Thoughts? The article says that Britain can’t annoy the US too much over this Iran war, because UK security is unfortunately completely dependent upon the US.
Starmer has to deploy what influence he has with the White House carefully. He must consider other strategic goals – the need to keep Trump onside in Ukraine, for example. And he must be mindful that Britain’s own military and intelligence capabilities are enmeshed with Pentagon systems.
As one [minister] puts it, Britain would be “massively exposed” if a capricious US administration decided it no longer wanted our friendship.
Perhaps the best way for the UK to stop being a vassal of the US is for the UK to join forces with its European allies. Europe together can surely create the capabilities needed to defend the continent.
This is the annoying reality of politics. It’s easy for us to sit on the side and say “just do X!!” but unfortunately the US holds more cards than we do and we need some political capital for other things.
Perhaps the best way for the UK to stop being a vassal of the US is for the UK to join forces with its European allies. Europe together can surely create the capabilities needed to defend the continent.
Agreed.
The UK is part of the Commonwealth of Israel and will do whatever they want so long as the house of lords and Downing street are full of pedophiles.
The UK already has some of the highest per-capita military spending in the world. The problem is foreign policy, we’ve been too involved in too many things. Reduced dependence on the US means scaling back, becoming more neutral, focusing strictly on self-defense.
Your solution to being a vassal of the US is to become a vassal of Brussels?
Other people addressed the idiocy of calling that “vassalhood”.
It is a fact though that throwing your lot in with others is a risk - a risk that they do something stupid, like the US keeps doing, and dragging you with them. A risk that when you come to rely on them, they don’t show up, as the US is doing in Ukraine and has implied it would do in case of a Russian attack on another member of NATO. That shows the importance of being aligned with your allies.
The fact is, we are far more aligned with EU countries than we are with the US when it comes to foreign policy - what comes of geographically being in Europe. It may not be true together, in which case reliance on those countries could be a problem, but isolationism is a far bigger problem.
If you join a club for your own interests, and the members of the club (including yourself) agree to appoint leadership for the club, which is renewed by elections every few years, I don’t think that means you become a vassal of the leadership of the club.
For example let’s say you’re in a band. The members of the band agree to have a manager, to handle certain tasks. That doesn’t mean the band members are vassals of the manager. The band members can replace the manager if they think the manager is doing a bad job.
Why would working closer with European allies mean becoming a vassal of Brussels?
Perhaps the best way for the UK to stop being a vassal of the US is for the UK to join forces with its European allies. Europe together can surely create the capabilities needed to defend the continent.
This is the only sensible option but it would be a project taking years if not decades to disentangle from our US military and intelligence alliances, and we’d be exposed the entire time.
it would be a project taking years if not decades to disentangle from our US military and intelligence alliances, and we’d be exposed the entire time
Perhaps true, so I guess we shouldn’t try to cut our ties with the US straight away. Instead we can work with European allies to build up Europe’s defences. Then if the US continues to diverge from Europe, Europe will have its own defences in place.
I think this is basically the plan! But it does, in the meantime, involve pleasing nearly no one, as Behr says.
