{"id":366716,"date":"2018-06-25T18:46:48","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T17:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/americas-cold-war-tugboat\/"},"modified":"2018-06-25T18:46:48","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T17:46:48","slug":"americas-cold-war-tugboat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/americas-cold-war-tugboat\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Cold War \u201cTugboat\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_103198\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-103198\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/06\/6164358471_7ffb3bbb61_b.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"325\" srcset=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/06\/6164358471_7ffb3bbb61_b.jpg 510w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/06\/6164358471_7ffb3bbb61_b-300x191.jpg 300w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/06\/6164358471_7ffb3bbb61_b-768x489.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Daniel Lobo | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Several years ago, I had occasion to interview the <em>Guardian\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Russia correspondent, Jonathan Steele, and asked how he assessed Britain\u2019s ties to US foreign policy. He humorously described the US as the big ship in the harbor and Britain as its \u201ctugboat.\u201d No longer a world power on its own, Britain these days escorts the US into foreign outposts where neither belongs. British propaganda scholar Emma Briant appears to agree: \u201cBritain\u2019s defence strategy was pragmatically steered towards complementing US capabilities and spinning its \u2018expertise\u2019 in counter-insurgency warfare\u2026 to engineer inroads for relative influence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Middle East Prologue<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One will remember the Tony Blair-George Bush bromance in 2002, when the Labour prime minister began a collaboration with the US toward the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the pretext that the Saddam government was producing and storing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Blair pledged to Bush, \u201cI will be with you, whatever.\u201d It\u2019s no wonder he was widely seen in Britain as \u201cAmerica\u2019s poodle.\u201d A memo written by Matthew Rycroft, then private secretary to Blair and later (2015 to early 2018) UK ambassador to the UN, was leaked to the British press. It disclosed that \u201ctheintelligence and facts <em>were being fixed\u00a0<\/em>around the policy\u201d (i.e., a propaganda operation) to make the case against Saddam, with \u201clittle discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/06\/25\/americas-cold-war-tugboat\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by Daniel Lobo | CC BY 2.0 Several years ago, I had occasion to interview the Guardian\u2019s\u00a0Russia correspondent, Jonathan Steele, and asked how he assessed Britain\u2019s ties to US foreign policy. He humorously described the US as the big ship in the harbor and Britain as its \u201ctugboat.\u201d No longer a world power on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-366716","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}