Our Greatest Foe

Of course visitors to the National Army Museum are right to have identified George Washington as our greatest foe. He set the tone for all of his successors.

Most people in Britain have never heard of the War of 1812. But they have heard of it in America. Britain and America nearly went to war many times during the nineteenth century, and a huge military presence was required to defend Canada. America entered the First World War on, among other conditions, the partition of the United Kingdom by means of the creation at least of the Irish Free State.

Who now remembers that in 1906, Edward VII conferred the Order of Merit on two Japanese princes who had been instrumental in setting up the Imperial Army, and on the legendary Admiral Tōgō, “the Nelson of the East”? But that was before America had foisted on us the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, under which we granted her the naval parity that we had just fought a World War more than anything in order to avoid granting to any other country. America thus destroyed our naval alliance with Japan, with all that followed from that destruction.

Up to and including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were anti-British no less than anti-Japanese acts, designed to prevent the War from instead being ended by the British re-conquest of the Empire in Asia and the Pacific. To that end, the British Pacific Fleet had been cheered into Sydney Harbour because it was not the American one that had been expected to turn up and require that Australia and New Zealand cut all trading and migration ties to Britain, abolish the monarchy, adopt American spelling, teach American rather than British history in schools, and so on. Those remain key American objectives.

America’s efforts to detach Commonwealth countries from the Sterling Area forced us back onto the Gold Standard in 1925, sending our manufacturing industries into depression and thus causing the 1926 General Strike. America was planning in detail for a war against Britain as late as 1935, and decided to retain that War Plan Red even in 1939. America subjected us to Lend-Lease, not paid off until 29th December 2006, though paid off on that date, so that no debt from the War can any longer be said to exist.

America required us to decolonise far too quickly, with disastrous consequences for numerous of the countries that we were forced to leave. America entered both World Wars for her own reasons, and on her own strictly businesslike terms with us. Nothing wrong with that. But it gives the lie to the popular fantasy of a “special relationship”, a term which no American has ever used.

America’s conduct over Suez does need to be seen in the light of the fact that that was a misadventure on our part, but America has subjected us to more than 60 years of the presence on our soil of foreign forces, politically as unmentionable as they are permanently unforgettable, without any parliamentary authorisation. America maintains bases here with fake British names, entirely unaccountable to us.

America also maintains such bases on two other pieces of our territory, denying democratic representation to the British inhabitants of Ascension Island, and forbidding the British people of the Chagos Islands to set foot there at all. America charges us for the privilege of hosting American nuclear weapons and pretending that they are our own, but we have so little self-respect that we pay up.

America forced us to join the European superstate. America, fundamentally defined against any British presence in the Western Hemisphere, did everything short of send forces to fight for Argentina in 1982.

America spent decades arming and directing our terrorist enemies (who “haven’t gone away, you know”) in order to bring about a United Ireland within NATO and the EU, up to and including more than complicity in the murders of at least three British parliamentarians, one of them a member of the Royal Family; America was funding and arming the IRA at exactly the same time as Gaddafi’s Libya was doing so, and the most uncritically pro-American Prime Minister until Tony Blair mysteriously “escaped” from what was supposedly an IRA attempt to assassinate her. No, not a few people in New York and Boston: it was common knowledge that NORAID was financially dependent on the CIA, as its own publications made clear.

America invaded Grenada, a Commonwealth Realm in the Caribbean, and America has long had legislation in place providing for the forcible incorporation of Canada. One fifth of British casualties in the first Gulf War were killed by American “friendly fire”, which managed to get in before the enemy did.

America seeks to disperse the inmates of Guantánamo Bay by flattering politicians in British Overseas Territories as if theirs were the sovereign states that their electors have consistently voted not to become. Slavish devotion to America took us to war in Iraq and Libya, and keeps us as at war in Afghanistan.

Our greatest foe, indeed. But only, these days, because we insist that he and his never has been and never could be.