When and if President Trump addresses the NATO conference that begins in The Hague today, I trust that he’ll announce the withdrawal of the US from the alliance. Why would the US remain within such a contemptible entity, which marries incompetence with dishonesty and deceit with stupidity? The most perfect prelude to the summit came when, with world war simmering on no less than three fronts, and with British military bases supposedly on total lockdown, terrorist sympathisers could saunter into RAF Brize Norton. There, presumably after an all-night disco-rave with flashing lights on a runway, they vandalised several military aircraft, while the single RAF sentry was gallantly on duty in the local pub. Could have been worse. They might easily have planted bombs inside the RAF’s last remaining troop-carrying aircraft, which in due course would have become a cloud of superheated molecules at 35,000 feet, but no seat 11A.
What does all this tell President Trump? That these British are not serious, whereas he emphatically is. “Serious” certainly covers going into a forever-war with Iran and the world’s Shias which he promised he’d never do, and without even seeking Congressional approval, whereas “serious” does not in any sense apply to the British. In 2012, after Taliban blew up half a dozen US Marine Corps Harriers at Britain’s Camp Bastion airbase in Afghanistan, the Corps promptly ended the careers of two senior officers. But though the primary culprits were their own, the British (naturally) blamed an innocent Tongan contingent, and no British careers suffered. You see, the British way when dealing with a calamitous failure is to keep smiling (preferably through a stiff upper lip), blame a few foreigners if possible, and soon all those iffy problems will simply iff off.
Ah, the problem here is that such problems never iff off, but the pathologically amnesiac just think that they do. Which is why the British Army has already forgotten all those bitter and bloodily-acquired lessons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland. Sorry, Northern where?
Britain’s Prime Minister Starmer promised Trump that he was going to increase government spending on defence and then assured his backbenchers he wouldn’t. Lying in public to Trump is the sensory equivalent of steam-cleaning your eyelids, as Starmer will soon discover. Anyway, the British Army could barely put a nine-man cricket team in the field these days, never mind an infantry brigade. Furthermore, the British defence budget conceals within the small-print of its impenetrable double-entry accounts the inflation-proof pensions of hundreds of thousands of military retirees. Also invisibly listed there are the costs of rural broadband. Why? Because they just are, that’s why. Indeed, some genius-accountant is probably disguising the costs of the calamitous HS2 railway project as “defence sundries”: stationery, paperclips, stapes, milk, total, £200 billion, it’s all right, the dim Yanks will never notice, they never do.
Yes, they bloody well do, but they just can’t cope with such double-dealing, smarmy incompetence, a commonplace phenomenon across the EU. For example, the Netherlands, this year’s NATO host, has an internal gendarmerie, the Marechaussee, whose budget is totally funded by defence. So, when the Dutch say that their defence budget is a whopping €27 billion or 1.9 per cent of GDP they are – what’s the word? – oh yes, lying.
Similarly, the Italians, whose internal national police force, the lads with the big ostrich-feather hats, the Carabinieri, are funded out of the defence budget. Even Italy’s forestry service is incorporated in the Carabinieri, which employs over 100,000 people, including the Carbonari – yes, the charcoal-burners who invented the famous spaghetti. You say Carabinieri, I say Carbonari, let’s call the whole thing off. Let’s not, because the lot, salaries, capital costs, axes and pasta conveniently shove up Italy’s “defence budget” to 1.4 per cent of GDP. Sigh; another lie.
Likewise, the people who invented the word gendarmerie are at the same game, with the running and capital costs of the 103,000-strong French domestic police also coming from “defence”. However, if Russian forces ever break through Alsace, they’re unlikely to encounter a Maginot line of armour-piercing kepis and laser-guided cloaks with chic chain-fasteners.
In essence, aside from that brace of politicised-sewers, the courts in Strasbourg and The Hague, Europe has two unifying vectors: the EU and NATO. The former cannot fight, and the latter doesn’t know how to, well, not as NATO. I recently stood on the French-Belgian Border, at the very point where Rommel crossed the Maas/Meuse in 1940. By happy chance, the air forces of both countries were in the skies overhead. On one side were F-16s, on the other Mirages, both antiques. Seventy-six years after NATO came into existence, it still can’t even standardise obsolescence, even though this is about the same amount of time as elapsed between the end of the US Civil War and American entry into the Second World War. What does that tell us?
That these people are not serious.
Why would they be? The EU is basically the Hanseatic League with a diploma in Mediterranean cookery. NATO is a large marquee, with the canvas and the tent poles and the electricity coming from the US, while the windy gaps between the flapping awnings are supplied by Europe. In short, the defence of the EU is a liturgy without a theology, primarily because its designers wanted an expandable territory rather than a defensible perimeter or unity of purpose. The script ran, The larger we are, the better we are!
Not so: not remotely so, since all successful democracies have an army at their centre. The US Army and the Marine Corps outdate the US Constitution, Les Invalides is psychologically more important to France than the Elysée, and whenever the UK wants to extol its national virtues, out struts the Brigade of Guards. Not coincidentally, Ireland has no military component to its sovereignty. Within the EU, it is now the smooth-talking, freeloading tapeworm that has been luring US companies into its low-tax regime, though it doesn’t even try to protect the underwater nexus of cables that makes its parasitic economy possible.
However, Ireland recently announced that it is finally ordering a single piece of towed-sonar, due to be delivered in three years (probably five) and if it ever arrives, it will be the first time that Ireland has attempted to police the depths that it has “governed” for over a century. But for now, Ireland has just one functioning patrol vessel, whose single gun doesn’t work. If the admiral commanding Russia’s Atlantic Fleet wants a good night’s sleep, he probably whispers “Ireland” three times, and that’s him off to the land of nodski.
Meanwhile, the Irish Air Corps is comparably defunct: If it loses just two more air traffic controllers, the duty-officer may as well turn off the lights as he goes home. The Irish Government has nonetheless acted swiftly and decisively by renaming the Air Corps “The Irish Air Force”, yes, festooned with capital letters but utterly unfestooned with aircraft. And that’s it: nearly 900,000 square kilometres of unguarded sea on the EU/NATO’s western flank, because Ireland proudly proclaims its neutrality. Instead of being booted out the EU for its unprincipled, self-regarding slothfulness, it is treated with deference, because it is Europe’s good Anglophone country, unlike the treacherous, unworthy, incompetent British.
Not that those terms don’t apply. They do. Two words abolish any doubt about that: Brize Norton. However, those earlier words – treacherous, unworthy, incompetent – also apply to most NATO/EU countries, with the shining exception of the Baltic states. In the great post-Ice Age tribal migrations that produced the racial minestrone that is Europe today, the peoples along the Baltic found that they had inadvertently become neighbours to a brilliant, drunken, bicontinental, tri-oceanic, manic-depressive psychotic whose raging, bloodthirsty tantrums were regularly interrupted by long transports of elysian beauty.
Borodino vs Borodin: Bolshoi vs Bolsheviks; Butterflies vs NaBokov. So, in this final example, we see rare and exquisite lepidoptera being netted, gassed and pinned through their still-warm, rainbow-oozing thoraces onto index-cards by the most exquisite writer of the 20th century. It was he who turned his elegiac exultations over the serial-rape of a 12-year-old girl into bewitching literature.
How could such an evil obscenity be remotely possible? No idea. Ask Russia.
So back to Moscow 1812, or the hecatomb of the purges, or Stalingrad, or Kursk, or the thousand days of the Leningrad/St Petersburg siege or the gang-rapes of Berlin and Vienna, or the Iron Curtain, or the butchery of Ukraine, with a million dead and wounded Russians, and yet still the war continues. We must now surely understand that the issue is not Tsarism or Leninism or Stalinism or Putinism. It’s Russia, and though the USA has an Arctic sea-border with greater Russia, it’s us, we poor Europeans, who share the same landmass as this irrational, chess-playing, music-loving, violent Caliban, one minute crooning a melodious air by Tchaikovsky, the next howling with murderous self-pity before devouring its neighbours’ children, lightly boiled in a creamy Stroganoff sauce (but easy on the mushrooms, and yes, thinly diced rather than chopped).
And though logical-Russia knows that western Europe will never invade it, reptile-brained Russia mounts endless war-games against us in revenge for some deep hurt, the antiquity of which is matched by the deranged Russian inventiveness that had originally created it. This is Europe’s inescapable geopolitical bipolar-volcano, not America’s. So, it is time to grow up, to avoid war by sedulously preparing for it but without the US, to acknowledge that the French were 100 per cent right to develop their own bomb, and to ruthlessly isolate those European countries that refuse to cooperate in our common defence.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Fruitcake intellectuals who don’t care about ‘thought’