John Bolton
John Bolton doesn’t want a trade deal with the UK – he wants
to colonise us
Simon Tisdall
Trump’s national security adviser wants the UK to be
beholden to the US for its daily bread, making the country a timid American
outpost
Tue 13 Aug 2019 16.20 BST Last modified on Tue 13 Aug 2019
19.03 BST
U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton arrives for a
meeting with Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid at Downing
Street in London, Britain, August 13, 2019. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls
‘Bolton, a lifelong neoconservative ideologue,
Muslim-baiting thinktanker and erstwhile Fox News commentator, does not give a
hormone-filled sausage for a free trade pact, fair or otherwise.’ Photograph:
Peter Nicholls/Reuters
John Bolton doesn’t do free trade. He does regime change in
countries such as North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. He does military
interventions, notoriously in Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in
2011. He does punitive sanctions and embargoes. He does spite.
Bolton’s speciality is tearing up multilateral agreements,
such as the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, which he claims
undermine US national sovereignty. For the same reason, he reviles the very
idea of the UN, international law and the international criminal court (ICC).
So when Bolton, whose actual job is national security adviser
to Donald Trump, came to London this week to meet Boris Johnson and senior
ministers, the real focus of his visit, despite the Whitehall briefings, was
not on a post-Brexit bilateral trade deal. It was on regime change in the UK.
Bolton, a lifelong neoconservative ideologue, Muslim-baiting thinktanker and
erstwhile Fox News commentator, does not give a hormone-filled sausage or
chlorine-rinsed chicken wing for a free trade pact, fair or otherwise. Midwest
wheat and soya exports are not his thing. What Bolton really does care about is
exploiting the UK’s recent governmental upheaval, which almost anywhere else
would be described as a rightwing coup, to America’s, and Trump’s, advantage.
In short, the former colonies are out to colonise the UK.
Supposed American trade concessions will be tied
to extraneous US foreign policy objectives
Bolton has three main aims. The first is purely
transactional, in keeping with the Trump administration’s arm-twisting style.
Although he says the US is content to wait until after Brexit on 31 October
before pressing its demands, it’s already pretty clear what they will be. If
Johnson wants a quickie sectoral trade deal on, say, the car industry, then
Bolton’s price could be the UK’s withdrawal from the hard-won, US-trashed 2015
Iran nuclear agreement and the abandonment of fellow signatories France and
Germany. In truth, Johnson and Dominic Raab, his neophyte foreign secretary,
are already halfway down this road, having agreed to join a US-led maritime
force in the Gulf rather than support a Europe-wide initiative initially
proposed by Jeremy Hunt.
This U-turn is rightly seen in Tehran as evidence that the
UK is falling in behind the aggressive, failing Trump-Bolton “maximum pressure”
campaign. The risk of war with Iran is acute. The costs would be incalculable.
But Brexit Britain, it seems, can be bought – a nation of shopkeepers after
all, and mercenary to boot.
Other supposed American trade concessions will be similarly
tied to extraneous US foreign policy objectives, although there will be a
face-saving pretence that this is not so. In the name of helping “our British
friends”, the US will seek support in ostracising China’s Huawei telecoms giant
and, maybe, backing for its trade war with Beijing. The list of politely
framed, slightly menacing American “requests” could go on and on. How about
British acquiescence in Israel’s proposed, Trump-backed annexation of West Bank
settlements, in defiance of UN resolutions hitherto backed by London? That
could be seen as helpful, even necessary, in the UK’s new world of weakness.
Bolton’s enthusiasm for the “incredibly valuable” role that
an “independent” UK could play in Nato, a regular target of Trump’s
anti-European spleen, suggests an ever-greater degree of subservience. Will the
price of market access soon include uncritical support for Trump’s renewed
nuclear arms race with Russia and China, now he has scrapped the intermediate
nuclear forces (INF) treaty? And whatever you do, chaps, don’t mention the
words “climate crisis”. That sends Trump nuts.
The dire prospect raised by Bolton’s gleeful, hopefully
premature Whitehall victory tour is one of the UK’s foreign and security policy
outsourced to Washington, subordinated to the Trump-Bolton global agenda, and
in hock to rightwing nationalist-populist ideology. Brexiteers promised a
return of sovereignty. What’s coming is a sellout – a fire sale at the altar of
America First.
Bolton’s second aim is to drive a wedge between the UK and
Europe, and then use it as a sort of Afghan war-style forward operating base
from which to disrupt, subvert and weaken the EU, whose very existence offends
him. Throughout the Brexit negotiations, the official UK position has always
been that whatever future EU trading relationship emerged, close cooperation on
foreign and security policy would be maintained wherever possible. Yet that
sort of continuity doesn’t suit Bolton’s purposes. For him, regime change means
root-and-branch destruction of the status quo. If the UK, ever more beholden to
the US for its daily bread, can be used to foil Emmanuel Macron’s ideas about
integrated European defence, or undermine EU regulations covering digital
multinationals, so much the better.
On this trajectory, the UK’s new best friends in Europe will
not be Angela Merkel or Donald Tusk but Trump’s far-right chums, Hungary’s
Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.
Freed from EU shackles, the UK, Bolton said, “will be
pursuing UK national interests as it sees them”. For UK in that sentence, read
US-approved. The UK will not even enjoy the equivalent position of one of the
50 US states, whose rights are protected by the federal constitution. On offer,
if and when Johnson caves, is the status of mere satrapy – a tame, timid
outpost of the American empire.
For this is the third Bolton aim: to enlist a radically
repurposed and realigned UK in pursuit of his singular vision of American
global hegemony, of the truly exceptional nation whose power and dominion know
no limits and whose enemies quail before its unrivalled might. In Bolton’s
imperious worldview, the pre-eminent, muscular and righteous US republic rises
above all others, sustained by the ultra-conservative, libertarian,
populist-nationalist preconceptions and prejudices that only those with
commensurately tiny minds can seriously entertain.
Never mind that the shining city on a hill is now “an ugly
pile of rubble”, as the US commentator, Maureen Dowd, sadly noted at the
weekend. This is the recycled project for the new American century to which
Johnson and his blindly buccaneering Brexiteers, trading time-honoured
principles for quick bucks, are about to sign up. It will not make us
prosperous or safe. It will make us ashamed.
• Simon Tisdall is a foreign affairs commentator
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