Sleepless nights for the mangy British lion
America's abandonment of Afghanistan has left its principal ally cruelly exposed
I wrote here that, in the wake of the Afghanistan catastrophe, the countries of the free world will be anxiously asking themselves how they might defend themselves in future now that the United States has shown itself to be a faithless friend and a frighteningly weak link in the defence of the west.
In fact, it’s worse than that. In pulling up its drawbridge against Afghanistan and the Islamic world — while making nice with genocidal Iran and eroding the security of its putative victim, Israel — the US has now incentivised every jihadi, tyrannical regime and rogue state in the world to step up attacks against American and western interests, secure in the confidence that America will not respond with anything other than pious and useless virtue-signalling.
This anxiety is probably being articulated nowhere more painfully than in Britain. For Britain is supposedly America’s most powerful and significant ally in NATO. Yet Britain will not be able to fill the terrifying vacuum that has now opened up.
There was a time when Britain led the world in the defence of freedom. Slow to anger and stoical to a fault, the British were nevertheless once unmatched as fighters when their backs were to the wall.
What they excelled at over centuries was war in the defence of their island nation. Their armed forces were the envy of the world. And today, many in Britain still smugly tell themselves that they are quite unlike the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” of France and the rest of the EU.
Alas, this is no longer true. While the armed forces still contain the very best of Britain, the British lion is now a mangy beast. Profoundly demoralised after World War Two by being in hock to the US as well as having lost its empire, Britain — no less than the EU it so unwisely joined — has for decades relied upon American might to keep it safe.
Coddled by decades of peace, consumerism and a culture of hyper-individualism, the British have become deeply reluctant to commit to wars in far-away places about which they know little and care less.
Like America and much of the rest of the west, they have taught themselves that their culture was born in existential sin and that its values are a source of shame and to be rejected rather than upheld and defended.
Like America and much of the rest of the west, they have taught themselves that patriotism is for scoundrels, that the very worst thing is to die for your country and that war must accordingly be replaced by negotiation, “peace-processes” and compromise with the enemy — otherwise known as appeasement.
Like America and much of the rest of the west, they fail utterly to understand the singular nature and scale of the threat posed to themselves by the Islamic world, both from within their own country and from without.
And like America and much of the rest of the west, they have become consumed by the malevolent fatuities of identity politics. Why should young people who claim to be terrified by the slightest perceived insult to their professed sense of self take much notice of people whose unwavering aim is to destroy western culture, render the west powerless and enslave its people, whether by Chinese domination or Islamic rule?
All this has meant that for decades Britain has been disastrously eroding its military capacity. With zero public demand to maintain the country’s defences, spending on the military has been systematically eroded — even the recent increase in the defence budget, achieved by the refreshingly well-grounded Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, will be nowhere near enough to make up what is needed.
In January last year, Wallace told The Sunday Times that the prospect of America withdrawing from the world “keeps me awake at night”.
Concerned at that time with the isolationism of President Donald Trump, he was anxious that, if Britain was forced to fight wars without America, it no longer had the capacity to do so. As the paper reported:
He said the government needed to rethink military assumptions, in place since 2010, that the UK would always be fighting alongside the Americans — and should use the upcoming defence review to buy new kit to ensure that the armed forces do not have to rely on US air cover and spy planes in future conflicts.
“I worry if the United States withdraws from its leadership around the world,” he said. “That would be bad for the world and bad for us. We plan for the worst and hope for the best… We are very dependent on American air cover and American intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. We need to diversify our assets”.
Although President Donald Trump has now morphed into President Joe Biden, Wallace’s sleepless nights over American isolationism have now become a nightmare for many more.
The grim fact is that the United Kingdom no longer has the military personnel or hardware that it needs to defend itself adequately without US cover, and it would take a huge switch in priorities and increased funding for the UK to be able to do so.
This has been the case for years; but now the country’s priorities have veered from reckless indifference into lunacy.
For while spending on defence has been progressively degraded, Britain’s Conservative (!) government has undertaken to spend trillions of pounds on fighting “climate change” — a hypothetical threat for which no evidence exists that stands serious scrutiny for five seconds and which in its own terms can’t be stopped anyway.
I wrote here for my premium subscribers that western conservatives have forgotten what they need to conserve in order to defend the west. What they need to conserve above all is the practical means of conducting that defence.
Yet with some very honourable exceptions, Britain’s Conservatives appear to be quite oblivious of this crucial necessity. Despite Brexit and the restoration of the UK as an independent nation, they no longer seem to grasp what independence means. They too have drunk the Kool-Aid of western defeatism.
The Biden administration’s abandonment of Afghanistan has now ripped away the veils of illusion. America and Britain, intently engaged for years upon the all-consuming activity of scrutinising their own navels, are now revealed as sitting ducks for those enemies of civilisation who have the scent of blood in their nostrils.
America may or may not be lost. But Britain’s Conservatives need to snap out of their self-indulgent trance right now, ditch the apocalyptic millenarian man-made global warming myth along with the narcissistic idiocies of “victim culture”, and start doing what they used to know it takes to defend their country against threats that are all too real.
Recent posts
Premium subscribers can read my most recent exclusive post, on how conservatives have forgotten what they need to conserve, if you click here.
And you can read my most recent post that’s available to everyone, on how America has abandoned far more than just the Afghan people, by clicking here.
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