*(Top image: Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with British troops in Tapa, Estonia. Credit: Number 10/ Flickr)
Following last Thursday’s announcement that the British government would increase its defence budget by an estimated £24.1bn over the next four years – the largest British military expenditure since the end of the Cold War, the largest military expenditure in Europe, and the second-largest expenditure of any current NATO member bar the United States – the Conservative government of Boris Johnson has come in for criticism from many quarters.
Questions have been asked as to why this money will not instead be spent on replenishing a British economy wrought by the effects of the current COVID-19 pandemic, or to offset the effects of increasing child food poverty in the UK, an issue recently highlighted by Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford – accusations are also abound that Johnson is using these military increases as a means to further project Britain’s image onto the world stage following the UK’s impending departure from the European Union.
One aspect of this significant military increase that has so far received scant media coverage however, is how it fits perfectly in line with the likely foreign policy aims of the impending United States Presidency of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris; one that is far more likely to engage in overseas military interventions than the preceding Trump administration, and which going by the events of the past decade, will undoubtedly have the full support of Downing Street in doing so.
In 2011, following Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s plans to launch a ‘Gold Dinar’ currency, one that would have ended any reliance by Tripoli on the US dollar, both the CIA and MI6 subsequently launched a regime-change operation against the Libyan Arab Jamarihiya, beginning with the arming and training of Salafist terrorist groups seeking to depose Gaddafi, and which ended with a ‘No-Fly Zone’ being imposed over the Arab nation by both the United States Air Force and RAF, a military intervention that left what was once the most prosperous country in Africa in ruins, and was carried out under the auspices of then-US Vice President Joe Biden.
A similar situation involving joint US-UK imperialism also took root in Syria at the same time, following Bashar al-Assad’s 2009 refusal to allow Washington and London-ally Qatar to build a pipeline through the secular Arab Republic, resulting in the White House and Downing Street carrying out the same actions of arming and training Salafist groups seeking to depose Assad.
Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016 however, the White House took a noticeably pulled back approach to the original Neocon goal of removing Assad from power, ending the support of the aforementioned terrorist groups in July 2017 and instead focusing on economic sanctions against Damascus and the fulfilment of the Tel Aviv-backed Yinon plan in the north-east of the country via the arming of Kurdish militias; and bar a US cruise missile strike against a Syrian government airbase in 2017, and further air strikes carried out in 2018 against Syrian government targets involving both the United States and Britain, both in response to alleged chemical attacks, there has not yet been a full-scale US-UK military intervention in Syria on the same scale as what happened in Libya.
The projected victory of Joe Biden, who has long favoured an ‘Assad must go’ position, in this year’s US Presidential election however, looks like that may soon become much more likely; indeed, Kamala Harris was one of the notable Democrats who expressed bipartisan support for the Trump administration’s 2017 cruise missile strike against Syrian government forces, and new Secretary of State selection Antony Blinken has also long favoured a full-scale military intervention against Damascus – one that if it takes place, the British government is seemingly preparing to give its full assistance to.
WRITER
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