopers—something that was not required during the D-Day landings in 1944. They lose no opportunity to slight us, but all British politicians are determined to regard the Europeans as our allies. In recent weeks, David Cameron has agreed a deal on the Gibraltar border that will see Spanish border guards man the territory. Britain is prepared to hand over any of its real interests in order to be included in “the West”. Why isn’t Argentina manning custom and immigration in the Falklands?
We are told that our mad Net Zero obsession—an obsession that we could have junked with Brexit, a step that would alone have justified the exit—now means we are more reliant on French power than ever. Any future government that sought to leave the Northern Irish arrangements could be punished by the French. This is what our self-proclaimed British patriots have done to us. Worse still, our Brexit deal allowed us to stop paying £10bn a year to the EU, but we have made large payments of money and materiel to the Ukraine, and taken in large numbers of refugees from a country a long way off from us. This largely cancels out the gain from the Brexit deal in terms of financial payments. Britain’s involvement in the Ukraine is not linked to any discernible UK national interest, but rather reflects a project long planned for by the US “Deep State”.
We are failing to conceive of our national interests as separate from those of “the West”. Britain’s key interest is in preventing the rearmament of Germany. In the 1920s, Germany had a democratic government and the rise to power of Hitler was not expected. Britain stood by and did nothing as Germany rearmed in the 1930s in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. Now the US is pushing Germany to spend more on defence, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies predicts German defence spending in 2030 will rise to £94bn, while Britain’s will be £90bn. After 1945, Germany had to give up East Prussia, part of which is in Lithuania. The singing of the original German national anthem, including the phrase “from the Maas to the Memel” is banned, as Memel (a river now called the Neman) is in Lithuania. Yet Germany, a country that occupied Lithuania during the war, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian losses, has now sent troops to the country and plans to have a permanent contingent of 4,800 troops there by 2027. The Ukraine affair is clearly allowing Germany to reverse parts of the 1945 settlement.
Germany is considering reintroducing conscription, and the German defence minister Boris Pistorius has stated that “We must be ready for war by 2029”. Worse still, the upcoming NATO summit is expected to lead to a “military Schengen zone”, with Germany co-ordinating the militarisation of the EU in partnership with NATO. After years of following the US lead in every conflict—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Ukraine—we are on the cusp of seeing NATO permanently assign Germany the co-ordinating role in Europe. This justifies German militarisation and will see us working for German national interests, while that country continues to try to break up the UK (see the Northern Ireland Protocol) and refuses to give Britain a financial services deal and other things promised at the time of Brexit. We are once again working for someone else’s interests, while our leaders claim we need to be at the summits. We don’t have any influence at the summits, because the agenda is already set, and you can only just go along with it.
Daniel Hannan wrote this:
AJP Taylor used to argue that Britain and Russia, being peripheral to Europe, were natural allies, neither wanting to dominate the continent, both seeking to maintain the balance of power there. Enoch Powell, somewhat incongruously, shared Taylor’s view, convinced, even at the height of the Cold War, that the two semi-European nations had kindred interests. Taylor and Powell would doubtless have seen Brexit, and the EU’s consequent decision to deepen its common foreign policy, as making an accommodation more important. The trouble is that we are not dealing with the abstract Russia that existed in their capacious brains. We are dealing—as they were, though they never liked to admit it—with a gangster regime that does not see international borders as representing any constraint on its activities.
Enoch Powell’s view that Britain and Russia shared an interest in preventing a German resurgence was not “incongruous” at all. Russia is not a regime that sees respecting international borders as kind of optional. Rather, it is defending its own interests against US attempts to bring the Ukraine into an anti-Russian military alliance. This is as provocative as it gets in international politics. Communism got in the way of a British-Russian entente during the Cold War, but with the Communism gone, and more importantly, with US hegemony on the wane, the two peripheral powers do have an interest in preventing German dominance of Europe.
It is completely foolish to assume that no war in Western Europe will ever be possible in the future. We are seeing a gradual fraying of the global system, and Russia’s role as a balancing power in Europe must be maintained. This is the key British interest in Eastern Europe. For Britain to work for German power in Europe, and for the weakening of Russia, is buffoonish. Maybe the US would like to see the EU slot in as part of the US empire with German militarism subcontracted to manage European military affairs. That is a direct threat to British interests, however.
There is no such thing as the West. This was always only ever a US trope, a device to bring all European powers in as satrapies of the US empire. Neither is US policy linked to the promotion of democracy. Democracy and imperialism are opposite concepts to a great degree. To the extent that Joe Biden gleefully states that the US is powerful enough to shape global events, he is saying that policy choices even of democratic states have to give way to US influence (e.g. why should India, a democratic country, be allowed to be neutral towards Russia? Or why should Hungary, a democratic country, have laws preventing LGBT propaganda from being peddled to 5-year-old?) The US isn’t actually interested in democracy as such, other than to the extent that some of the non-democratic countries in the world can resist US influence.
A long list of the mainly democratic regimes overthrown by the CIA can be found on Wikipedia. Particularly egregious were the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the 1960 Congo coup, the US role in bringing a military dictatorship to power in Brazil in 1964, the 1965 overthrowal of Sukarno in Indonesia that led to the killing of over a half a million civilians, the CIA overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973, the various interventions in Guatemala and Nicaragua and US foreign policy in the Middle East leading to 1m-2m deaths over the decades. The Korean and Vietnamese wars were not designed to bring democratic regimes to power or otherwise to help the local people either. It it is ridiculous to claim that US policy aims to foster democracy. The current proxy war in the Ukraine supports a president whose time in office has run out, and yet he refuses to hold an election. All opposition parties have been closed down and all the media has been nationalised.
Britain is gearing up for military conflict over the next few decades with Russia and/or China or other non-Western nations. We will be told that we need to defend the West and democracy. The people who advance this project—essentially the US neo-conservative project—claim to be patriots. If you don’t support their wars, you’re not a patriot, apparently. In my view, those who support wars in the interests of some other country (including the US) are the real traitors. If a country never has permanent allies, we need to reassess, as a matter of urgency, relations with the US, France and Germany, and avoid playing a bit-part in the militarisation of countries that don’t have our interests at heart. We ought to be a neutral country, and trade with all who recognise our right to rule ourselves. The drum-beat towards war must be resisted.
