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Monday, December 06, 2010

Vichy Britain: The truth exposed by Wikileaks




This piece of mine appears in today's First Post.


Neil Clark: Even the Americans are turned off by our blind obedience to the ‘special relationship’.


Oh, how the mighty have fallen! A hundred years ago, Britain was the centre of a vast global empire, which controlled about a quarter of the world. Today, as the WikiLeaks disclosures reveal, the one-time rulers of the world have been reduced to the status of arch-crawlers to American imperial power.


Saturday's batch of leaked cables - published by the Guardian - reveal how leading Conservatives, when in opposition, promised to US diplomats that they would run a 'pro-American regime' and buy more US arms once they got into power.


The level of obsequiousness shown by the self-confessed 'children of Thatcher' to their imperial masters in Washington is quite extraordinary.


You can read the whole of the article here.

3 comments:

Douglas said...

Despite President Obama's vigorous efforts to snub and insult the UK at every turn, there is a decades-long history of shared values, interests and action (FDR and Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher, Bush and Blair) that I believe will continue after Obama is a footnote in the history books.

I recalled this blog post about Churchill when I read your post.

I would also like to recommend the book "The Anglosphere Challenge" by James Bennett, which is putting the "special relationship" into a larger context.

I've noticed a lot of "Free Gary" icons on Twitter. But that is because I follow a lot of Brits on Twitter, and because I was diagnosed with Asperger's in 2006.

vladimir gagic said...

In a moderate defense of the United States, don't forget the warmongering goes two ways. Tony Blair was the proximate and primary force that motivated Clinton to bomb Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and Serbia in 1999. Without Blair's insistence, Clinton would never have had the stomach for the attacks.

brian said...

well the US is itself a victim of a 'special relationship'! the one with israel, where US politicians cant do enough for the mad dog of the middle east.
You can be sure the jewish israelis are also smugly amused at american servitude...