For almost a year, claims have been rife that the United States was either “on the edge of energy independence” or “energy independent”. There has been very little public push back against these claims, suggesting that there is great deal of truth in them. Since the energy in question long has been sitting nearby in the ground or under the oceans one is tempted to ask “What took so long?”
Still, Obama did all he could to prevent energy independence, and Hillary Clinton would have shut the door on the issue, so all that can be said is that President Trump, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and American energy companies have done a great and lasting service to genuine U.S. national security interests.
The question that cannot be dodged, however, is why the United States is at daggers drawn with Iran because Tehran is cocking around with British shipping? The UK is an ally of America’s imagination, not one of contemporary or historic reality. The only thing the United States has ever gotten from the UK – and it is no small thing — is what the Founders called “English liberties”, which are at the very heart of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. But in toting-up the pluses and minuses of the republic’s relationship with Britain, the negatives far out way the positives, the single one of which was just mentioned.
–1770-1775: The British Crown and Parliament gradually denied British North Americans the “English liberties” that were their birthright; occupied Boston with military forces; closed Boston Harbor to commerce; suspended representative government in Massachusetts, as well as its governing charter; and started a war when the British army attempted to disarm Bostonians and those living in the region surrounding the city.
–1776-1781: The British military conducted a savage war against pro-independence British Americans, and promoted civil war among, and Indian wars against, them. British American prisoners of war were treated with enormous barbarity, and the king’s army and navy burned and pillaged villages, towns, and other property.
–1783-1796: Notwithstanding the Treaty of Paris (1783) that ended the American Revolution, British Governors, civil officials, and military forces stationed in Canada armed, incited, and otherwise assisted Indian tribes to attack the new republic’s frontier settlements and populations. It also tried to entice Vermont to join British Canada.
–19th Century: Britain waged war against the republic from 1812-1815. Later in the century, British governments meddled – contra-the Monroe Doctrine — in the Western Hemisphere in Texas, Venezuela, and and other Latin American states. Most damaging, the British government dangled the glittering prize of official UK recognition for the Confederacy – thereby augmenting Southern determination to keep fighting – and provided the C.S.A. Navy with commerce raiders that were used, in part, to bring contraband through the Union blockade and into southern ports. Those C.S.A. raiders also ruined New England’s whaling industry and severely damaged the carrying trade of the U.S. merchant marine. Britain also provided Confederate ground forces with small arms and a limited number of sophisticated artillery pieces.
–1914-1917 and 1939-1941: British governments used their intelligence, propaganda, and military personnel, and those of the some of the countries of Britain’s empire – Canada, in particular — to covertly influence/suborn U.S. citizens, politicians, bankers, industrialists, media, and opinion leaders to demand the republic’s entry into both world wars on the side of Britain and its allies. In 1917, Britain succeeded in gaining America’s unnecessary participation in a European war. By 1941, covert cooperation among British agents, Roosevelt administration officials, and leading U.S. citizens again succeeded in driving America toward war, but this time war came only because Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the republic.
The foregoing is but a brief summary of some of Britain’s centuries-long despicable behavior toward the United States and its national-security interests. That such UK behavior continues today is patently obvious in the large and willing role Britain’s government and – at least –intelligence agencies played in Obama’s attempt to destroy President Trump’s candidacy and then to overthrow his presidency and administration.
Given the foregoing record, why does the Trump administration give a damn about Iran seizing a British tanker. That act could be spun into an act of war, but it would still be an act of the war against Britain not against the United States. If the British want their tanker back, let the windbag Boris Johnson – who authorized British electronic surveillance of Trump and his organization before and after the 2016 election — fight Britannia’s battles.
Let old Boris and his anti-Trump diplomats negotiate with the Mullahs and get the ship back, or let the mighty Royal Navy sail smartly into the Persian Gulf, deal a death blow to Iran’s navy, and return to the UK on clouds of glory with the freed ship. In other words, why not let a British prime minister perform as the adult leader of a nuclear power – for the first time since Mrs. Thatcher retook the Falklands in 1982 – and let the British military prove if it is anything more than a force from which small units are sent to unnecessary wars with U.S. forces to keep the realm’s American Neocon sugar daddies sweet.
There is another problem that has been fully exposed by Trump’s apparent preparations to send the U.S. cavalry to aid the British in their problem with Iran. The minute that it was publicly confirmed that Iran held the British ship, the British foreign secretary announced that the Royal Navy was not big or strong enough to meet all of its worldwide commitments. This, of course, was the UK government’s way of telling Trump that only the U.S. navy could get the tanker back if push came to shove with Tehran.
The common belief is that Tehran is a tin pot regional power with a crumbling economy, and that Britain is Great Power armed with both nuclear weapons and a storied and heroic military. And yet the first words out of a senior British minister amounted to telling America, “Oh, we’re so weak, so it is your duty to help us.” Now, Britain is a country that – as noted above – has tormented this republic since its inception and even before. But the real question is not why would we help a bastard that has caused America harm for nearly 250 years, but also what does Britain’s inability to fend for itself against Iran, say about its reputation as the strongest member of NATO?
What it says is that the United States should immediately begin the formal process of withdrawing from the alliance. If Britain is the strongest of NATO’s European militaries, but cannot get a single ship back from Iran, what does that say about NATO as a whole? Most of Europe’s NATO members – save for two or three east European members – have steadily disarmed since the 1991 demise of the USSR and are far weaker than the UK. In addition, Europe’s educational system has, in the same period, bred the warrior spirit or inclination out of the bulk of its students. In this light, Britain appears the pick of a mighty mangy, effeminate, and militarily obsolete NATO litter. Having seen Britain defeated and scream for help because Iran captured of just one of its merchant ships – a skill that it once employed to devastate the U.S. merchant marine and press American sailors into the Royal Navy – what possible use would Britain and NATO’S other European members be if Russia moved against Europe?
The answer is next to none, and so any Russian move westward could be stopped only by the quick use of British, French, and American nuclear weapons. Why would the United States have any interest in staying in an alliance that can only defend itself with nuclear weapons, the elites of which have laughed and smirked as U.S. taxpayers have been, for decades, scalped to pay for the additional American military strength needed to make up for Europe’s NATO slackers and their unwillingness to pay for their own defense? The answer is that the republic has no genuine national-security interest in doing so, and ought to depart NATO as soon as legally possible, and thereafter let the European governing elites decide if they want to become responsible adults or learn to speak Russian
In sum, for the American republic, energy independence means nothing if the national government still is willing to be drawn into wars to protect another country’s energy supplies. If Britain cannot take care of itself on the energy front, let the bastards in perfidious Albion sit and freeze in the dark. Likewise, the NATO alliance is a dire threat to the United States because its European members are today far less capable of defending themselves – with conventional arms — against the Russian military, than were their far better-armed predecessors to confront the Wehrmacht in 1940.
Overall, the United States would be better off without Britain and the rest of NATO as allies, for whom we must automatically go to war to defend if even just one of them is attacked. Indeed, as my dear friend Colonel Mike says, the republic would be better off and safer by having an alliance with Five Guys rather than with the Five Eyes – at least we would get a burger and peanuts to shell out of the former.
