UK, Lost Empire, Knackered Trojan Horse

Letter From America

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: June 17, 2017 Last modified: June 17, 2017

Maybe the so-called Special Relationship gets extra spirit from the Tory “understanding” with the DUP. In both Washington and London, the purported leaders of their countries do not have a mandate from a majority of the electorate, but both depend on the votes of bigoted anti-Diluvian evangelists, who do actually believe in the Flood described in The Bible, but do not believe in the flood lapping around their feet from sea ice melts.

The former Ian Paisley’s degree from the Bob Jones University did not endow him or the DUP with the ecumenism of modern American Evangelists who have now expediently forsworn their traditional anti-Papism to ally with reactionary Catholic Bishops against their common enemy – modern tolerance.

And both the DUP and Republican evangelical right in the US share an apocalyptic Christian Zionist view that makes them support Netanyahu and the far right in Israel. It is worth remembering that theological roots of this are not based on some sentimental philosemitism but on a reading of the book of Revelations that sees the gathering of the Jews in the Holy Land as a necessary precursor to the rapture, Armageddon and the Second Coming. It is only good for the Jews if you regard being converted to Christianity or being thoroughly smitten by a vengeful deity as a blessing.

Sadly, Trump’s unbounded admiration for Nigel Farage seems to have inhibited him from tweeting support for May. We can assume that a blessing from the US president might have lost her even more seats. Domestic resistance, even in his own party, tempers some of Trump’s policy eccentricities at home but the presidency’s powers over foreign policy give him more leeway abroad, although, even there, the foreign policy establishment has inhibited some of his wayward options. For example, although like so many previous presidents he promised to move the US Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as Congress has mandated, the State Department’s residual attachment to international law has forced him to postpone it yet again.

However, Farage notwithstanding, the Trump administration has even less time than Obama for the so-called special relationship with Britain, a phrase very rarely heard in the US media except when Washington is looking for London to send sepoys to lend international flavour to yet another military folly.

However, we sometimes forget that the “special relationship” was very much a Labour invention. After fighting World War Two alone for over two years Ernest Bevin wanted NATO to cement an American commitment. Churchill condemned Attlee’s permission for US bases in Britain as a derogation of sovereignty while Attlee committed troops and treasure to support the US in Korea, even if that was mandated by the UN.

Suez showed who was in charge of that special relationship. Indeed, forgotten now, but newsworthy at the time was that Senator Joe McCarthy (and his sidekick Robert Kennedy) had Winston Churchill and the UK in their sites for trading with China during the Korean War. They pointed out that the tan­gential British contribution to the Chinese war effort probably equalled the value of the British input into the Korean war itself.

While on the one hand, Brexit adds cogent geopolitical reasoning for keeping friendly with the Americans, since the UK is now again just an isolated off-shore island, on the other hand Trump’s silence on the matter has devalued the US commitment to NATO’s common defence. Recent Tory miscalculations, on the referendum and the election do indeed suggest that belief in fairies is a strong component in conservative politics, but can even they believe that an isolationist Trump administration feels any special regard for Britain?

Geoffrey Howe at a UN briefing once explained that British foreign policy was the same now as in the days of Pitt – to ensure that no combination of powers could arise in Europe that could threaten our island, and I suspect that most conservative governments did indeed thwart and sabotage European unity with that in mind. EU foreign policy has almost always been a joke, depending as it did on consensus and thus effective abstention on controversial issues. Britain lost its empire and found a role as Washington’s Trojan horse in Brussels.

The current chaos suggests other possibilities. Perhaps it is time to audition for a new role, or rather resume the position of supporter of the UN Charter and international law. It is something that Labour should be thinking about, taking up where Robin Cook left off.

About Ian Williams

Nuance not Slogans for new non-New Labour Foreign Policy

Tribune : Ian Williams

Published: September 27, 2015 Last modified: September 22, 2015

As Robin Cook said, foreign policy must have an ethical dimension. He was cannily aware that nations have interests and that rules are, shall we say, guidelines. If Jeremy Corbyn is in Number 10 in the future, he too will have to confront real life ethical conundrums – and dare one commit thoughtcrime in this new age? Tony Blair was sometimes right. His action outside the United Nations chain of command in Sierra Leone was beneficial and effective in relieving the misery. He was also right over Kosovo where faced with unreasonable vetoes in the UN Security Council, it was right for Nato to threaten to invade – and if Bill Clinton had not disclaimed that option early, Slobodan Milosevic would have folded without the messy diversion of high level bombing designed to minimise American casualties. Without Blair’s efforts, the ethnically cleansed Kosovars would probably still be in refugee camps across the Balkans.

Iraq was different. The last invasion was disastrous for Iraq, the region – and for international law. As the Chilcot Inquiry should show, even through the layers of whitewash it has been accumulating over the years, it was an unnecessary and illegal war. Blair did serious damage to the growing concept of Responsibility to Protect by invoking humanitarian intervention as an excuse for Iraq, when he realised that the nebulous weapons of mass destruction were not going to solidify.

As an MP with an internationalist outlook, who has show deep concern for human rights and violations of international law, one would hope that a Corbyn administration would actively support moves to implement R2P, perhaps Kofi Annan’s greatest achievement, which is actively supported by Ban Ki-moon.

Annan got the 2005 summit of world leaders to declare that the UN’s enforcement clause, Chapter VII, is not restricted to conflicts between states, but also applies to mass violations of humanitarian law within states. That creates obligations on all members of the UN, and even more so on permanent members, to be able and ready to answer such calls for assistance. That should be taken into consideration as we correctly question the size, cost and purpose of the armed forces.

There might be pragmatic limits, but the United States veto on behalf of Israel in the Security Council should not inhibit a Labour government from taking action to deal with trade and aid for illegal settlements to implement existing resolutions.

Fulfilling Britain’s full potential in the United Nations might also involve a much more active role in the European Union. For a start, a joint declaration by Britain and France renouncing or limiting the conditions under which they use the veto could send an ethical signal to other existing or potential permanent members. On many issues, especially in the Middle East, the EU members collectively return resounding abstentions, and one reason cited has been Britain’s deference to American positions of unconditional support for Israel. More active British diplomacy would actually have a leveraged result in the general assembly and send the clear signals that Benjamin Netanyahu is currently not getting.

Which brings us to relations with the US. Pragmatically, when people talk about the special relationship in Washington it is the one with Israel, not with Britain. There is no British lobby in Congress to threaten electoral defeats.

However, it is also true that US administrations do genuinely want to have Britain onside for parlous initiatives. It is likely that British resistance to Iraq would have headed off the war instead of egging it on as Blair did.

The fervent ineptitude of Washington against Cuba and Venezuela, or indeed Putin’s Russia, should not blind us to the genuine authoritarian cast of those regimes. The 1945 Labour Government’s attitude to Russia was moulded by Moscow’s treatment of socialists in Eastern Europe and none of these icons of the far left have shown much more tolerance for dissent. A Labour prime minister has to steer between fostering delusions of grandeur of Britain’s reflected power from the so-called special relationship, and a Chomskyite world view that not a sparrow falls without the CIA targeting it. Geopolitics calls for nuance, not slogans.

UK abstains on nuke vote

Ian Williams

UK Ducks with Netanyahu gestures

Tribune December 19, 2014 Last modified: December 14, 2014

In the United Nations, a flight of disarmament resolutions went through in December – and the nuclear powers, including Britain, disappeared up their diplomatic rears abstaining or voting against core principles in the treaty.

Significantly, one resolution calling for a nuclear-free Middle East passed by 161 votes, with the United States, Canada, Palau, Micronesia and, of course, Israel voting against. No fewer than 18 cowardly countries abstained, including Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. In contrast, the tiny Marshall Islands, totally dependent on the US Congress, had more integrity than Britain, and voted for.

The Marshall Islands has gone to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for a ruling on the failure of the nine nuclear nations to disarm, and asking the court to require them to stop maintaining and modernising their weaponry as well as take substantial steps to disarmament.

The Marshallese know whereof they speak since US exploded out no less than 23 hydrogen bombs on the itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny atoll of Bikini in the former Strategic Trust territory. Five of those nine would-be nuclear bombers, Britain, China, France, Russia and the US, are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which bars new nations from going nuclear but which also requires the existing nuclear states to move towards complete disarmament. Among the 190 signatories is Iran. Not among them are India, Pakistan – and Israel.

So why would Britain, Germany and France vote against a resolution whose principles their countries have publicly endorsed and committed to?  The reason is that the resolution was not about North Korea, or even Iran, but specifically called on Israel to “accede to that treaty without further delay, not to develop, produce test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, to renounce possession of nuclear weapons” and to put its nuclear facilities under the safeguard of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

US representative Robert Wood claimed that the resolution “fails to meet the fundamental tests of fairness and balance. It confines itself to expressions of concern about the activities of a single country.” His statement epitomises the absurdities of Washington’s position. In a resolution calling for a US backed nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, is it “unfair” and “unbalanced” to mention the one nuclear state in the region?

But the US is the mover of all the resolutions in the UN Security Council, identifying Iran as the only threat to disarmament in the Middle East. Iran is not the most palatable regime in region, although on almost every human right standard, it far surpasses our Saudi allies. But the ayatollahs have declared nuclear weapons unIslamic. Iran has signed and apparently observes all the chemical and biological warfare conventions and treaties, and has not invaded any of its neighbours. Although its citation of its “inalienable right” right to civil nuclear development might sound pompous and portentous, it is lifted straight from the Non-Proliferation Treaty which it has signed and Israel hasn’t.

Indeed, the Security Council resolution against Iran was only possible because Washington won over the vote of India, a nuclear non-signatory of the NPT, by exempting it from sanctions for its own nuclear programme to get a reference from the IAEA.

In contrast, Israeli politicians have openly called for military action against Iran on the mere suspicion of possible nuclear capability – thereby violating the most fundamental core of the UN Charter. It has flouted the NPT, and has a nuclear arsenal.

The reaction of the US and the Europeans is to pour treasure, armaments and diplomatic support to Israel. Germany provides advanced nuclear-capable submarines to the world’s biggest nuclear power outside the NPT.

Sadly the more reactionary governments become, the more support they win from across the political spectrum of European leaders, who all preach to the world about respect for UN resolutions, international law, nuclear disarmament, the International Criminal Court and the Geneva Conventions – unless anyone tries to apply them to one bellicose state in the Eastern Mediterranean.