Is UK Trying to Drag U.S. into World War III?

Keir Starmer's government is determined to continue the war in Ukraine and to undermine President Trump's efforts to bury the hatchet with Russia.

Between 1588, when the English Navy repulsed the Spanish Armada of Philip II, and 1815, when the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, the British government did a pretty good job of pursuing British interests without getting dragged into the treacherous and ever shifting alliances and conflicts on the Continent. Notable exceptions were the War of the Spanish Succession between 1701 and 1714 and the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763.

The causes of these wars strike the contemporary reader as obscure and confusing. An ancestor of mine, Sir John Leake, was an Admiral of Fleet during the War of the Spanish Succession, and ever since I read his biography as a boy, I have been fascinated by British military history. To me, what is most remarkable about it is that, despite the occasional stupid and disastrous war, the small island nation continued to expand its power and wealth in a steady progression all the way till the end of the 19th century.

It was only the in 20th century that the British ruling class started making really bad decisions, starting with its overreaction to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s ambition to build a strong German Navy. Until then, the British—whose royal family was from Germany—had always enjoyed cordial relations with the German principalities.

Additionally, British rulers struggled to form a coherent Russian policy. During the Crimean War the British allied with the Turks against the Russians. During World War I, the British allied with the Russians against the Turks. Following World War I, the British endorsed dissolving the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Both policies created yet more instability and resulted in yet more war.

After World War I, British rulers made a bungling mess out of the Middle East, implementing policies in Palestine, Syria, and Iraq that planted the seeds for many recent conflicts.

For a while the British supported Palestinian Arab claims, and even turned away Jewish refugees from Europe after Hitler extended German rule into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Poland. After the Irgun blew up the British Mandatory Palestine headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, Whitehall realized the place was too hot to handle and terminated its Mandate two years later.

During World War II, the British formed an alliance with the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin against Germany. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Churchill and Roosevelt essentially granted Stalin total domination of Eastern Europe, including Poland—ignoring that the violation of Poland’s sovereignty was the original casus belli against Germany.

Also overlooked was the fact that the Soviets invaded Poland shortly after the German invasion, as well as the Soviet murder of the Polish officer class in the Katyn forest in 1940.

During the 20th century, the one thing the British government undeniably excelled at was persuading the United States government to take its side in World War I and II. Along with these decisions, the American people have been conditioned to believe that the British—our cousins across the pond—are necessarily the good guys in Europe.

While some elements of this narrative were true in the past, I strongly doubt this is the case today. The current British government strikes me as the most dreadful in the nation’s long history. Especially stunning has been its tyrannical imposition of censorship, thereby flouting an unbroken tradition of free speech going back to John Milton’s “Areopagitica” defense of free speech, which he published in 1644.

In recent weeks it’s become clear that the British government is working hard to undermine President Trump’s attempts to end the senseless war in Ukraine and to make peace with Russia—a nation with whom the United States can and should have a peaceful and cooperative relationship.

Millions of Americans who have been systematically brainwashed by anti-Russian propaganda for the last thirty years are unable to see this reality, but this doesn’t make it any less real.

In light of recent events, it is one of the great ironies of history that the American Left was enamored with Soviet communism well into the 1950s, when Hollywood and other cultural institutions were sympathetic to Russia and hated Senator Joe McCarthy.

In 1953, the great American playwright, Arthur Miller, wrote The Crucible. Ostensibly about the Salem Witch Trials. the play was Miller’s parable about McCarthy’s so-called Red Scare.

When Alger Hiss died in 1996, the New York Times published a flattering obituary that lent no credence to the evidence that Hiss—part of Roosevelt’s delegation at Yalta—was one of Stalin’s most useful spies.

In recent years the situation has completely reversed, and the American Left has become hysterically anti-Russian. Nowadays you’ll find no greater supporters of the warmongering U.S. Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex than Americans who identify themselves as liberal Democrats.

We applaud President Trump’s bold and courageous efforts to end the senseless war in Ukraine, bury the hatchet with Russia, and focus on building American prosperity instead of getting dragged into Britain’s imbecilic “Great Game” against Russia.

I hope Trump makes it clear to Starmer that if the ridiculous and treacherous Prime Minister gets Britain into a war with Russia, the Yanks will not be coming to his rescue.