[Robin McAlpine Blog] We need to stop listening to failed militarists

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We need to stop listening to failed militarists

As you probably know, Donald Trump has been (rather weirdly) publicly ruminating about what are quite clearly deep-rooted psychological fears that he isn’t going to get into heaven. Well I’ll tell you what Donald, if your response is to call the Pope a prick and post a picture implying that Jesus wasn’t all that, then I am going to have doubts about your strategy.

Then again, I find that happening a lot just now. I am watching establishment figure after establishment figure abandoning political and strategic positions they have maintained for their entire lives, or who are taking a strategy they said was for one thing and then stating it again as a solution to the immediate opposition of the one thing they previously said it was for.

What this all sounds like to me is ‘did I say the bubonic plague was bad and I was the man to sort it?, because what I meant was the bubonic plague is a good thing – but I’m the man to run it’, or ‘I did not say fire extinguishers are there to put out fires, they’re there to start fires as I have always maintained’. And it’s all because the world we knew no longer exists but the people who created it cling on.

Which is to say that George Robertson is not an impressive man (I know, I was his press officer once) in any other regard than his ability to appear to believe whatever he needs to believe at any given moment. Today he guts out the UK for being rubbish at defending itself and, in surprisingly hostile comments, demanded Keir Starmer gets the chequebook out.

Well of course he does. You may know him as ‘former Defence Secretary…’ or ‘Former General Secretary of Nato…’, but you should really just think of him as ‘…who sits on or has sat on more corporate arms manufacturing-related Boards than there is space to list here’ (currently two consultancies who advise arms manufacturers and arms dealers).

Let’s have a look then; what did George actually do? Well, he was only in charge of Britain’s defence for two years between 1997 and 1999 and he presided over a 12 per cent cut in defence spending as a proportion of GDP and we’re still basically stuck at the levels he left us with. So it’s kind of on you big man, no?

He then went on to ‘run’ Nato (scare quotes because the one person you can be certain isn’t running Nato is its General Secretary – look at that woeful inadequate Mark Rutte and tell me if you’d let him run a bath never mind the Nato canteen never mind actual Nato). So how did George get on with ensuring Britain was defended by Nato?

Did he ensure that Britain could defend itself on its own as part of a Nato alliance? Nope, he did not. In fact he was the front man for making absolutely sure that Britain could never defend itself without Nato. That has been the Nato strategy for a long, long time now.

The US mollycoddled Europe with generosity, the purpose of which was to infantilise the continent, make it reliant on the US and therefore give the US ultimate political leverage

So let’s just spell this out; Nato started out as a defensive pact to shore up Europe’s defences during the Cold War. Immediately on the end of the Cold War Nato converted almost wholly to a new mission – to reinforce and protect US global hegemony. The primary role of Nato since the Cold War has basically been to ensure that Europe cannot defend itself.

I don’t know if I need to go over all this here but Europe was one of America’s greatest fears during the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have come to the conclusion that the US is a uniquely paranoid country. It’s certainty that everyone and everything that does not bow and scrape before it is an existential threat is hard to explain based on any real threat America faced.

In the early 1990s, foreign policy task one for the US was to destroy any chance of Russia making a transition to liberal European democracy (if you don’t know the story of how that happened then please go and learn before mouthing off about the world because it is a foundational piece of knowledge – there is so much to read that you’ll find with a quick web search).

The US feared post-Soviet Russia not as a military threat but as a hegemonic threat, the country it seemed to them to be most likely to challenge a unipolar US-run world. So it fucked up Russia and then looked around again. Which means by the mid-1990s the most likely competitor looked awfully like the newly-formed EU.

Had that gained strategic autonomy, it had a population and economy size which could challenge the US as the global leader. In America’s worst nightmare, these two fears would merge and an increasingly European Russia would join the EU and frankly overtake the US as the most powerful geostrategic force on the planet.

So it sought to stop that happening. It couldn’t fuck up Europe like it fucked up Russia, so it took a different approach. It mollycoddled Europe with generosity, the purpose of which was to infantilise the continent, make it reliant on the US and therefore give the US ultimate political leverage. Europe said thank you.

This is why when people now say ‘can Europe walk away from an unhinged US?’ the beard-stroking foreign policy establishment write you long essays which can be summarised by village idiot Rutte when he says Europe can "keep on dreaming" about such a scenario.

Britain has just been savaged for not spending enough on defence by the man who cut defence funding to more or less its current levels and then made a career out of ensure that Europe did not achieve autonomous continental defence capacity.

But the scale of his crap doesn’t end there. He is now clearly saying ‘get your chequebook out and head off to your nearest corporate defence contractor’, even as Iran is busy humiliating the world’s most powerful military using cheap improvised weapons and a bunch of basic missiles. Russia is struggling to beat a Ukraine which converted a novelty dog toy maker into military hardware producer.

In an era of asymmetric war, the pendulum has swung away from the big power corporate militaries because the corporate arms dealers have railroaded dumb military planners into systems so complex that they cost a fortune but don’t defend against a host of threats.

You can buy mental-expensive interceptor missiles and say ‘they’re never going to send cheap drones at us and we’re never going to run out of money ever’ all you want, saying it doesn’t make it true. The arms companies Robertson shills for are selling precisely the wrong people the wrong things.

The whole lot of them aren’t having an epiphany, they’re just cosplaying someone who had a clue what was actually going on in the world

So, in summary, man who leaves Britain defenceless on behalf of the US and corporate arms dealers goes mental that Britain is defenceless and demands they give all the nation’s money to corporate arms dealers he financially benefits from personally to buy precisely the military kit which is failing in Israel, Iran and Ukraine? Quick, clear my diary!

The irony is that George made one actually intelligent intervention a few years ago in which he admitted that basically all of what I’ve just written was right and that it was a terrible mistake. Clearly his employers have taken him through the back and had a word, because he’s back on script. It’s just a pity the script is a farce.

It’s not just George; people who called people like me all sorts of names for pointing out that the US effectively controls our nukes have now discovered that our nukes are controlled by the US and want something done. Their idea is to replace the bit the US controls (the delivery system) with our own.

Except unless Lego makes a pre-boxed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile kit then I think the chances of Britain building one from scratch must be something in the vicinity of fuck all. We are four years behind and 48 per cent over-budget with the bit we’re supposed to know how to do (the warheads), we can’t launch even the US missiles successfully and our submarines as all but sinking and we’re miles behind schedule replacing them. So give it a break you fantasists.

Likewise to the people who are now venerating Mark Carney for making a speech I’ve made dozens of time in writing which those same people mocked me for. The mid-power alliances I have called for for ages do not seem to be best put together by relying on the people who were convinced it was a terrible idea until, what, ten minutes ago.

George Robertson is full of shit. He always has been. Remember how the forces of darkness were going to sweep the earth if Scotland became independent? That was 100 per cent because Scotland would have undermined a Nato which is falling apart before our eyes anyway. It was bullshit then, it is bullshit now and the whole lot of them aren’t having an epiphany, they’re just cosplaying someone who had a clue what was actually going on in the world.

Trump is an embarrassment, a senile old man who clearly has no idea what is going on, who has lost the room badly and who is therefore lashing out in increasingly deranged directions everywhere, using wilder and wilder language. He is doing it because his preening self-certainty has been challenged.

Most of that is true about George Robertson too, and of Mark Rutte, and of so many others there isn’t space to list them. For god’s sake, can we not start to ignore them? They got us into this mess. All I really want to hear from them is the crack of party poppers and the honk of party blowers emanating from their retirement parties.

Source: We need to stop listening to failed militarists