A recent blogpost on VDARE.com expressed the view that the UK will be on India’s side in the eventual struggle for global dominance between China and India, whereas Australia would be pro-Chinese, and the US position is unclear. It is time we reconsidered our long-term foreign policy in the UK. Our overall strategy appears to be drifting, with continuance of the US lapdog strategy that has been in place for a long time, and a foot in the European camp too. But the US will not always be the leading power in the world, and will not always be an Anglo-Saxon-dominated (or in US parlance, “WASP”) country.
The need for a rethink has been underlined by Barack Obama’s reflexive contempt for Great Britain. We have seen him refusing to meet a British prime minister, despite our support for US adventurism abroad and the supporting role of our troops in Afghanistan defusing landmines by hand—by hand, no less!—as part of the supposed, but largely fictional “special relationship” between the two countries. Barack Obama apparently supports Argentina’s claims to the Falkland Islands, and has enthusiastically sought to destroy BP for an accidental oil spill. The US has strong-armed the UK into an amazingly one-sided extradition treaty. Many minor slights could be enumerated, including the gift of trashy DVDs to a British prime minister and Michelle Obama’s disrespectful behaviour towards the Queen.
There is no special relationship. We must breach the psychological barrier that tells us that there is. On a people-to-people basis, there is much in common between the British and American peoples, and I would argue that this survives despite tensions at the governmental level, but if we cannot cash that in for support by the US government geopolitically, it is not as meaningful as it at first appears. Furthermore, US immigration policy is designed to shift the country away from its roots. The US of the future is not going to look like us, and we could be left looking foolish trying to insist to a multicultural America that Great Britain is its natural number one ally. We need other options.
I would like to see the UK as a neutral country, as the European option is too invasive of our country’s sovereignty. Furthermore, there is a whole world outside Europe, and while we might look back longingly to the reassuring world of the past, where European supremacy was taken for granted, that will not be a realistic view of the world in the future.
An interesting question is what attitude the UK will take towards India and China. I have outlined before some reservations over the rise of China, none of which is incompatible with UK geopolitical neutrality. But reservations over the rise of China should not be equivalent to support for the rise of India, supposedly because the country is “English-speaking” (after a very poor fashion) and “democratic” (after a very poor fashion too). More than anything else, I do not think the presence of a large (and unwanted) South Asian community in the UK should be the determinant of our foreign policy. We should not be trying to appease ethnic minorities. We need to think about things more rationally than that.
China is a determined competitor, and one with a casual attitude towards human rights, but that cannot be our main concern. In many ways, China is a more admirable country than India. It has a rational government and a largely non-violent population, and is not beset by the linguistic, religious and racial divisions of India. Unlike India, China is not a ramshackle and disorganised country. Furthermore, China is already further ahead on the path to modernisation than India. We should avoid giving any impression that we are going to back the loser (India) in a future global struggle for power. Another consideration is that, as India begins to become more powerful, the temptation for that country to interfere in the UK’s domestic politics where the Indian minority is concerned will grow—India is already exhibiting that tendency in relations with Australia. True, China plays the same game too—but the Chinese minority in the UK is much smaller than the Indian minority. A future relationship with both countries needs to be based on our right to handle immigration and issues related to cultural conflict as we see fit.
It is time to pull out of Afghanistan and NATO too, and become a neutral country. The US lease on the British Indian Ocean Territory (Diego Garcia) should be allowed to expire, and US military bases in the UK closed down. While maintaining strong civilian contacts with the US, we need to recognise that the US is determined no longer to be a WASP country. Barack Obama is not the exception to the rule, but the future rule itself. Relations with Canada, Australia and New Zealand may change dramatically too as those countries take determined steps to expropriate their Anglo-Saxon majorities. We need to make clear to China that we are not going to be rivals of their growing power. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or anywhere else in Asia, would be neither here nor there to the UK.
We should consider selling as many arms as possible to both China, and Taiwan if possible (although that option may be excluded by an agreement with China). We should also sell as many weapons as possible to India and Pakistan. China and India are both nuclear powers, and it is too late to bar them from the nuclear weapons club. China has bought weapons from Russia, and we should explore the option of defying the EU and the US and dropping all controls on arms exports to China. Ideally, we would aim for long-term supply contracts, to make as much money as possible out of China—although we should definitely avoid any commitments not to supply India with the most advanced technology too.
We should get out of the whole democracy export business, and cease the publication of official reports on the progress of Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese rule. We should also see if the City of London could garner a slice of the future offshore renminbi business that is likely to be monopolised by Hong Kong. All immigration —from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau—as well as from the whole of the Indian subcontinent—should cease, including that of refugees and family members.
We need to halt the opposition to Russia and Belarus that has been the policy of the EU and the US for some time. Those countries are democracies, although not necessary as liberal as the Western countries, and we should stop pushing those countries into the arms of the Chinese. Ideally, any agreement with Russia should guarantee the UK’s supplies of oil and gas quite independently of the EU. More generally, we need to consider our foreign policy, and not just continue with existing policies out of inertia.