The question no one dares ask: what if Britain has to defend itself from the US? | George Monbiot

5 hours ago 3

All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.

As Keir Starmer visits the orange emperor’s court in Washington, let’s first consider the possibilities. I can’t comment on their likelihood, and I fervently hope that people with more knowledge and power than me are gaming them. One is that Donald Trump will not only clear the path for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, but will actively assist him. We know that Trump can brook no challenge to his hegemony. Russia is no threat to US dominance, but Europe, with a combined economy similar to that of the US, and a powerful diplomatic and global political presence, could be.

Putin has long sought to break up the EU, using the European far right as his proxies: this is why he invested so heavily in Brexit. Now Trump, in turn, could use Putin as his proxy, to attack a rival centre of power. If Trump helps Russia sweep through Ukraine, Putin could then issue an ultimatum to other frontline and eastern European states: leave the EU, leave Nato and become a client state like Belarus, or you’re next. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán might agree to this. If Călin Georgescu wins in Romania in May, he might too.

What form could US support for Putin in Ukraine take? It could involve intelligence sharing. It could involve permanently withdrawing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service from Ukraine, which is strategically crucial there, while making it available to the Russian armed forces. Already, the US government has threatened to nix the service if Ukraine doesn’t hand over its minerals, as reparations for being invaded. This is how Trump operates: blackmailing desperate people who are seeking to defend themselves against an imperial war, regardless of past alliances. In the extreme case, Trump’s support for Russia might involve military equipment and financial backing, or even joint US-Russian operations, in the Arctic or elsewhere.

Now consider our vulnerabilities. Through the “Five Eyes” partnership, the UK automatically shares signals intelligence, human intelligence and defence intelligence with the US government. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that the US, with the agreement of our government, conducts wholesale espionage on innocent UK citizens. The two governments, with other western nations, run a wide range of joint intelligence programmes, such as Prism, Echelon, Tempora and XKeyscore. The US National Security Agency (NSA) uses the UK agency GCHQ as a subcontractor.

All this is now overseen by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, in charge of the CIA, NSA and 16 other agencies. After she recited conspiracy fictions seeded by the Syrian and Russian governments, she was widely accused of being a “Russian asset” or a “Russian puppet”. At what point do we conclude that by sharing intelligence with the US, the UK might as well be sharing it with Russia?

Depending on whose definitions you accept, the US has either 11 or 13 military bases and listening stations in the UK. They include the misnamed RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, actually a US air force base, from which it deploys F-35 jets; RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, in reality a US NSA base conducting military espionage and operational support; RAF Croughton, part-operated by the CIA, which allegedly used the base to spy on Angela Merkel among many others; and RAF Fylingdales, part of the US Space Surveillance Network. If the US now sides with Russia against the UK and Europe, these could just as well be Russian bases and listening stations.

Then we come to our weapon systems. Like everyone without security clearance, I can make no well-informed statement on the extent to which any of them, nuclear or conventional, are operationally independent of the US. But I know, to give just one example, that among the crucial components of our defence are F-35 stealth jets, designed and patented in the US. How stealthy they will turn out to be, when the US has the specs, the serial numbers and the software, is a question that needs an urgent answer.

Nor can I make any confident statement about the extent to which weapons designed here might be dependent on US central processing units and other digital technologies, or on US systems such as Starlink, owned by Musk, or GPS, owned by the US Space Force. Which of our weapons systems could achieve battle-readiness without US involvement and consent? Which could be remotely disabled by the US military? At the very least, the US will know better than any other power how to combat them, because our weapons are more or less the same as theirs. In other words, if the US is now our enemy, the enemy is inside the gate.

Much as I hate to admit it, the UK needs to rearm (though cutting the aid budget to find the money, as Keir Starmer intends, is astonishingly shortsighted). I reluctantly came to this conclusion as Trump’s numbers began to stack up last July. But, if they are fatally compromised by US penetration, rearmament might have to begin with the complete abandonment of our existing weapons and communications systems.

This may need to start very soon. On 24 February, the UN general assembly voted on a Ukrainian resolution, co-sponsored by the UK and other European nations, condemning Russia’s invasion. Unsurprisingly, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary and several small and easily cowed states voted against it. But so did the US and Israel. This, more clearly than any other shift, exposes the new alignment. An axis of autocracy, facilitating an imperial war of aggression, confronts nations committed (albeit to varying degrees) to democracy and international law.

For many years, we have been urged to trust the UK’s oppressive “security state”. Yes, this security state is yanked around like a fish on a line by the US government, with such catastrophic outcomes as the US-UK invasion of Iraq. Yes, it is engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens. But, its defenders have long argued, we should suck all this up because the security state is essential to our defence from hostile foreign actors. In reality, our entanglement, as many of us have long warned, presents a major threat to national security. By tying our defence so closely to the US, our governments have created an insecurity state.

I hope you can now see what a terrible mistake the UK has made, and how we should have followed France in creating more independent military and security systems. Disentangling from the US will be difficult and expensive. Failing to do so could carry a far higher price.