Re-establishing the Empire. Wishful thinking would be a kind way to describe it!
On 13 November last, Theresa May seized the opportunity offered by the Prime Minister's annual speech at Lord Mayor's Banquet to give an overview of the new British strategy after the Brexit [1]. The United Kingdom intends to re-establish its Empire (Global Britain) by promoting international free exchange with the help of China [2] and ejecting Russia from international instances with the help of its military allies - the United States, France, Germany, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Retrospectively, all the elements we can see today were mentioned in this speech, even if we didn't immediately understand it at the time.
Let's take a step back. In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the Munich Security Conference. He noted that the unipolar world proposed by NATO was by essence anti-democratic, and he called upon the European states to dissociate themselves from this US fantasy [3]. Without responding to this essential comment about the absence of democracy in international relations, NATO denounced Russia's desire to weaken the cohesion of the Alliance in order to threaten it more easily.
However, a British expert, Chris Donnelly, has since refined this rhetoric. In order to weaken the West, Russia is allegedly attempting to delegitimise its economic and social system, the foundation for its military power. That would be the hidden motive behind Russian criticism, particularly in the media. Let's note that Donnelly does not respond any more than did NATO to the essential remark by Vladimir Putin, although why bother debating democracy with an individual who is suspected, a priori, of authoritarianism?
I believe that Donnelly is correct in his analysis, and that Russia is correct in its objective. Indeed, the United Kingdom and Russia are two diametrically opposite cultures.
The former is a class-based society with three levels of nationality fixed by law and mentioned on all identity papers, while the latter - like France - is a Nation created by law, where all citizens are « equal in rights » and where the British distinction between civil rights and political rights is unthinkable [4].
The aim of social organisation in the United Kingdom is the accumulation of wealth, while in Russia it is the construction of one's own individual personality. Therefore in the United Kingdom, the ownership of land is massively concentrated in very few hands, unlike Russia, and especially France. It is almost impossible to buy an apartment in London. The best that one can do - as in Dubaï - is to sign a 99-year lease. For many centuries, almost all of the city has belonged to no more than four people. When a British citizen dies, he or she decides freely to whom they will bequeath their heritage, and not necessarily to their children. On the contrary, when a Russian citizen dies, History begins again at zero - his or her property is divided equally between all the children, whatever the wishes of the deceased may have been.
Yes, Russia is indeed attempting to delegitimise the Anglo-Saxon model, which is all the more easy to do since it is an exception which horrifies the rest of the world as soon as they understand it.
Let's return to Theresa May. Two months after her speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, on 22 January 2018, Her Majesty's Chief of Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, gave a very important speech which was entirely dedicated to the coming war with Russia, based on Donnelly's theory [5]. Drawing the lessons from the Syrian experience, he described an enemy who possesses new, extremely powerful weaponry. (This was two months before President Putin revealed his new nuclear arsenal [6]). Sir Nick Carter confirmed the necessity of having many more ground troops, of developing the British arsenal, and of preparing for a war in which the images broadcast by the medias would be more important than victory on the ground.
The day after this shock conference at the Royal United Services Institute (the Defence think tank), the National Security Council announced the creation of a military unit to combat « Russian propaganda » [7].
How is the British project developing?
Although the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons has cast doubts on the reality of the Global Britain project [8], several of its points have moved ahead, despite a huge setback.
It is important to understand that Mrs. May is not attempting to change, but rather to reorganise her country's policies. Over the last half century, the United Kingdom has been trying to integrate the European structure, progressively losing the advantages inherited from its former Empire. The question now is not to abandon everything that was achieved during this period, but to re-establish the former world hierarchy, in which Her Majesty's officials and the gentry lived in clubs all over the world, waited on by the local populations.
In her journey to China the week following Sir Nick Carter's speech, Theresa May negotiated several commercial contracts, but entered into political conflict with her hosts. Beijing refused to distance itself from Moscow, and London refused to support the Silk Road project. Free exchange, yes, but not via communication routes controlled by China. Since 1941 and the Atlantic Charter, the United Kingdom shares the charge of the « common spaces » (both maritime and aerial) with the United States. Their two navies are designed to be complementary, even though the US Navy is much more powerful than that of the Admiralty.
Thereafter, the Crown activated the government of its Australian dominion in order to reconstitute the Quads, the anti-Chinese group which used to meet during Bush Jr's mandate [9]. Apart from Australia, this group is composed of Japan, India and the United States.
Presently the Pentagon is working on ways to create trouble on both the maritime Pacific Silk Road and the land-based Silk Road.
The announced military Alliance was constituted in the form of the very secret « Little Group » [10]. Germany was weathering a government crisis at the time and did not participate at first, but it seems that this late start was rectified at the beginning of March. All the members of this conspiracy coordinated their actions in Syria. Despite their efforts, they failed three times to organise a false-flag chemical attack in Western Ghouta, since the Syrian and Russian armies had seized their laboratories in Aftris and Chifonya [11]. However, they did manage to publish a common anti-Russian statement concerning the Skripal affair [12] and to mobilise both NATO [13] and the European Union against Russia [14].
How might this situation evolve?
It is obviously strange to see both France and Germany support a project which was specifically designed against them: Global Britain, insofar as the Brexit is not a retreat from the federal bureaucracy of the European Union, but an act of rivalry.
In any case, Global Britain today may be defined as follows :
the promotion of international free exchange, but exclusively in the thalassocratic context, in other words with the United States against the Chinese communication routes;We may anticipate several incidental consequences of this programme:
and the attempt to exclude Russia from the Security Council and cut the world in two, which implies the on-going manipulation with chemical weapons in Syria, and the Skripal affair.
The current crisis is a reshuffle of the elements from the end of Obama's mandate, except that London is now at the centre of the game rather than Washington. The United Kingdom, which can now no longer count on the support of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, will turn to the new US National Security Advisor, John Bolton [15]. Contrary to the allegations of the US Press, Bolton is absolutely not a neo-conservative, but a close friend of Steve Bannon. He refuses the idea that his country could be submitted to international law, and howls at Communists and Muslims, but in reality he has no intention of launching any new wars, and desires only to live at peace in his own home. He will not fail to sign all the declarations proposed to him against Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea. London will be unable to manipulate him to exclude Moscow from the Security Council, because his personal objective is not to reform the UNO, but to get rid of it altogether. He will however be a faithful ally concerning the the conservation of the « common spaces » and the opposition to the Chinese « Silk Road », particularly since he was the initiator of the Proliferation Security Initiative - PSI in 2003. We should therefore begin to notice the outbreak, here and there, along the traces of the Chinese routes, of new pseudo civil wars nourished by the Anglo-Saxons.
Saudi Arabia is preparing the creation of the « Neom », a new fiscal paradise in the Sinaï and the Red Sea. It should replace Beyrouth and Dubaï, but not Tel-Aviv. London will connect it with the Crown's different fiscal paradises - including the City of London, which is not English, but depends directly from Queen Elisabeth - in order to guarantee the opacity of international commerce.
The multitude of jihadist organisations which flows out of the Levant is still controlled by MI6, via the Muslim Brotherhood and the Order of the Naqshbandis. These troops may well be redeployed for use, mainly against Russia - and not against China or in the Caribbean, which is the option currently being studied.
After the Second World War, we were witness to the decolonisation of the European empires, and then, after the Vietnam war, we saw the financialisation of the world economy by the Anglo-Saxons, and finally, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we saw the solitary attempt at world domination by the United States. Today, with the powerful rise of modern Russia and China, the fantasy of a culturally globalised world governed in unipolar fashion is fading away, while the Western powers - and particularly the United Kingdom - are falling back on their own imperial dreams. Of course, the high level of current education in the old colonies is forcing them to rethink their models of domination.
Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Pete Kimberley
[1] "Theresa May speech to the Lord Mayor's Banquet 2017", by Theresa May, Voltaire Network, 13 November 2017.
[2] By doing so, Mrs. May confirms the prognosis I published just after the Brexit, sixteen months earlier : "The new British Foreign Policy", by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 4 July 2016. However, as I shall explain in the follow-up to this article, this vision was quickly confronted by the Russo-Chinese alliance.
[3] "The unipolar governance is illegal and immoral", by Vladimir Putin, Voltaire Network, 11 February 2007.
[4] This is a fundamental question which was debated in depth by Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. It is is this irreconcilable difference that opposes the Anglo-Saxon concept of Human Rights (defined by the Declaration of Mary II of England in 1689) and the resulting system of parliamentary monarchy, on the one hand, and on the other, the French concept of Human Rights (defined by the Declaration of the National Constituent Assembly of 1789) which put an end to the three orders of the Ancien Régime.
[5] "Dynamic Security Threats and the British Army", by General Sir Nick Carter, Voltaire Network, 22 January 2018.
[6] "Vladimir Putin Address to the Russian Federal Assembly", by Vladimir Putin, Voltaire Network, 1 March 2018.
[7] "British army to create a unit against Russian propaganda", Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 6 February 2018.
[8] "Global Britain inquiry", Foreign Affairs Committee, UK House of Commons.
[9] "Stealing China's thunder: the Quads' counter project to the Silk route", Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 23 February 2018.
[10] « Syrieleaks : un câble diplomatique britannique dévoile la "stratégie occidentale" », par Richard Labévière, Observatoire géostratégique, Proche&Moyen-Orient.ch, 17 février 2018.
[11] "Discovered: two laboratories of chemical weapons of "moderate" Syrian rebels", Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 16 March 2018.
[12] "Salisbury attack: Joint statement from the leaders of France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom", Voltaire Network, 15 March 2018.
[13] "Statement by the North Atlantic Council on the use of a nerve agent in Salisbury", Voltaire Network, 14 March 2018.
[14] "European Council conclusions on the Salisbury attack", Voltaire Network, 22 March 2018.
[15] "John Bolton and Disarmament through War", Voltaire Network, 30 November 2004.
Comment: Tre real dangers to those mascarading as the virtues of "freedom and democracy" are those countries where there actually is a fair level of freedom and democracy. In other words, nothing scares the lie more than the truth.