Disentangling Britain from America

[Samdelila]

I know we are reliant on the USA for security and they are a major trading partner, but I would like to know what, if anything, could be done to disentangle us from the USA in the future. Does anybody have any ideas?

So, if push came to shove, we could reduce the global reach of the US military - if we worked in tandem with other allies. That’s good to know, thank you.

@Walkaround Agree with most of this.

The problem is that we refuse to acknowledge the position we are in. We are no longer world leaders.

We are a small densely populated island that has become used to a luxury standard of living and provision to our population, that is well beyond what we can actually achieve ourselves.

The only thing the US wants from us is to take what's left of our healthcare infrastructure, put in their healthcare companies (more than already) and then sell it back to us at vastly inflated prices and to worse outcomes. (see vets for future)

If we cave to that (already partly have with increasing NICE cost thresholds for pharmaceuticals) then they will play nice with us for a while.

The problem with that plan is i) coordination is hard, so the threat to the US is not very credible ii) actually doing those things harms us too, either through retaliation or just intrinsically.

(eg we sell US bonds en masse, we get hit by the resulting global recession. We switch off Five Eyes intelligence sharing, we face more terror threats. Not to mention how reliant our military, NHS etc all are on US supply chains).

Long term the answer is to become much richer and militarily stronger, ideally with a large, young, highly capable population. Then all sorts of things start to shift in your favour. But for that we need to unleash growth and we are pretty bad at that. The EU, for example, unironically talks about being a ‘regulatory superpower’. That’s not really a thing, up against military and economic superpowers.

Edited to add: we can also do long-term things to make us less reliant on others for our critical national infrastructure (e.g. the EU built its own version of GPS for that reason). It all has costs though. Unless we’re prepared to accept significantly increased taxes or significantly lower public spending in other areas, we can’t do it (other than by growth, see above). Borrowing more is not viable if you are trying to reduce reliance on outside forces, becuase you just make yourself more vulnerable.

"Long term the answer is to become much richer and militarily stronger, ideally with a large, young, highly capable population."

This is about as far away from what our current population pattern can be.

We are old and sick with a depleted military, with people struggling to have children and for those children to be invested in so that they become capable and well.

If we actually shifted our spending from our old to our young it would help.

Thank you, this is really interesting. We need to drive growth, and persuade the public that lower public spending is essential, so that we can play the long game - in order to become less reliant on the US. Unrealistic, I know, but having a plan is better than nothing!

The obvious answer is to be closer to Europe. Leaving Brexit has weakened us considerably. Such a stupid move.

Basically, yes. If we get really high growth then tax rise/public spending cuts doesn’t need to be so drastic.

But there are political barriers to growth that are hard to fix. Big levers are: massively cheaper energy (drop net zero and/or build lots of nuclear), much cheaper housing (hits those who own property, who vote, and implies planning deregulation which will lead to lots of locally-objectionable things), massively cheaper infrastructure (fewer vetos for communities, perhaps lower standards, long-term planning), more-strategic immigration (unless we want to start having babies again, which we don’t, we need lots of high-quality immigrants and fewer low-quality immigrants. The “lots of” talk alienates the right while the “quality” talk alienates the left). And so on!

It was a stupid move, but it’s done. I’m not convinced they’d have us back either, even if we were to try to reverse Brexit.

Correct. I'm a U.S. Army veteran who served with BA troops in Iraq. You've gutted the British Army. It's now just 72k active duty troops, the smallest it's been since the Napoleonic Wars. And out of that number, no more than 30% are front-line war fighters. What you have now is more of a peacekeeping force than an actual army.

The Brits I met in Iraq were great soldiers, but even back then, their kit was a disgrace. Most of their front-line troops didn't even have body armor. We had to loan them some of ours.

This is the long term issue isn’t it?

And US v China AI is relevant. I pick up on a few analysts / speakers who look at the long term picture and it comes back to the two major superpowers and what they do over the next few decades.

Wow. Has this shortage of body armour ever been reported?

Some good sites for choosing to avoid US products:

https://european-alternatives.eu/
https://www.bankrupttrump.org/

We need to rejoin the EU as soon as possible for all sorts of reasons but in the meantime the more we can align ourselves with our European cousins and allies the better. As a bloc, we can challenge US and Chinese supremacy when it comes to defence, energy and markets.

United we stand, divided we fall.

This was in 1991, during what you call Operation Granby. The US Army had been using body armor during combat operations since the Vietnam war, but it became far more common after lighter, more effective Kevlar armor became available. During the Gulf War (Op Granby), it was issued to everyone deployed.

I don't know why the BA was slow to adopt it, other than cost. A full set of milspec body armor costs about $2k per soldier. The British chain of command was certainly aware of it at the time. They used to trade with us for ours, usually liquor, which the US Army doesn't issue to troops.

As I said, this was over 30 years ago. I've no idea what the situation is at the moment.

F35, nuclear deterrent, satellites, logistics, computers. Some pretty important stuff. Our nuclear missile subs would be useless and our aircraft carriers.

Some things you wouldn't think of such as American tec. Your apple phone, Microsoft computer, artificial intelligence. If this sort of thing was tampered with it could massively effect the efficiency in companies and communications.

We are reliant on them for security, but the USA aren’t in NATO for altruistic purposes, are they?

I think it’s both. I think there are genuine shared values as well as shared security interests.

The US’s view of its values and interests has changed though.

It was already the case that the US (with some justification) saw Europe as free-riders on a lot of the public goods that it provides (free navigation of seas, deterring the Russia threat, etc.). If it now doesn’t even see having a stable Europe as being an important interest then they might well pull back. Or if they are happy to have stability by giving Russia what it wants and redrawing the lines.

I’m actually more worried by the shift in how the US sees its values and interests than I am in the Greenland thing specifically (because, famous last words, I think this is almost certainly a Trump dealmaking tactic not a serious prospect of invasion).

So, to reduce our reliance on America we need to begin collectively moving away from American tech.

I too am worried about a shift in US values and interests. Now that we know their values can shift we need to find ways to shift away from them.

Fascinating. Soldiers trading liquor for body armour sounds dystopian.

It boggles my brain that someone can think this.

I try not to get worked up about international politics, but the thought of not having America on side is really alarming.

People on other threads seem to welcome closer ties with China.

Is that a good idea?

It was really much more polite than commercial. The Brits would give us a case of scotch and a case of gin as a friendly gesture. We would give them 15 sets of body armor we had as spares as a reciprocal gesture of goodwill. Never mind that the liquor was worth maybe $300 and the body armor cost $30k. We conducted joint patrols with the BA regiment on our flank. It was in our interests to have them as well equipped as possible, and of course, they were our comrades, allies, and battle buddies. Of course we're going to help. Body armor saves lives.

When body armor takes a hit from a large caliber round, it's compromised and usually has to be discarded and replaced. So the body armor we gave the Brits was accounted for as expended in combat.

Trading supplies is a way of life in the military. Logistics can be a bit chaotic, especially in a combat zone. I recall one time in Iraq when my unit had 30 cases of canned peaches but no coffee. Our supply officer found other units with no canned fruit but more coffee than they needed. You help each other out.

• We apparently can’t build lots of nuclear without help from China, which we don’t trust when it comes to embedding itself in our infrastructure
• Cheaper housing via deregulation?! Ha, ha. What we get from deregulation is houses so appallingly badly constructed that some are not even fit for habitation, have sewage coming up through their toilets and floorboards when it rains heavily, regularly have floodwater ingress in heavy rain, have no mains water during heavy rain/drought/cold weather/because of decades of massive underinvestment, etc
• See above re cheaper infrastructure - we have all seen the consequences of underinvestment in our essential infrastructure and those are an unhealthy population, unreliable public transport, clogged roads, pollution, nature depletion, and dangerous lack of resilience against weather, let alone foreign attacks.
• Immigration - “high quality” immigrants have just as few children as the population already here - “lower quality” immigrants tend to produce more children. But that’s ignoring the fact we are already massively overpopulated in terms of what our crumbling infrastructure can cope adequately with. What we “need” is for people to die sooner once they are no longer economically useful and a young population that is encouraged to patriotically breed…. No doubt an appealing concept to the Far Right - they aren’t opposed to vaccination and abortion for no reason 😏.

Hmm I’m not sure encouraging people to die earlier will fly, but encouraging younger people to have more children (by introducing measures that make this more affordable) sounds like it could be a good plan.