70 years of foreign troops? We should close the bases | Seumas Milne
US forces in Britain aren’t defending the country but lock it into an empire in decline. It’s past time for some independence
It’s almost never discussed in the political mainstream. But thousands of foreign troops have now been stationed in Britain for more than 70 years. There’s been nothing like it since the Norman invasion. With the 15-month Dutch occupation of London in 1688-9 a distant competitor, there has been no precedent since 1066 for the presence of American forces in a string of military bases for the better part of a century.
They arrived in 1942 to fight Nazi Germany. But they didn’t head home in 1945; instead, they stayed on for the 40-odd years of the cold war, supposedly to repel invasion from the Soviet Union. Nor did they leave when the cold war ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, but were invited to remain as the pivot of the anti-Soviet Nato alliance.
A generation later, there are still nearly 10,000 US military personnel stationed in Britain, based in dozens of secretive facilities. Most of them are in half a dozen major military bases – misleadingly named RAF this or that, but effectively under full American control: Lakenheath, Croughton, Mildenhall and Molesworth among others – along with the National Security Agency and missile defence bases such as Menwith Hill in Yorkshire.
British troops are now finally being pulled out of Germany. There is not the slightest suggestion, however, that US forces will be withdrawn from Britain in the forseeable future. But what are they doing here? Who are they supposed to be defending us from?
A clue as to what’s at stake was given last week by Robert Gates, a former US defence secretary, when he warned that cuts in Britain’s defence spending – still the fourth largest in the world – threatened its “full spectrum” military “partnership” with the US.
He’s not the first American official to play on the neuroses of the British security elite, for whom the preservation of a lopsided “special relationship” with the US is the acme of their aspirations for the country. The London establishment’s fear of US rejection reached fever pitch last year when parliament finally represented public opinion over military action and rejected what would have been a catastrophic attack on Syria.
Elite anxiety over risking American displeasure or neglect is matched by a growing fear that the British public will no longer tolerate the endless US wars it has dragged them into over the past 15 years. General Sir Nick Houghton, the chief of the defence staff, last month declared that the nation had become “sceptical about the ability to use force in a beneficial way”, and must not lose its “courageous instinct”. He was echoed by the Commons defence committee, which claimed that “one of the greatest strategic threats to defence” is the public’s “lack of understanding of the utility of military force“.
No wonder the government has been clamping down on protest rights at bases …read more
