Posted on 04/24/2016 6:22:49 AM PDT by Nextrush
Now will we grasp that the United States is not our friend, but a foreign country whose interests are often different from ours?
President Obama's blatant intervention in our internal affairs is not a sudden breach of a soppy 'special relationship'. The USA's only real special relationship is with Saudi Arabia, a 70-year old hard pact of oil, money and power, welded together with such cynicism it out to make up gasp.
Barack Obama's open desire for us to stay inside the EU is by no means the first or worst example of White House meddling here in these islands. Bill Clinton forced us to cave to the Provisional IRA in 1998 and his successor, George W. Bush, continued the policy by making us to Sinn Fein's bidding afterwards.
Washington came close to scuppering our recapture of the Falklands in 1982. And with the current state of our Armed Forces, which can nowadays do nothing without American support, I often wonder how the White House and the Pentagon would behave if Argentina once again seized Port Stanley.
If anyone thinks Hillary Clinton is a great friend of Britain, they're in for a big surprise.
But surely the Americans fought with us should to shoulder against the Kaiser and Hitler? Not exactly. The USA (quite rightly) fought for its own interest in both great wars, not for us.
When we ran out of money after the First World War, Washington seized the chance to force us to limit our Navy, and so began to overtake us as the world's major naval power. We had feared Germany would do this. It is one of the great ironies of history that the USA ended British sea power.
In the blackest months of the Second World War, just after the fall of France.....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
The Brits were pretty harsh masters. We just bailed on them first.
Britain has made their own problems.
You’d be speaking German, for starters.
The Monroe Doctrine was for continental European colonialists.
You sure about that?
The 1917 October “revolution” took the nascent USSR out of the war, but that doesn’t mean that they would not have been dragged back into it. Most of the Stalinist ideas had their birth in Lenin. A continental Second Reich would have been just as expansionist as a Third. Better look up what the Second Reich did in parts of Africa.
They got the stories wrong.
Hitchens is right here. Normally, all countries, including allies, will act in their own best interests. In fact, that’s what usually creates allies; When two or more countries find that acting in certain ways together will be in their collective best interests.
However, Obama has thrown a monkey wrench into things. He seems to have held long time beliefs that Western Civilization is evil, and seems to believe that a weaker USA would be in the best interest of the world.
One thing that cannot be denied is that he has repeatedly taken actions that actively diminish the strength and influence of the USA among the rest of the world, enacted policies that can only weaken the USA economically, and done all he can to divide us internnaly. But more importantly, he has actively worked against the USA’s interests by working against our traditional allies, and in many cases, cow-towing to, and even actively supporting those countries who are not only not our friends, but actively hate the USA, and wish to see the USA destroyed.
Mark
Even Old New York was once New Amsterdam.
It may be that he is unacquainted with the level of U.S. support rendered during the Falklands affair. That's forgivable, most Americans are as well. But the notion that one sovereign nation is not to be regarded as the "friend" of another is hardly a major revelation.
We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow...
That was Henry Temple, 3d Viscount Palmerston, in 1848. Any diplomat, politician, or foreign affairs "expert" who believes otherwise is too impossibly naive to be in the business. As late as 1934 there were contingency plans for war with Great Britain, after all. Surely Hitchens cannot be amazed by this.
I do take issue with the notion that the United States is responsible for the decline and fall of the British fleet. There is one, only one, precisely one party responsible for that and it is the British government who didn't want to pay for one. It is the reason the storied Black Watch no longer exists as an independent unit. Every government sets its spending priorities, and Great Britain's didn't fall in that direction. If now some of that seems misplaced, take it up with Parliament.
As far as "special relationships" go, however, one may certainly have one despite all the above, and for better or worse, we do. We have a "special relationship" with Israel too, which does not argue a necessarily happy one at all times. We have one with Japan for entirely different reasons dating back to Perry. But when the lead starts flying, it is not Israeli or Japanese troops who are in the next foxhole over, it's the Brits and the Aussies and the Canucks. You can find a term other than "special relationship" to describe that if you like, but it doesn't change anything.
They can be silly sods, though. They play baseball in armor and football without it. Probably all that warm beer they drink...
That would have left Germany as dominant in Europe (bad). But Hitler and Stalin never could have risen to power (very good).
As for the German colonies, the British navy could blockade them into insignificance whenever the Brits felt like it.
And I plan to test my theory if I can somehow figure out how to build a Mr. Peabody Wayback Machine.
You claim I “refuse to learn” and you don’t know history? OK then.
It was only the British High Commissioner who set up Al-Husseini as the Jerusalem Mufti, specifically antisemite and anti-Zionist John Chancellor, and that came back to bite him on the rear end in 1936 when Husseini rebelled against British rule and fled to the Axis powers eventually. For someone who claims to be so deeply emotionally involved in matters such as this, how come you put this on the entire British empire and not on this man?
The USSR’s alliance with Egypt and Libya energized the Wahhabist, Salafist and Ikhwan elements in those nations. How are you unaware of that fact of history?
I don’t hinge an empire’s behavior on this or that tyrant. Any other human could have been chosen. I would say that Wilson and his policies were beginning to have a negative societal effect on the USA, which needed its moral and religious faith far more than shifting faith towards a centralized government.
Here we will most certainly agree.
But taken in the whole, the English did more to civilize the world than any other country. That is the main point I was trying to make.
Yes, and Florida and California had strong Spanish influence. Louisiana the French. If it was just British, it wouldn’t be quite as interesting.
Sorry. We did dig you out. Without the oil and armaments we shipped over, without American troops, victory in the West would have never been possible. Goes for both WWI and II.
Admittedly, the Soviets did the heaviest lifting in WWII.
With a LOT of help from us. Stalin killed a lot more Russians than needed to die in order to win the war.
It’s humor, dude, allow some literary license.
Dude, just ignore Obama. We do.
I’ll take that advice to heart. Thanks.
Mr. Hit hints is 100% wrong. America is Britain’s friend. It’s the socialists and Marxists who are not the friends of Britain. And your country is full of them. And they run essentially everything.
He is angry and cannot accep the fact that the majority of the British people put the socialists and Marxists in office. They are responsible for destroying Britan. Rise up John Bull and throw them off!!
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