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The US empire is hidden in plain sight

1 September 2024

So-called RAF bases filled with US military personnel are a tell-tale sign of Britain’s key role in US imperialism, writes Matt Kennard.

Four years after my book The Racket was first published, I started my own media outlet with historian and journalist Mark Curtis. It was a departure from what I had focused on before – the consequences of US imperialism around the world – because this new publication, Declassified UK, would cover British foreign policy.

Britain handed the mantle of world domination to the US after World War Two and the received history is that it then retired from any kind of imperial role. I found out pretty quickly at Declassified that this was a misunderstanding. The truth is the empire never died. Britain merely became a ‘junior partner’ to the US hegemon. London’s adjunct status did not mean it was insignificant, however. The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital which spreads neoliberalism around the world, Britain’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed the country still served a critical imperial role for its senior partner.

But a more interesting realization for me came when I started to look at the institutions that make up the US empire and their role in Britain. I had spent years looking at what institutions like the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the US military were doing in the Global South, where their power was exercised against often weak states. But I saw quickly that the infrastructure of the US empire which had colonized so much of the world had also colonized my home country, the country where I had lived nearly all my life. Britain, in fact, appeared to be more completely under the control of its American ally than any country I’d looked into around the world in The Racket.

The similarities did not stop there. Like the mainstream media could never mention the term ‘US empire’ or explain its real role in world affairs, those same establishment journalists did not touch US influence in Britain. This was, again, an invisible empire, hiding in plain sight. The work I began doing would have never made it into the pages of my old employer, the Financial Times, like so many truths in The Racket never could.

Into the state

The colonization by the US empire of Britain became particularly clear when the Labour party elected Jeremy Corbyn leader in September 2015. A veteran anti-war and anti-imperialist politician and activist, Corbyn was a complete outlier within the British political system. He was dangerous to the rule of the British establishment, but also the ability of the US to retain Britain as a vassal state. 

The different pressure points that stay hidden in normal times, when the system is running like it should, quickly became exposed. This was made explicit in June 2019, when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Britain and was recorded saying privately: ‘It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.’

……………….. Britain’s traditional subservience to the US ‘could have gone a different way at various points in modern history, recently if Jeremy Corbyn hadn’t been destroyed by a vicious media campaign,’ Noam Chomsky has written. But it was not a coincidence. The US was integral to building a British political system that made a ‘different way’ next to impossible. m that made a ‘different way’ next to impossible. I began looking at how the US state had been interfering in British politics to stop the rise of anti-imperialist leaders. Britain has never had a prime minister that was not signed up to the US imperial project. I started to realize this was not a mistake, but the result of concerted efforts from Washington.

…………………………………………………………Declassified files from the CIA show how concerned the intelligence agency then was by the left turn in Labour. The BBC noted ‘the deep level of concern inside the CIA about the strength of the Left within Labour in the early 1980s, a political force which the agency regarded as anti-American’.  The CIA was particularly concerned about Foot winning the 1983 general election, with an internal report stating that ‘a Labour majority government would represent the greatest threat to US interests’. Foot’s 1983 election manifesto questioned ‘the programme for establishing American-controlled cruise missiles on our soil’ and noted that a new European security pact should end with the ‘phasing out’ of NATO. The BAP’s own official history notes that ‘the traditional British leftwing remained deeply suspicious of the United States, particularly on foreign policy and security issues’ in the period, adding ‘this was the era of Michael Foot’s leadership of a Labour Party committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament’.

………………………………. Michael Foot was a founder and strong supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), while Corbyn has been a member of the peace group since he was 15 and was, at the time of his election to the Labour leadership, its vice-chair.

The US neutralization campaign, which was leaked to the Washington Post, ‘would take three forms’, Dorrill continued: mobilizing public opinion, working within the churches, and a ‘dirty tricks’ operation against the peace groups.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was ‘created… to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades,’ the New York Times reported in 1997……………………………………..  Since the end of the Cold War, the NED had grown and been involved in trying to undermine or remove governments independent of Washington,………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………….. John Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, told me that recent changes in the law have widened the potential targets of US information operations. ‘In 2011, the US Congress changed the law that forbade the Executive Branch from propagandizing the American people or nationals of the other ‘Five Eyes’ countries – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,’ he said.

……………….. The CIA’s propaganda efforts throughout history have been shameless. But now that they’re not legally relegated to just Russia and China, the whole world is a target.’ One particularly interesting case was Index on Censorship, the UK’s foremost free expression group which monitors threats to free speech and publishes censored writers. It received £603,257 from the NED in 2016–21, according to its Charity Commission accounts.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. This is how it works. Not just in the developing world, but, I was learning, in the developed world, too. In fact, the control was even deeper. I soon understood that the US was not just interfering in the British political process, media and civil society. The hidden fist of the US empire which I’d seen deployed all over the developing world – the massive American military – was also occupying Britain.

I found the US Air Force (USAF) had 9,730 personnel permanently deployed throughout Britain, a number which was increasing rapidly.

……………………………………………… US military personnel in Britain are all in England, with access to 11 Royal Air Force (RAF) bases, stretching from Cambridgeshire to Yorkshire. They are known officially as United States Visiting Forces (USVF). 

……………………….Jewel in the crown

The largest US military presence is at RAF Lakenheath, a 727 hectare site in Suffolk. Despite being called an RAF base, it is leased to the USAF, and its population is overwhelmingly American. There were 5,404 US Department of Defense personnel based there in 2022. 

……………………………………………… The US is spending billions of pounds upgrading air bases in Britain to enable Washington to intercept international communications and launch military strikes more quickly. Some of the locations are hubs for offensive bombing missions. RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire is the USAF’s only bomber Forward Operating Location, or military base, in Europe. The aircraft deployed there ‘enable US and NATO warfighters to conduct a full spectrum of flying operations’. 

………………………………………………..But the UK appears to have very little control over what happens on the USAF-operated bases or the missions that are flown from them. The overarching framework for the stationing of US forces in the UK comes from two pieces of legislation. In 1951, NATO agreed a ‘status of forces’ agreement to govern hosting arrangements between its member states. The following year, The Visiting Forces Act incorporated the NATO agreement into UK law.

But Hudson said that these agreements ‘ultimately reserve jurisdiction of US personnel to the US’. Most of the American bases are called RAF stations and leased by the US. ‘Because of this, while the physical buildings comprising the bases are usually the property of the UK Ministry of Defence, very little of what happens in them is controlled by the British government,’ Hudson said. The empire never sleeps and, despite the mainstream media working to keep it invisible, it’s everywhere.

This is an edited version of the new preface to The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire by Matt Kennard. The second edition is out now, published by Bloomsbury and available at bloomsbury.com and via all good bookshops.

September 7, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, UK