Awkward AUKUS is victory for opportunism – and a chance for Johnson to bash the French
This baby’s nuclear: I have no idea if this is the kind of submarine Australia is getting.
Isn’t it?
This Writer wasn’t aware of Chinese sabre-rattling around Taiwan – I’m more concerned with domestic politics, and face it: how much did the BBC tell you about it up until now? – but I’m happy to accept that there’s an issue.
It seems the United States has been supplying Taiwan with military support of some kind, in order to fend off encroachment by the so-called Red Menace, but decided more help was needed and turned to Australia.
The Aussies saw an opportunity to progress into the military major leagues and said they’d help out – if they could have nuclear submarines – and the UK stepped in to offer to build them.
This meant Australia had to cancel a previously-existing deal for submarine upgrades – with France.
No wonder the French government is denouncing the deal as a “stab in the back”!
To This Writer’s way of thinking, it seems the United States is trying to drag the UK into yet another ill-advised foreign adventure.
Harold Wilson had the good sense to stay out of Vietnam, back in the 1960s – but then, he was probably the most intelligent prime minister the United Kingdom ever had.
Now we have Boris Johnson in charge – a man whose intelligence rates only slightly higher than a swamp filled with quicksand. And he has already started ramping up the UK’s warfaring capabilities in the hope that he can start a rumble that might make him popular at election time.
Let’s face it – all Joe Biden would have to do to drag that blonde lemming over the cliff* is whistle and point.
And Johnson gets to say he has whisked a plum contract out from under the noses of the French.
Never mind the fact that he’s bringing loads more nuclear waste into the country – it’s loadsamoney for… someone!
Yeah. This particular deal looks less and less tasty, the more I look at it.
Oh – and the Chinese have said they’re not happy with all this, but they would, wouldn’t they?
*I know Disney made up that particular urban myth but it’s such a well-known story that the comparison still works.
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Cabinet papers for 1965 indicate that Wilson was unable to send British troops to Vietnam because of the vocal opposition of a group of Labour MPs.
In addition, Defence Secretary Denis Healey was very hostile to President Johnson whom he described in his memoirs as ‘a monster’.
Okay, a little history lesson for you:
Wilson believed that the Labour government should not be seen to support the war in Vietnam, and that in any case the United Kingdom simply could not afford it.
He therefore offered only token support to the United States. He believed he had to be supportive in a small way because the US was the UK’s biggest creditor at the time.
The UK had been left with a national debt that was two and a half times the size of its economy at the end of World War II, and it was a loan from the States that allowed the nation to rebuild. It is ironic that a nation that hates socialism is actually responsible for funding the Welfare State and the National Health Service.
Wilson still faced huge criticism from the public for not condemning the war in Vietnam, and when this spilled over into a Cabinet meeting where he was asked why he would not condemn Lyndon Johnson, he reportedly responded, “Because we can’t kick our creditors in the balls!”
More information is (for example) here: https://www.forces.net/news/harold-wilson-man-who-kept-us-out-vietnam
So Wilson supported the war politically, but didn’t send British cannon fodder to support the war militarily (troops on the ground) because Britain had no money and was in hock to the Yank Empire?!
What Britain did in Korea and Malaysia around 15 years before Yank aggression started around 1965 in Vietnam didn’t seem to be a problem? Was not the Labour Party still in power during the beginning of the US led aggression against Korea in 1950 ?
Or what it did in Kenya against the Mau Mau before the Vietnam war even started in the early-mid sixties? What, no money then? Still not indebted to the US Empire?
Suez 1956 is when the Yank Empire put Little Britain in it’s box and instead of adopting a neutral pragmatic foreign and geopolitical policy it decided to kiss America’s ring- post millennium, even more so. Why Britain has a FCO is beyond me, the US State Department calls the shots.
No. He supported the American position rhetorically, in order to keep the States sweet, but consistently avoided any commitment of British forces, giving as reasons British military commitments to the Malayan Emergency and British co-chairmanship of the 1954 Geneva Conference. He attempted to mediate in the conflict at least once, and actively dissociated his Government from American bombing of the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong.
Wilson never personally supported the Vietnam War in any meaningful way.
Wilson was not prime minister at any time during the Korean War, in Malaysia or in Kenya. You should probably look to the Conservatives if you have an axe to grind over that. And Suez was a disaster that famously killed the career of the ineffective Tory prime minister of the time.
I wonder whether your comment was intended to be taken seriously.
From Phillip Roddis(Steel City Scribe):The US military budget, oscillating between three quarters of a trillion and over a trillion dollars per year, exceeds the arms-spend of the next fourteen nations put together……
Unlike China’s and Russia’s defence sectors, America’s military-industrial complex (not my term but Eisenhower’s) is vital to the US economy; a key means of syphoning wealth from America’s many to America’s few. The US ruling class thrives on war not only as an enforcer of imperialism but as one which more than pays for itself. See this piece on the trillions that flowed to corporate death dealers led by Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman; courtesy the ‘War on Terror’. (Nor has Big Tech missed out, with fat contracts to Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple and Microsoft.)
Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons for real – and its stated reasons for doing so were not the real ones.
The aforementioned carnage in the middle east is no aberration. America has been at war for more than 200 of its 242 years of existence. … that none of these things rate a mention by the Guardian tells us all we need to know about ‘liberal’ corporate media. Or it would do if not for the fact that, as sci-fi author Robert Heinlein reminds us: You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.
Fourth and for now finally, I note the Guardian’s citing of China’s “incursions into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone, and upp[ing] the ante in the South China Sea”….
Taiwan is part of China, recognised as such by the UN….
So the Guardian may speak, with little fear of reader pushback, of China ‘threatening’ Taiwan. Millions of Westerners, including an intelligentsia kept historically and geographically illiterate while believing itself well informed, will buy it….Which brings me to that “upping the ante in the South China Sea”. Given the latter’s sensitivity, and the predictably bellicose reaction of the West to China’s threat – not to you or me, but to the elites who most gain from exploiting the global south – then of course Beijing will respond in no uncertain terms. It must be clear by now to anyone with half a working brain that China, like Russia, has had its fill of America’s “rule based order”. And we can be sure Beijing will respond, also in no uncertain terms, to yesterday’s news. Who knows, maybe it will supply Havana with nuclear subs to patrol the international waters of the Mexican Gulf.
In the interests of world peace….”
The axis of evil nuclear sub gang imperialists giving it large- this time against China (who, I’m sure are absolutely bricking themselves!). The PLA will teach them a lesson that has been long overdue if Sleepy Joe, BoJo and that large penal colony known as Australia are stupid enough to attack them militarilly.
What has been learnt from the debacle and absolute humiliation from the US aggression/occupation/defeat regarding Afghanistan?……..absolutely nothing.
Hubris, arrogance, supremacist ignorance and a phenomenal lack of self awareness will be the Empire’s downfall (it’s already begun). The fact that the majority of the ruling, political and media class in Little Britain has been fully behind this since the beginning of the new millennium (at least) means only one thing…..Britain will go in the same direction as it’s Pimp. If the US is Britains’s Pimp, what does that make Britain? Is Britain still in debt hock to the US Empire? What’s the new excuse going to be? What is it now? Shared democratic liberal values?!……this coming from countries that have invaded, occupied, bombed, economically sanctioned, trade embargoed and fascist couped more than the rest of the countries on this planet combined since the beginning of the new century alone (2000).
Keep this tin pot imperialism, Natostani nonsense up- the payback will come (it’s already begun) and the Global South, Eurasia and the majority of the Far East will not shed any tears when what’s been unleashed on tens upon tens of millions of men, women and children in Afgahanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria alone by ‘democratically’ elected ‘civilised’ regimes since the beginning of the new millennium alone.
‘China is committing genocide against Muslims in Xinjaing’…….what!?!?…is their a shortage of mirrors in the Anglo-American mind set world? Who the hell do the that mob in DC, Brussels, and Westminster think they are….after what they’ve done, and doing right now?
Donkeys led by donkeys……