Britain is at the forefront of the Ukraine War. Two media events – Seymour Hersh’s report and Naftali Bennett’s interview – have hit the headlines which throw some light on this. Britain is also America’s closest ally, or is it only the ally of America’s Democratic establishment?

Nord Stream Balloons.

Seymour Hersh published a report on 8 February accusing the Biden administration of planning and executing the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines that took place on 26 September last year, by using an ‘obscure deep-diving group’ from Panama City, Florida, trained in special underwater operations.[1] Hersh refers to a single anonymous source who told him that these operations were directed with the help of the ‘Norwegian Secret Service and Navy’ to plant C4 charges covertly on the pipelines during the June 2022 NATO exercise known as BALTOPS (Baltic Operations) 22. The eventual detonation of the charges took place three months later. They damaged large parts of Nord Stream 1 twin pipelines, as well as one section of Nord Stream 2, and were triggered supposedly by a sonar buoy dropped by a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane making a ‘seemingly routine flight.’ This way, it would not ‘be obvious that America had been involved.’

Bernhard Horstmann at the Moon of Alabama (MoA) blog posted ‘Some Small Corrections To Seymour Hersh.’ According to the post, where BALTOPS usually included mine hunting exercises, in June 2022, these were augmented using camera equipped unmanned vehicles. These NATO exercises were also shadowed by two Russian Karakurt-class corvettes, anti-submarine warships with hull-mounted sonar systems. Both factors would make a secret undercover underwater operation impossible.[2]

Given that the pipelines are dug into the seabed, the operation would have required pressurised water systems to uncover them. The pipes themselves are strong (steel + concrete casing) and would require several hundred kilos of explosives to destroy.[3] The task would have needed several daily crew changes because of the depth and would have taken two to four weeks. MoA reasserts a claim it had made immediately after the explosions, based on German reports, namely that the USS Kearsarge, a large and highly capable ship with helicopters, fighter jets and 2000 soldiers, which lingered in the Baltic after BALTOPS up until 20 September, would be the most obvious candidate for executing such an operation.[4]

Larry Johnson, the same day that Hersh publishes his piece, posts a video originally published on YouTube on 30 September, which appear to confirm the role of the Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane in Hersh’s account.[5] The original creator of video, however, who tracks military aircraft movements on Money Werx US, denies Hersh’s claims in a new 10 February video.[6] Starting at 20.10mins the video explains that the P8 Poseidon aircraft was not a Norwegian aircraft, but a US Navy aircraft that came straight from the US, and refuelled over Poland, only to drop its load, as the video shows, at 30.37mins, over the spot where the explosions then occur. The sky around the Baltic is suspiciously quiet during this operation, only for the whole area to light up immediately afterwards.

In the video, the creator of Money Werx, muses that the movement of the plane as it drops its load, consistently with the damage done to the pipelines in footage recorded after the fact, are both in line with the effects of a HAAWC torpedo launched from the air.

We have then to consider why Russia blamed Britain for this attack at the time. One reason could be that Russian intelligence picked up a cryptic message sent by British PM Liz Truss to US Secretary of State Tony Blinken immediately after the Nord Stream explosions, in which she says: ‘job done.’[7] Likely, Russian intelligence picked the message up, which would allow Maria Zakharova at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to level accusing questions at Britain.

The cryptic message is potentially consistent with British divers preparing the ground, clearing the area of craft, placing signals for the torpedo attack, and reporting back after the event. The British and Danish intelligence services, which are reputedly very close, would have also needed to secure the airspace which lies above Danish territorial waters around Bornholm. [8] Such a collaboration by Britain with American objectives would be in line with its involvement in training and special operations in Ukraine generally. The Nord Stream sabotage appears from the available evidence thus to be a joint British-American operation.

Hersh’s report comes out a little over a month after the idea of blaming Russia for the Nord Stream explosions was dropped. An article in the Washington Post, comes out on 21 December to say, what most sensible people had already concluded for themselves, namely that Russia didn’t do it.[9] Hersh’s source comes in the wake of this admission to laud US capabilities for acting against ‘Russia’s threat of Western dominance,’ but at the same time to jeer at Biden for having the ‘balls’ to say he would do such a ‘stupid’ thing as blowing up an international gas pipeline,[10] and then actually do it – which the source tells Hersh was the ‘only flaw’ in the plan. Why didn’t Russians respond? Hersh asks. ‘Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did,’ comes the answer from the source. The source was using Hersh as a well-known public figure to attack the Biden administration, while covering its tracks by giving the journalist what looks like a fanciful story the White House could easily deny.

The realisation within the US administration that a really bad precedent had been set for the future security of undersea infrastructure, whether energy or communications-related, most probably led to a climate of recriminations, Hersh’s source probably being among many who wanted to sling mud at the president. But that isn’t the least of the report’s effects. The main virtue of the account, notwithstanding the questions over its details, or actually perhaps because its details are now up for active discussion, is that the UN, at China’s prompting, may soon decide it wants a full inquiry.[11]

This would be disastrous for the Biden administration’s continuing attemps to co-opt the UN in various resolutions to bolster its policy in Ukraine. This is also probably why the Russians are now being left to get on and repair the pipes.[12] This concession, however, is unlikely be the end of the story.

Boris Johnson and the failed peace.

It is common knowledge that between 28 February and 14 March 2022, active peace negotiations took place between Russia and Ukraine in Gomel (Belarus), and in Istanbul. We also know that some kind of agreement was reached between the parties, and the prospects for peace were good given the signs coming from Putin. Russian forces had withdrawn without preconditions from the Kiev area ahead of the final negotiations. A personal meeting between Putin and Zelensky was on the cards, until British Prime Minister Johnson turned up unannounced in Kiev on April 9. It was when Johnson quashed the idea of peace, and the war took off in earnest.[13]

What hadn’t been public until now was the fact that, quite apart from Turkish president Erdoğan hosting Ukrainian and Russian negotiators, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was pursuing active shuttle diplomacy, meeting with all the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and NATO face to face. According to a five hour TV interview, Bennett decided to mediate in this conflict after he had already developed a personal relationship with Putin when he met him in Sochi before the war. Pursuing this mediation role would also allow Israel the freedom of not taking sides in the conflict. After a brief intro, the tape of the interview is English-captioned, and discussion of Ukraine and the negotiations begins at 2hr 33min.[14] The interview provides colour, explains why the war could have been avoided, and suggests that Britain was the factor that drove things over the edge.

Bennett says that he was astonished at the level of concessions he managed to extract from Putin and Zelensky, in the course of his discussions. This comes at about 2hr 41min in the tape. Most especially, Putin agreed to drop demands for the “demilitarisation of Ukraine.” This was important because Zelensky was seeking guarantees from the Western powers as the basis for a deal with Russia. Putin saw that if Ukraine was allowed to have a sufficient level of armed forces to allow it to protect itself, then such guarantees, about which he was sceptical, would be unnecessary.

Putin also agreed to drop his demand for the “denazification” of Ukraine. Bennett explains that this was a euphemism for the assassination of Zelensky and his close aides. When Bennett phoned Zelensky from Moscow to say that the Russian leader had given his word not to kill him, Zelensky was overjoyed, came out of his bunker, and broadcast videos of himself in the presidential palace.

Bennett’s revelations add credence to the idea that Putin didn’t want war. If fact, despite all the White House rhetoric in December 2021 and January 2022 about the inevitability of a Russian invasion, CIA signals intelligence reports that Putin’s decision to invade was last minute.[15] Dimitri Medvedev later pointed to Zelensky’s extremely provocative threats to develop a “dirty” bomb out of fissile material in Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, as the trigger for Putin’s last minute decision.[16] Zelensky’s comments were made in the context of his statement at the 19 February 2022 Munich Security Conference that Ukraine would withdraw unilaterally from the Budapest Memorandum in which it had renounced the development and use of nuclear weapons.[17]

The significance of Putin’s concessions were not to be underestimated. They were, after all, the two main objectives of the “Special Military Operation” which Putin had launched in Ukraine under the “collective self-defence” provisions of article 51 of the UN. When Zelensky, from his side, then conceded Ukraine would not join NATO, Bennett believed (correctly, it seems) that all the elements were in place for an agreement.

Then, at 2hr 54min on the tape, Bennett describes the last leg of his negotiations with the leaders of the NATO powers: Biden, Johnson, Scholz and Macron. Where Scholz and Macron were open to peace negotiations, Boris Johnson was not. Biden, on the other hand, looked undecided and acted somewhat like an arbiter between the other leaders. Putin had already withdrawn the Russian troops in northern Ukraine, used initially as a feint to draw Ukrainian reserves away from Donbass, which was the main target of the Russian invasion. Having served their purpose, this withdrawal of Russian forces from the north was a sign of goodwill.

But then things started going badly. On April 4, a massacre of Ukrainian civilians in a Kiev suburb called [Bucha] was blamed on withdrawing Russian forces. This event was inexplicable in the light of the way negotiations were going on the Russian side and the way the withdrawal was being framed diplomatically. The recriminations surrounding that event, however, Bennett says, effectively ended negotiations. The inescapable nature of this context strongly suggests this massacre to be a false flag operation; a truly gruesome one in the history of false flags.

At that point, which comes at 3hr on the tape, he says that the West decided ‘to block’ further negotiations. Bennett also says that ‘I thought they were wrong,’ although he also uses the qualifier ‘legitimate’ to describe what he calls ‘the decision to keep striking Putin.’ But putting Bennett’s personal thoughts aside, the fact is that everything ended with Boris Johnson’s unannounced April 9 trip to Kiev. Biden, if he was indeed acting as an arbiter between the minor NATO powers, came down on Boris’ side. Why?     

Why Ukraine became a British war.

There are three aspects to explaining this.

(1) The first concerns the development in the United States of an anti-Russia policy in the wake of the Great Financial Crash (GFC) of 2008 as a response to the rise of China. NATO’s eastward expansion is revived.

(2) The second point concerns the turn to NATO by Britain after Brexit to launch a comeback in Europe and the importance of the Ukraine War in that transformation. NATO’s new dominance in Europe is a British opportunity.

(3) The third point concerns an alliance of the British and American establishments using Russia and Russian demonisation as a method of censorship in the West, in order to defeat the rise of populist forces. Trump’s attack on NATO galvanises the Atlanticist establishment.

Let us go over these three aspects individually.

(1) The Great Financial Crash and the rise of China

Cold War II is being fought on two fronts. In the Pacific we have the cold war against China and in Europe we have the hot war against Russia. But the war in Ukraine is not really about Russia. It is about the fact that America is faced for the first time, in the Chinese nation and its economy, with an antagonist that is its equal, albeit that America as the incumbent has greater institutional strength worldwide.[18] But China is blowing up the neoliberal world disorder, to which it has been shackled since its inception, to create what it sees as a more just balanced order for itself and the world.[19] It is written in plain English in the Biden-Harris National Security Strategy that China is the strategic antagonist of the United States.[20]

In his 7 February State of the Union address, Biden says, to cheers of USA! USA! from Congress that he wants to challenge China:

‘Before I came to office, the story was about how the People’s Republic of China was increasing its power and America was falling in the world…. Not anymore.’[21]

Russia didn’t come up in the President’s State of the Union address, although there is a mention of ‘Putin’s aggression’. Russia hasn’t been a threat to the commercial dominance of the United States since the turn of the Khrushchev régime towards détente after the Cuban missile Crisis. Russia has provided a resource-based economy complementary to the world’s manufacturing engines – Germany, Japan, South Korea, and indeed China – all of which have in turn been plugged into the financialised economy of the United States, as importer of manufactures and capital, sitting at the apex of the neoliberal world disorder. Until now.

With the GFC this system was put onto a ventilator, as quantitative easing was applied, and is now dying. China took over as the world’s single engine of growth in 2009 with its $700bn rescue of the world economy, engineered by the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao government in the Zhongnanhai (the leadership compound) at the time.[22] Hu launched a more assertive foreign policy. China’s subsequent leader, Xi Jinping, would then develop this policy in 2013 into a global plan for reconfiguring the relationship between China and the rest of the world’s nations, that came to be called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).  

The question then arose: who would have strategic control over Russia’s vast resources in the coming clash of giants, America or China? Carl Gershman, head of the CIA-offshoot, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), wrote in a 2013 Washington Post article, while pursuing his job of “democracy promotion” in Ukraine, that Russia represented ‘the biggest prize,’ for whoever could control it.[23] The first pass at trying to control Russian resources was made by the EU, pursuant to its 3 September 2009 “Third Energy Package,” in which the Russian government was asked to privatize its energy industry, with all the Western energy giants waiting in the wings to buy up its companies and facilities.[24] When Putin rejected the idea,[25] the EU lost control, and the US moved in.

Targeting the intransigent Putin régime became a priority as soon as Obama became president. The manufactured “Russiagate” narrative demonising Putin “the autocrat” actually began with the events that led to the passing of the Magnitsky Act 2012 in the US Congress and the initial batch of Russia sanctions and diplomatic expulsions under Obama at that time.[26] This began long before the Democratic National Congress (DNC) began turbocharging the Russiagate narrative, in 2016, with the vast web of lies that would eventually be discredited,[27] first by independent investigative journalism,[28] and more recently in a four part report in the establishment Columbia Journalism Review.[29]

The Obama administration wasn’t just about developing a “narrative,” however. It had brought neo-conservatism with it to the State Department along with its agents [30] quite openly engineering a coup in Kiev.[31] After this, it began cultivating a rabidly anti-Russian neo-Nazi régime in Ukraine that sought rapid rearmament with NATO’s help and the destruction of the Russian-speaking populations in the east of the country adjoining Russia. Before the 2016 “securitising turn” in Britain with Theresa May’s premiership, these were the kind of ugly facts about Ukraine that the BBC would eagerly make documentaries about.[32]

The aim of destabilising the Putin régime, and controlling Russia’s oil and gas, was clearly the ultimate goal. In May 2022, Wolfgang Streeck would comment in an article called The Return of the King, that ‘If there ever was a question of who is boss in Europe, NATO or the European Union, the war in Ukraine has settled it, at least for the foreseeable future.’[33] King NATO was back.

(2) Brexit and the (sudden) turn to NATO

In its Defence and Security Review, the Cameron-Osborne government of 2015 envisaged a beefed-up military-intelligence force for Britain with a more assertive global presence. This met with American approval. However, its policy of engagement with China, which led to its participation in China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) angered Obama.[34] The policy involved George Osborne’s visit to the Shanghai Stock Exchange in September 2015,[35] and the plan to link it to the London Stock Exchange. All this culminated in Xi Jinping’s state visit to the UK that October.

In this policy, the City of London was pushing its own agenda because it was impatient with the slow process of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade agreement between the US and the EU. TTIP and its mirror image in the Pacific region, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) specifically excluded China and were Obama’s responses to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Only, negotiations on TTIP were going badly. France was playing tough on agriculture and GMOs. Germany was playing tough on legal issues. German judges had ruled Investor Trade Dispute Settlement (ISDS) unconstitutional; ISDS being the crucial TTIP clause which allows business to bypass national court systems and sue governments for past and/or future profits lost. But Obama was relying on Britain to help push TTIP through. When Brexit happened, however, it all became moot.

Brexit was a result of the June 2016 referendum, on whether Britain should stay in the EU. Cameron promised this to the Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party in order to secure his position. The Eurosceptics represented the disgruntled southern British élite, a quasi-aristocratic milieu, that was allied to many in the City of London. They had originally become alienated from the EU project when the 1992 Maastricht Treaty between EU member states, laying the ground for a federated European state and a common European currency, was brought by John Major to the British parliament for ratification in 1993. This began a vicious and chronic internecine war in the Conservative Party.

In this period, Tony Blair de-ideologised Labour in 1995, drew Rupert Murdoch’s support, and won the 1997 elections by a landslide. Those elections were also contested for the first time by two single-issue Eurosceptic parties: UKIP, and the better funded Referendum Party. They were narrow elitist parties without much popular support, but they would draw crucial support away from the conservatives at the time.

Meanwhile, the negative effects of the neoliberal world disorder were working their way through British society and its economy. Although Britain maintained an independent currency, as part of the EU, it couldn’t pursue an independent industrial policy. Because Britain focused on banking and insurance, it could finance its trade deficits from its “invisible” (non-trade) earnings, keeping the price of sterling high, thereby disadvantaging manufacturing. Like the Eurozone countries that were being crucified by their common currency with Germany, Britain couldn’t compete with a Germany whose hyper competitiveness was literally built into the EU’s neoliberal wage and currency structures.

British finance and the London service economy boomed, creating a new young metropolitan élite. But Britain’s northern and coastal economies were hollowed out, and there emerged a disenfranchised population that provided the country’s disgruntled aristocratic-banking milieu with electoral allies that enabled them to win the Brexit vote in 2016. The Boris Johnson election win in December 2019 realised this unlikely alliance between the very rich and the very poor, in parliamentary terms.

2016 would be a fateful year. Every single institution of the neoliberal order put out warnings to the British public about voting to leave; the White House, the US State Department, the Pentagon, NATO, IMF, IBRD, OECD, EU, ECB, No10 Downing Street obviously, and HM Treasury, which cranked out numbers from its economic model to show that every single British household would lose £4387.25 p.a. if Brexit happened. A long string of celebs headed by David and Victoria Beckham were also pulled in to help. To cover all bases, Cameron threatened the British public with WWIII if they voted to leave.

But they still voted to leave. Obama was incensed and Cameron had to resign. But then the Democratic establishment in America was also brought down in shock by the disenfranchised when Trump astonished everyone by winning the Republican nomination and by beating Hillary Clinton in the presidential election in November that year. The UK and the US publics had spoken.

While the Brexit outcome had its reason in the fact that Britain was the most unequal of OECD nations by measures of regional and sectoral income and productivity, it had a logic for the country’s future which, irony of ironies, George Osborne had understood when he travelled to Shanghai; namely that Britain’s future lay in the fact that it is the world’s second largest exporter of services, whether financial, legal, informational, musical and architectural.

But Britain’s élite, like most Western élites, identifies the national interest with its own. Once empowered, the Eurosceptic right, whose ranks were now swollen by their Brexit victory, and under influence of the American right, began to mount a sustained attempt to change the overall narrative on China. Theresa May reflected this in her policy of “securitising” Britain’s relationship with China; viewing the eastern giant as a threat rather than an opportunity.

America had its reasons. The so-called “China shock,” quite independently of the effects of NAFTA, and other free trade deals, had cost the country 2.5m jobs. Trump, played his part, beginning as he did the US-China trade war in 2018 in which the United States made demands on China to reduce bilateral deficits by $200bn. Trump was addressing the concerns of the disenfranchised.

But the same didn’t apply to Britain at all. British élites would not become anti-China to solve a Chinese problem. They would forgo a golden Chinese opportunity, which Osborne had identified, in order simply “to securitise,” which meant prioritising Britain’s relationship with America through the Atlanticist institutions that are primarily security related. The Government’s 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy said,[36] the ‘United States will remain our most important bilateral relationship, essential to key alliances and groups such as NATO and the Five Eyes, and our largest bilateral trading partner and inward investor.’

In the same document, the government identifies Britain as a world class “soft power.” This is based on the country’s lead in the export of services. The oxymoronic nature of this identification arises when the kind of service that is being exported is subversive and military intelligence related. It is in that context that the Guardian remarked in May 2022 that ‘Boris Johnson is using Ukraine crisis to launch a British comeback in Europe.’ The writer of the piece wasn’t being critical, he was praising Johnson. Meanwhile, for Labour to establish its relevance in this environment, Keir Starmer would require his followers suddenly to make a blind investment in NATO, and thereby acquire the backing of the Murdoch press and the Guardian for the party.[37]

It is worth noting that the 2021 Integrated Review still seeks to define Britain as a “world power,” which it says seeks to maintain a significant reach in the Indo-Pacific region, despite its complete alignment with American strategy against China. This hubristic notion was predicated on an assumed continuing influence on Indian affairs and the affairs of other ex-colonies. But Britain’s failure to bring India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and even Commonwealth member South Africa in line with American policy on Ukraine, has blown this assumption apart.[38] All that is left for Britain to do, in the circumstances, is to use its still influential media to muddy the waters and spin the narrative that such differences are not important. Although they are.

(3) NATO vs. MAGA

It is important to recognise the GFC as something other than simply being the sign of a declining great power, starting to cede its place to a rising new one. The GFC also meant the collapse of the “Third Way” of the New Democrats, initially led by Bill Clinton, now seemingly fittingly represented by the senile figure of Joe Biden. As America struggled out of the stagflation of the 1970s and the sharp recession of the 1980s, the “Third Way” came as a reaction to increased inequality in the privatized Reagan economy.

Populism reared its ugly head in that period when Ross Perot challenged the established parties as an independent candidate in the 1992 presidential elections. If the voting system ultimately precluded Perot from making much headway in those elections, the Republicans under Newt Gingrich copied his campaign pledges word for word and used the Perot manifesto to end their 40 year stint in the political wilderness by taking the House and the Senate in the 1994 mid-term elections. Clinton would, thereafter, be hounded by a new Republican rhetoric and tactics that foreshadowed Trumpism.

Clinton decided to address populist demands by “financialising” them; to the delight of Gingrich, actually, who took the opportunity to become personally rich in the process. Clinton’s ultimately self-serving Third Way viewed the problem of the poor as a lack opportunities, but one that could be resolved through the provision of credit, rather than jobs. The idea was to deregulate banking and to ‘let them eat credit.’[39] As a redistributive mechanism, it was a lazy if not outright insane idea, that has ended up corrupting the entire American financial system. It isn’t surprising that the end of that particular rainbow led to the rise of a virulent hatred of the Democratic establishment by a new populist right that would elect Trump as its disruptor in chief.

It was Clinton who launched NATO expansionism at the end of the Cold War by pulling neoconservatism out of the shadows and making it American foreign policy. In elitist societies, neoconservatism becomes a tool for silencing democracy by invoking a constant state of emergency to protect the elite’s self-manufactured claims. The George W. Bush intermezzo between Clinton and Obama might have had a Republican face but was a continuation of the New Democrat era. The seeds of the Iraq War were embedded in the Clinton administration’s “regime change” philosophy. A 1998 law passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton authorized up to $97 million in military assistance to Iraqi opposition forces “to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein” and “promote the emergence of a democratic government.”[40]  In 1999 NATO would engage in the Balkan War to apply those same principles in Kosovo and would then enlarge itself to include the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. The unity of the Democratic-Republican establishment and the continuum of the Clinton-Bush-Obama régime is most interestingly manifested in the friendship between Michelle Obama and George Bush today.[41] Trump represented a discontinuity and came as a shock to this establishment.

Trump threatened NATO and the assumption that lay at NATO’s very foundation, namely that Russia was the enemy. During its headlong expansion eastward in Europe from 1999 onwards, Western leaders didn’t much think about Russia until the failure of the EU to keep it under the neoliberal umbrella. Theresa May’s new securitisation came in the wake of Obama’s 2012 Magnitsky Act. But when Trump came to power, she and the British establishment would, while maintaining a façade of cooperation with the Orange Man, work actively to support the Democratic Party’s destabilising campaign against him.

It is no surprise that one of the cornerstones of Russiagate and the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, as it took off in 2016, was a dossier prepared by an ex-officer of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service, Christopher Steele. Nor that Luke Harding, a reporter in the Guardian, assumed the lead role in spreading the idea of Trump as a Manchurian candidate controlled by Putin.[42] Nor indeed that the head of GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, Robert Hannigan, travelled secretly in July 2016 to Washington to brief CIA chief, John Brennan, on supposed British findings about a ‘stream of illicit communications’ between Trump campaign officials and Russians. Brennan would later admit that it was Hannigan’s visit that prompted him to form the inter-agency task force in August of that year to investigate Trump and to brief the top-ranking Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate on evidence he would say he had that Russia was trying to help Trump win the presidency.[43] Britain then staged its own local theatre of the absurd around the saga of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a close associate of Christopher Steele and his daughter Yulia, in Salisbury in 2018.[44]

As pointed out above in the text, and more especially in the footnoted references, this was all a pack of lies invented by the British Intelligence services as a service to the cause of the US-UK alliance and the Atlantic establishment. They had already demonstrated their plasticity when Bush pressurised Blair over the decision Britain had to take to go to war alongside the United States in Iraq. The “Steel dossier” of Russiagate would have its antecedent in whatSpiked magazine called the “Dodgy dossier” that justified Britain’s entry into the Iraq war.[45] The editors wrote: ‘Blair has come a long way since 7 September 2002. Then, while at Camp David with US President George Bush, he said: “We haven’t the faintest idea what has been going on in the last four years…other than what we know is an attempt to carry on rebuilding weapons.” From not having the faintest idea to 50-plus pages of “irrefutable evidence” in just 17 days? That ain’t half bad.’[46]

Claiming Russian interference in the democratic process in the West has provided the security state and its media with the weapon of “Russian disinformation” that has become central now to the narrative of the Democratic establishment, and central to censoring anti-establishment views.[47]

The admissions of Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan radio show about the suppression of reports about Biden family corruption, used the Russian disinformation tool precisely for this purpose. This kind of censorship has been the subject of much more extensive disclosures in the so-called “Twitter Files.” Those disclosures emerged after Elon Musk bought Twitter and recruited several prominent journalists to analyse the control that the security state, the FBI in particular, has exercised over social media.[48]

Britain played a central role in creating the necessary narratives for this state of affairs to come about, thus protecting the internationalist commitments of the American Democratic establishment, principally anchored in NATO, against the isolationist attack of populist forces which, in recent times, have campaigned under the banner of the MAGA movement begun by Trump.

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[1] https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=email

[2] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/02/some-small-corrections-to-seymour-hershs-new-nord-stream-revelations.html#more

[3] https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1574780608785653763

[4] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/09/whodunnit-facts-related-to-the-sabotage-attack-on-the-nord-stream-pipelines.html

[5] https://sonar21.com/independent-evidence-confirms-key-part-of-sy-hershs-report-on-the-attack-on-nord-stream-2/

[6] https://youtu.be/-gAzQ1KaCcE

[7] https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1587481700090908672

[8] https://www.marineregions.org/eezdetails.php?mrgid=5674

[9] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/21/russia-nord-stream-explosions/

[10] https://youtu.be/FVbEoZXhCrM

[11] https://tass.com/world/1578975

[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/world/europe/nordstream-pipeline-explosion-russia.html

[13] https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/5/7344206/

[14] https://youtu.be/qK9tLDeWBzs

[15] https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/russia-putin-ukraine-invasion-us-intelligence/

[16] https://tass.com/politics/1498889

[17] https://kyivindependent.com/national/zelenskys-full-speech-at-munich-security-conference

[18] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC97bJyrLKxoN8u9DXwftR0Q

[19] https://youtu.be/ya80z-CBuzw

[20] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/10/12/fact-sheet-the-biden-harris-administrations-national-security-strategy/  

[21] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/02/07/remarks-of-president-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-address-as-prepared-for-delivery/

[22] See my third video, the Neoliberal Order blows up, on this subject at https://youtu.be/ya80z-CBuzw

[23] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-soviet-states-stand-up-to-russia-will-the-us/2013/09/26/b5ad2be4-246a-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html

[24] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_10_264

[25] https://tass.com/archive/687261

[26] See the discussion between Lucy Komisar and Matt Ehret that correctly identifies the Magnitsky hoax and related sanctions, as the first leg of Russia Gate: https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2022/11/matt-ehret-interviews-lucy-on-the-browder-hoax/

[27]https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/07/24/meet_steele_dossiers_primary_subsource_fabulist_russian_at_us_think_tank_whose_boozy_past_the_fbi_ignored_124601.html

[28] For example, in  https://mate.substack.com/p/russiagate-has-no-rock-bottom

[29] https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php

[30] Specifically Victoria Nuland.

[31] https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-ukraine-hypocrisy#

[32] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBo0akeDMY

[33] https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/return-of-the-king

[34] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/13/white-house-pointedly-asks-uk-to-use-its-voice-as-part-of-chinese-led-bank

[35] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chancellor-lets-create-a-golden-decade-for-the-uk-china-relationship

[36] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/global-britain-in-a-competitive-age-the-integrated-review-of-security-defence-development-and-foreign-policy

[37] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/10/labour-nato-british-left-ukraine-keir-starmer

[38] https://commonwealth-opinion.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2022/understanding-indias-approach-to-the-russia-ukraine-war-realpolitik/

[39] A term coined by Raghuram Rajan, in Rajan, Raghuram G. 2010. Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Colin Crouch would call the policy ‘privatised Keynesianism,’ in Crouch, Colin. 2009. Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Régime. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 11 (3): 382-399.

[40] See page 10 in Woodward, Bob. 2004. Plan of Attack. New York: Simon and Schuster.

[41] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2021/04/19/george-w-bush-michelle-obama-friendship-bush-shocked-over-uproar/7284054002/

[42] Harding, Luke. 2017. Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House. London: Guardian Faber Publishing.

[43] See Sakwa 2021, page 101.

[44] Boyd-Barrett, Oliver. 2019. Fake News and “RussiaGate” discourses: Propaganda in the Post-Truth Era. Journalism 20 (1): 87-91.

[45] This was the 24 September 2002 document called Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, which parroted the Bush administration’s A Decade of Deception and Defiance published two weeks earlier.

[46] https://web.archive.org/web/20121224103735/http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DA63.htm

[47] https://www.racket.news/p/the-wests-betrayal-of-freedom?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[48] https://www.racket.news/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email