Saturday 18 March 2017

Trump is right to shun Merkel


I'm not exactly sure what game Donald Trump is playing. What I can see happening on present trajectory is NATO becoming a redundant shell and little more than a flag of convenience for joint UK/US operations. Keeping Europe on the fringes will likely lead to ramped up efforts toward greater European defence cooperation.

NATO is pretty much a cold war relic and like the EU is part of the post-war peace architecture. The NATO aspect though is the framework for the US military empire. It is key to US defence exports. If the US is rowing back from NATO then it is pretty much ending its military dominion over Europe - with the exception of the UK.

Britain is locked into NATO, or at least US defence cooperation for a time to come. Chinook, Apache, Trident, F35, Poseidon are all service mainstays and fairly recent undertakings that will define UK procurement for the next two decades at least.

What we can expect in the wake of Brexit is a retrenchment of the European defence sector, with several big names drawing down their UK operations - to be replaced with Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

With Britain leaving the EU and ending freedom of movement defence industry cooperation is made less attractive and so we will see more continental defence integration but without the UK. Britain will also take a more junior role in European space projects.

I expect defence cooperation between the UK and France will stay as strong as ever. In logistics, intelligence and electronic warfare we are mutually dependent. RAF Waddington is Europe's eyes and ears. This is what gives us considerable leverage in Brexit talks.

In terms of the much vaunted "European army" we are already seeing acceleration toward that end now that the British question has been resolved. How far it can go is all really dependent on how much EU citizens are willing to tolerate further erosion of their defence sovereignty.

This is actually why Brexit is brilliant. Britain can participate in joint EU military efforts but will always remain detached as a non-member. It keeps doors open to Norway and close Commonwealth naval allies.

As far as trade goes the Commonwealth is dead but in terms of military ties, Canada, New Zealand and Australia remain key allies and Brexit ensures that they will not be frozen out. Through the UK's carriers are largely useless they are prestigious defence assets and will buy us considerable EU cooperation. Politicians and generals like big shiny toys.

In effect we have stopped the creation of a European military superpower and the EU is now the junior partner in a Western alliance. This is why UK defence spending is more crucial now than ever.

If you're a peacenik, you may not see the point of all this but ultimately this is about power and empires. It always has been. The EU has always had ambitions of being a superpower and we've just killed that dream.

The left will have it that it means the UK now is a servile military outpost of the United States, which is not entirely incorrect but at the same time, who cares? It is far better to have a broader, looser Western defence alliance than two allied but competing superpowers. I cannot imagine anything worse than the EU having the tools to be the interventionist power it has always wanted to be. Libya is instructive as to how well that pans out.

Thanks to Brexit, EU defence cooperation will remain a disjointed and unpopular platform struggling for relevance. It survives only as long as the political elites driving the EU - which is not for much longer by the looks of it.

As to NATO, it will probably linger on in a semi-dormant state for as long as Trump is president. Trump though, will eventually be gone. What the world looks like then is really all dependent on his successor.

In a lot of ways our commitment to the US in its ill-conceived adventures has paid dividends in that our operational compatibility with the USA has remained intact and it makes the USA the obvious direction for future defence relations. In a roundabout way, the Iraq war has preserved our defence sovereignty.

As to procurement, Brexit probably rules out any more ideological me-tooism. The EU likes to have all the baubles of empire. The USA has Boeing, so the EU must have Airbus - which has always been a political venture. This has given rise to the ill conceived A380 and A400M. Both epic failures. Brexit means we will likely continue to buy US military hardware off the shelf - which is usually better - and of more value to the UK economy.

I for one could not be more delighted. For all that cretinous bilge from remainers about us Brexiteers "stealing my European identity", I say bollocks. You have no European identity. It is a figment of your imagination. You weren't watching a French cop show on Netflix last night were you? You didn't go and see a Spanish superhero film at the cinema last week. You know more about US politics than you do about the EU. Culturally, militarily and politically we are Anglospheric. That is a fact.

For all that we have seen remainers amphibious with grief, I say go and look at the traffic jams and the behaviour of drivers in Rome or go and watch the Spanish torture a bull to death and tell me that your culture is in any way reflected in Europeans. That's when I tell you to fuck right off.

If I have to pick an empire to be allied with, I choose the USA every single time. The land of The Wire, South Park, Rick and Morty, the First Amendment. The country that never needed any persuading that Communism is the manifestation of evil on earth.

Say what you like about Donald Trump, but Donald Trump is not America. Trump is for four years or so. Moreover, Trump is a good sign. Yes, he's a brash, oafish wrecker but he was elected on the back of a total rejection of American leftism. That which has aggressively moved to bury all moral norms and free speech along with it.

This is why Trump is weakening relations with the EU. Ultimately the diseased politically correct establishment in the USA is the consequence of a detached and corrupt liberal elite. In that respect the USA is in a more advanced state of decay than the EU - but we should view it as a warning. The soft left political consensus of the EU, with its deeply ingrained NGOcracy is that same disease. Brexit is not Trump. Brexit means we avert having one of our own.

In 2003, I was handed a pirate CD with a few low quality rips of early South Park episodes. I laughed until I hurt. And why was that? South Park drove a horse and cart through American liberal political correctness and spoke to a certain truth - that the left has totally lost the plot. To me, South Park marked the beginnings of a conservative reawakening. It was viewed as edgy at the time when really it was just the truth that nobody dare speak.

Well now that truth is being spoken openly - and that's a good thing. Now we are dismantling the empire of the Left. The one installed by Blair and Brown. And that makes Brexit all the more necessary. It is fashioned in their image.

In that regard I can understand the "Brexit at any cost" mentality. Politically our survival depends on it so that we do not follow the USA into its current cultural hole. Without that moral backbone there is no way our politics or indeed our economy can survive in the long run. I would rather the Tories didn't make a total pigs ear of it, but as a whole I would still vote to leave every single time.

In that respect, we are "taking back control". We are snatching Britain back from Euro cultural oblivion. The all pervasive creeping erosion of our institutions has already left us weak and vulnerable. You can see it in how Brexit is being handled - by a crop of criminally incompetent and stupid politicians lacking any guile or wit. This is what happens when national governments atrophy. Sooner or later that starts to manifest in more noticeable ways where we cannot respond to existential threats with any moral certitude. Which is exactly what the self-hating left has always wanted.

To that end, it is no surprise that the fightback has started in the USA. We may not like the messenger, but we are seeing a return to that conservative order - the one that defeated fascism and communism and brought about great leaders like Thatcher and Reagan. For all their many faults, they were staunch defenders of liberty and ensured we had the means and the will to fight our enemies.

Right now the focus is on Russia. The EU is pushing Russia away and half of the eastern bloc with it. I can see Poland eventually leaving the EU. We have made an enemy out of a potential ally in a future conflict. If you pay any attention to trade at all you will see that China has been waging an economic war on the west for more than a decade.

China is undermining Western power overseas and weakening our economic power. There is nothing in the EU Arsenal to counter this not least because there isn't even a recognition of what is happening. Trump may not have the right strategy but he at least sees that there is a threat. If the fightback has started, I am glad that, once again, Britain stands with America.

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