July 26, 2019, EDITORIAL Strategic Culture
Foundation http://www.strategic-culture.org (Russia)
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/26/boris-johnson-dangerous-yes-man-to-washington/
The clownish figure of Boris Johnson comes with a trunk load of
anti-Russia baggage as he arrived in Downing Street this week as new British
prime minister.
The dour, hapless Theresa May has been replaced by a guy who seems to
think that geopolitics is a circus conducted with custard pies to the face.
His past deplorable comments about the Skripal affair blaming
Russian President Vladimir Putin for ordering an assassination plot in England
last year, plus his outrageous denigration of Russia’s World Cup as comparable
to Nazi Germany holding the Olympic Games in 1936, demonstrate that this politician
is unfit for office. He can only make relations with Russia even worse.
Moreover, Johnson’s cringing sycophancy to US President Donald Trump
adds a whole new disturbing risk of war with Iran.
Everything about this 55-year-old polemist, who made his journalistic
career on the back of concocting sensationalist rubbish, speaks of someone who
is unscrupulous and a self-serving egomaniac. Added to those “qualities” are
his dense stupidity and
insufferable arrogance characteristic of the pampered
English upper-class.
The Eton-Oxford educated, toffee-nosed Johnson is a proponent of a “hard
Brexit” from the European Union. In his acceptance speech this week, he
declared that Britain would exit the EU this October with or without a
follow-on trade deal with the European bloc. Johnson appears to suffer from
delusions of Britain as somehow capable of restoring its presumed greatness as
a free-trading nation, as in the days of empire over a century ago. He is
prepared to walk away from the EU in a “hard Brexit” departure, meaning that
the United Kingdom will be dependent on the Trump administration offering a new
“free trade pact” with London. Johnson needs to ingratiate himself with the
Trump White House in order to find a major trading partner in place of the EU
after more than four decades of membership to the bloc. He shows every sign of
being a pathetic Trump minion.
That inevitably means Johnson being beholden to Washington’s whims and
demands, not just on trade matters, but on every other way of following and
pandering to US foreign policy.
Already, the British have shown a reckless deference to Trump’s policy
of aggression towards Iran in recent months. London is dispatching more
warships to the Persian Gulf “to protect” British shipping through the strategic
waterway. Such deployment of increased military forces by Britain, in lock-step
with US escalation, is an incendiary move in a highly tense situation. It
further exacerbates tensions and raises the stakes over a miscalculation,
leading to a full-on military confrontation. Where wiser heads would be more
restrained and seek diplomatic negotiations to resolve a potentially explosive
stand-off, Boris Johnson seems too much of a lackey to Trump and his aggressive
policy towards Iran.
Johnson is bombastic, arrogant and ill-informed – not unlike Trump – and
that is a very dangerous combination.
With regard to Russia, the new British prime minister has previously
displayed an appalling lack of knowledge on geopolitics, history and basic
norms of diplomacy.
Recall that it was Johnson who as foreign secretary pushed the absurd
narrative over the Skripal incident in Salisbury last year. Within days of the
mysterious apparent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his
daughter in March 2018, Johnson was asserting – with no proof at all – that the
Kremlin was responsible for an assassination attempt. He even laid the blame
for the incident on Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordering the
alleged plot.
It soon emerged that Johnson was mendaciously distorting “intelligence”
seemingly implicating Russian state agents. That intemperate and reckless
official British response to the incident – which more than a year later
remains a bizarre, unexplained event – led to US and European expulsion of Russian
diplomats and sanctions, and a further deterioration in Western relations with
Moscow.
Johnson doubled down on his anti-Russia rants when days later in March
2018 he likened the then forthcoming World Cup held in Russia to the 1936
Olympic Games hosted by Nazi Germany. The British politician went on to compare
President Putin to Adolf Hitler and urged the US and Europe to take more
punitive actions against Moscow. He has made ridiculous, spurious historical
analogies between Russia’s alleged “annexation of Crimea” and the Nazi invasion
of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, saying that if Europe “doesn’t stand up to
Putin” it would be like the notorious appeasement policy of the 1930s towards
the Third Reich leading to World War II.
In making such wild and historically illiterate statements, Johnson
shows himself to be an ignorant buffoon. Ironically, he has pretensions of
being something of a history scholar and a big fan of Winston Churchill.
Johnson is not just a clown. He is a very dangerous and erratic showman
whose top objective seems to be self-aggrandizement. On one hand his dubious
“election” as prime minister this week by a tiny minority Conservative party
(less than 1 per cent of the British voting population) is a farce. Good luck
with his fantasies of resurrecting British “imperial greatness”. Most Britons
shudder at his new role, according to opinion polls.
On the other hand, his ascent to Downing Street marks the descent into
British delusional madness. The prospects for international relations, tensions
with Iran and Western animosity towards Russia are far from funny. It’s grim to
think of a clown in charge of a nuclear power, whose guiding priority is being
a Yes Man to Washington.
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