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by Finian Cunningham

Britain’s much-vaunted special relationship with the United States got a clunking reality-check with the arrival of President Joe Biden for the G7 summit.

Biden told Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, to stop messing around with the European Union over Brexit negotiations concerning Northern Ireland. According to reports, Biden ordered a severe diplomatic rebuke to Johnson not to jeopardize peace in Ireland from British wrangling about customs controls. 

That’s pretty sobering for the “junior partner”. It totally deflates British delusions of grandeur and shows Johnson and his ilk to be nothing but lackeys to the Americans who call the shots. 

Since the Second World War, we constantly hear about this American-British “special” alliance as if it is somehow a hallowed global force for good. We hear about “our shared values” and other platitudes. 

Well, it is special alright. Britain serves as Uncle Sam’s flunky. The Brits provide political, diplomatic and sometimes military cover for American wars of aggression around the world.

The Americans indulge the Brits by smiling and shaking hands for photo-ops like we will see at the G7 summit this week, and by also swooning for the cameras about a “special relationship”. But that term of condescending endearment does not mean parity between the two. 

The exemplar of reality was perhaps best seen during the GW Bush administration and Tony Blair’s premiership. The Americans wanted to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, not to avenge 9/11, but to impose “full-spectrum dominance” of US imperialism following the Cold War era. And Tony Blair, with typical British flair for moralizing and affecting civility, gave Washington the moral and seeming legal pretext for launching criminal wars. 

For the Americans, that’s what is really special about the Brits. They are dutiful lapdogs that perform an invaluable service of providing gravitas and propaganda to excuse what are otherwise heinous crimes under international law. 

The Americans have indisputable military muscle, but the British have an inimitable knack for conniving wordplay and duplicity. 

The first British bearer of the special relationship was Winston Churchill who coined the Atlantic Charter with Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 during the Second World War. When that war was won largely by the sacrifices of the Soviet Union, it was Churchill who crucially conceptualized the Cold War that the Anglo-American capitalist powers demanded in order to isolate Moscow. Churchill delivered his rousing Iron Curtain speech in the United States in 1946 before an admiring President Harry Truman. That speech can be seen as the beginning of the Cold War which was really just a curtain to conceal American imperialist plunder in every continent. 

The current British leader Boris Johnson, who likes to emulate Churchill, seems to have got above his station with delusions of grandeur. 

Johnson is reportedly not happy about the term “special relationship” because he feels that overusing the phrase implies that Britain is “needy and weak” and overly dependent on Uncle Sam. 

This British prime minister was the main architect behind Britain’s Brexit from the European Union. In his hubristic mind, Johnson believes that “Great Britain” (as if that name wasn’t enough!) is now set to become “Global Britain”. He thinks he’s leading Buccaneering Britain to rule the waves again as if it was the 19th century when the British empire pilfered a fifth of the world’s landmass. 

Hence his government is sending aircraft carrier battle groups to the South China Sea and declaring warnings to Russia and China over alleged malign conduct. This is while British society is crumbling from poverty and decay. 

In the arrogance of Johnson and many others in the British political class, the “special relationship” with the US should mean the two are equals. 

But the reality is Britain is a mere flunky – albeit a useful flunky – of the US. It has always been needy and weak as far as Uncle Sam is concerned. If it weren’t for the Americans intervening to bail them out financially and militarily, the Brits would have been defeated in World War I and II. 

Joe Biden is not someone to look up to as a leader. None of the US presidents are, except for maybe John F Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. They are all imperialist warmongers. 

Nevertheless, Biden’s Irish sympathies have been rankled by Johnson and Britain’s backsliding on Brexit which is stoking dangerous tensions in Ireland over a historic border dispute. 

The amusing – and enlightening – upshot from that is Biden showing in a very embarrassing way just who the boss is in the relationship between the US and Britain. Johnson has been told in no uncertain terms by the Americans to stop acting the cad and start implementing what he signed up to with Europe. That is what’s special. 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/202106101083118262-britains-special-relationship/

See toon mischief at top. Note: Apparently, the Japanese PM is a very dull serious character and this is why I chose to use the head of Herschel Shmoikel Pinchas Yerucham Krustofsky Krusty-the-clown to brighten him a bit...

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by Damian Wilson

Many onlookers expected the G7 summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall to be a big reset for the West. A chance to show that, after the tumultuous period of Brexit, Trump and the devastating coronavirus pandemic, the leaders of the biggest democracies on the planet had put all that behind them and were ready to take on the climate, vaccines for the world and an increasingly troublesome China.

And while those issues were addressed, what dominated the summit was the weeping sore of Brexit, the ridiculous ‘sausage wars’ that bedevil the chances of the UK and the European Union ever reaching final agreement on the British decision to leave the trading bloc.

Fundamental to the row, it came to light, was a European misunderstanding of British geography, with President Emmanuel Macron apparently under the impression that Northern Ireland and the UK were different countries.

He reportedly needed to be set straight on this by Bojo at Saturday night’s beach barbecue – social distancing, whassat? – but Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said it wasn’t just the French suffering this misperception, it was widespread among EU leaders and it was “offensive”. 

This helps explain why we have got to this point, if those involved in the negotiations don’t even know what country they’re talking about.

And while the spat bubbled along, it seems good ol’ President Joe Biden and the Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin had come up with a plan involving a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures deal that would eliminate 80% of the checks currently sought by the EU on goods crossing the Irish Sea from the UK.

At the risk of upsetting those geniuses involved in the past five years of talks around this thorny issue, why didn’t they think of the SPS route first? Instead, we have Biden and Martin jointly pulling a rabbit out the hat while the rest of the crowd stare on slack-jawed in wonder.

With no skin in this game, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga must be hoping his preparedness to sit through this torture will be reciprocated by his new buddies showing a readiness to run the Covid gauntlet for the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics scheduled for just over a month’s time.

There should be no excuses – after all, at Saturday night’s barbie, face masks were ditched, along with social distancing for a select group numbering far beyond the current UK allowance of just 30 people. Hey-ho. World leaders make the rules and it seems they can break the rules too.

Amid all this bickering, there was still time for the bigger issues, and top of those was China. With Biden in the Oval Office, it seems he is bringing more to this debate than a bagful of swingeing tariffs, and the big plan was to out-China China by offering receptive nations more than they might expect from the Belt and Road Initiative.

The initiative is China’s global goodwill policy aimed at providing finance to build railways, roads, ports and even sports stadiums in nations across the world – albeit at a price. Many of its efforts have been branded as debt diplomacy.

Now, the G7 leaders are saying they’re prepared to pull the same trick and likewise claim it’s a force for good. The only problem is it’s not quite clear who’s going to pick up the bill. Germany? USA? Anyone? Hello...?

Needless to say, China was quick on the rebuttal, warning that gone were the days of a “small” group of nations dictating terms to the rest of the world that “world affairs should be handled through consultation by all countries”. 

It’s funny that the Chinese Embassy in London should raise that point, because, tomorrow, the international leaders roadshow heads to Brussels for a meeting of NATO allies. And top of their agenda there is China once again, with Biden expected to press the Europeans to commit to a tough statement aimed at thwarting further Sino/Russian joint military operations in the region, which have been unnerving some NATO members.

The West can barely afford to take a breath before Tuesday’s big show in Geneva, at which President Biden is to meet Russia’s President Vladamir Putin for a cosy bilateral chat.

Forgotten will be the Cornish sunshine, the talk of sausages, and the never-ending Eurocentric obsession with Brexit – there is much more to talk about, and on issues that mean a helluva lot more to the wider world.

With Johnson having prepared the stage and Biden having shown himself willing to step up on key issues, maybe we can hope that the next few days will offer some sort of consensus on the way ahead both for the West and those it has found problematic to deal with.

China. Russia. Turkey. It’s not a long list. But now is the time to make progress and to make a difference. The world is watching.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/526470-brexit-g7-sausages-summit/

There will be a united "commoniqué" at the end of the parade and everyone will go back to their little holes where the fighting families make a mess of everything. At least the G7 will have served its purpose to remind us on which side of the planet we live. 

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