The retired British Colonel Richard Kemp has written a piece for the Telegraph, accusing Nigel Farage of “playing into our enemies’ hands” after Farage claimed that “we provoked” the war in Ukraine. What follows is a point-by-point rebuttal of Kemp’s article.
While he disapproves of Putin’s actions, it appears Farage actually believes that his pretext for war is genuine. That is something he has in common with Jeremy Corbyn.
Kemp is attempting to impugn Farage through guilt-by-association with Jeremy Corbyn. This is a poor argument and qualifies as a logical fallacy.
That was the man Keir Starmer said would have made a better prime minister than Boris Johnson, one of Ukraine’s most staunch defenders.
Kemp is contrasting Corbyn, and by extension Farage, with Boris Johnson – whom he describes as “one of Ukraine’s most staunch defenders”. What he doesn’t mention is that Johnson made the same argument as Farage back in 2016, and was summarily accused of being a “Putin apologist”. A plausible reason why Johnson changed his mind that he is not very principled: back in 2016, he wanted to be Tory leader; now he wants to be head of NATO.
If Farage and Corbyn are right, then what is the answer? Should we expel Poland, Romania and the other eastern European member states from the alliance to end the war and prevent further aggression?
To my knowledge, no one is suggesting that we should expel existing NATO members from the alliance. This is a straw man – another logical fallacy. Rather, the answer is to pursue some kind of diplomacy. One proposal has been put forward by George Beebe and Anatol Lieven – two of the many experts who disagree with Western policy but have been largely ignored by the mainstream media.
Perhaps all our foreign policy decisions should be calibrated to avoid upsetting Putin.
Kemp is presenting a false dichotomy – another logical fallacy. He is suggesting that if we don’t follow his preferred policy of continuing the war, then we have to cede to all of Russia’s demands. This is obviously wrong.
Incidentally, it is not just Putin that is “upset” by Western policy. As William Burns (the former U.S. Secretary of State and current CIA Director) wrote in 2008:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Kemp would have us believe that the entire conflict can be traced back to the delusional ambitions of a single man. But this is a cartoonish view. In fact, if Putin were replaced by someone else from his faction of the elite, it is plausible that person would continue or even escalate the war.
It might be logical to similarly defer to China’s sensibilities for fear of provoking President Xi.
Kemp is stating this sarcastically, but it actually is logical. Why would it not be logical to take into account the interests of the world’s second biggest power? Again, this doesn’t mean we have to capitulate to China and give them everything they want. It’s about being realistic. We can’t afford to act like this is the 19th century when Britain engaged in gunboat diplomacy and much of the world map was coloured pink.
NATO is a purely defensive alliance, which does not present any conceivable military threat to Russia.
Kemp is being painfully disingenuous here. It is indisputable that NATO is not a “purely” defensive alliance. In 1999, it bombed Serbia – even though Serbia had not attacked or threatened any NATO members. Then in 2011, it bombed Libya – which had also not attacked or threatened any NATO members. Regardless of whether these actions were justified, there is no way to claim they were “defensive” from NATO’s point of view.
And it is irrelevant that Kemp believes NATO “does not present any conceivable military threat to Russia”. What matters is what the Russians believe; Kemp has apparently never heard of the security dilemma.
Russia has an obvious interest in maintaining its control over Crimea, which Ukraine and most or all NATO countries still recognise as Ukrainian territory – despite overwhelmingly support for annexation among Crimeans. Even Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, stated in a speech that Putin “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his border”.
In an article [Putin] published in 2021, shortly before the 2022 invasion, he barely mentioned NATO but spoke of Ukraine.
Kemp mentions Putin’s 2021 article, which only mentioned NATO twice. However, he neglects to mention Putin’s speech on February 21st 2022, which mentioned NATO 40 times. Nor does he mention Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson, in which Putin mentioned NATO repeatedly – contrary to widespread claims. Russian elites have expressed their opposition to NATO expansion numerous times over the last few decades. This includes the great Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
He is worried that greater prosperity, especially in his next door neighbour Ukraine, will be looked at with envy by his own population.
This is a common claim, but it is not very plausible. Since 1990, Ukraine has performed worse than Russia and far worse than Belarus, a close ally of Russia. Belarussian living standards have grown by more than 100%, whereas Ukrainian living standards remain well below their 1990 level. This is most likely due to rampant corruption by Ukrainian elites.
Surely the Reform leader would not argue that any sovereign country should be denied membership of an economic union or even a military alliance because an authoritarian rival vetoed it.
In 2022, China and the Solomon Islands were negotiating a security agreement that might have led to the construction of a Chinese military base in the Solomon Islands. In response, the Australian Prime Minister announced that China must not build a military base “on our doorstep”, and that doing so would be a “red line”. The White House likewise warned that it would “respond accordingly”.
It may come as news to Kemp that great powers have an interest in preventing their rivals establishing military bases close to their territory. Sometimes, it may be appropriate for their rivals to accommodate those interests. The Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved when the Soviet Union agreed to remove its nuclear weapons from Cuba, thereby recognising vital U.S. interests. By Kemp’s logic, it shouldn’t have agreed to do this.
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“swapping out”
Oh dear. Criticising the very things being criticised. Swapping is sufficient.
A fair point, and well spotted… and happy to be corrected… but does it really invalidate the argument as a whole?
How? In 1945 the British population voted Marxist-socialist workers control the means of production, Comrade and sold out its manufacturing base (and soul) in exchange for – bang pans – an NHS and cradle-to-grave welfare state – free stuff, everyone leeching off each other.
It’s simple. Nationalise key industries, instead of profits going to greedy capitalists, redistribution to pay for NHS, free stuff, fairness, equality – brothers.
Result: capital to fund, expand, develop, only available from the taxpayer. Not enough. Borrow and print money. Still not enough. Chronic underinvestment. The workers collective demands more and more. Industry becomes bloated, uncompetitive. That profit disappears so borrow, print money to pay the shortfall and pay the increasing cost of NHS and welfare state.
Brain drain. Underinvestment, poor pay, high taxes, drives out best and brightest – engineers, scientists, designers – abroad particularly the USA and into their aerospace industry.
British aerospace collapses, car making is a joke, strikes daily – the end of the UK as a giant of tech development and innovation.
Result: £2.8 trillion debt, 7 million on (bang pans) NHS waiting list, and in 2023 220 000 died waiting… but had they lived treatment would have “free”… yippee!, a welfare state supporting 10 million impoverished immigrants, dependence on the Chinese command economy for what we consume.
Hurrah! And… full circle. 2025 UK population votes in Marxist-Socialist Labour Party and is shocked to learn it’s Marxist-Socialist and hasn’t kept its manifesto pwomises, the wotters, how beastly.
Those old enough will remember police, fire, ambulance with dignified British bells, not those common Continental – Hee, haw, hee, haw… klaxons.
I grew up with the two-tone klaxon so that’s all that I recall (we’re all products of our era, right?). Happy to endorse the British bell being brought back to service.
The classic parable of British industry would be: In Victorian times, someone invested a lot capital in building a factory somewhere in England. This factory made him and his descendeds very wealthy/ insanely rich and was kept running with minimal investments in maintenance until about the 1970s when the Victorian machinery finally broke down and couldn’t be repaired anymore. At this point, one of two things happened:
This is a story I part invented but I think it’s an accurate picture: The empire had served its purpose after the British elite had accumulated more wealth than most people can even think of. And since it was sort-of cumbersome and expensive to maintain, it was then dismantled using more or less poor pretexts (“Winds of change” etc). What remained was a British moor who had done his job and could go now.
How this process really started: From some time in the 19th century until 1914, Britain was the world’s dominant industrial, military and financial power. Closest competitor were the aspiring German Empire. The USA was mostly a rural and very much indebted backwater. Then, the so-called first world war started which people in Germany regarded as a combined attack on them driven by a French desire for Revenge for 1871!
and an English desire to get rid of England’s most successful economic competitor.
In autumn and winter 1914, the war had frozen in place along a line of fortified trenches running from the Belgian cost just westward of Ostend southwards and then eastwards through northern France to the east of the fortress of Verdun and from there southward to the Swiss border. The next three years saw yearly repeated anglo-french attempts to break through this line of trenches with every increasing use of preparatory artillery barrages followed by infantry attacks. This needed an enormous amount of artillery shells as tenthousands to hundredthousands of shots would be fired for any individual run of artillery attacks. Most of these shells were manufactured in the USA because enough workers where available there as the country didn’t participated in the war itself until 1918 and they were paid for by the British and French state borrowing money from American banks. The final outcome was that the USA became the world’s largest creditor and the British empire one of the largest debtors.
This pattern repeated during the second world war where military hardware on the Allied side was by-and-large all produced in the USA and then lent-out on use now pay later terms to the other Allied powers.
Totally agree.
US empire indeed. Britain is just a US state in many ways. Oddly, this American-state joined the US Empire’s German project called the EU. It then disentangled itself to further submit its interests to the War-Virology-NWO-WEF-CIA regime of the US Empire.
NWO is simply US hegemony. The Uketopian war is just an expression of the US empire’s quest to destroy Russia. That is why Vlad the Invader had to get busy in 2022 when poof! the Rona magically disappeared, though morons were stabbinated long after for the fake virus. The UK has played a most useful idiot in its screaming support for the US occupation of the Ukeland, pushing us to a nuclear confrontation. Well done UK.
Rona fascism, the Climate Con, WEF – all the NWO globalist institutions are somehow linked to the US Dystopian NWO
Rule Brittania? Nah, The Fools in Britannia more like it.
There is a completely different take to the last 70 years, and that is that old Europe has been dominating the US in the manner of a dominating wife in a traditional wife role who basically has her husband do all her bidding. (Not a statement about men and women, just an example of one particular archetype.)
The US protects Europe. And if Trump’s narrative is to be believed, Europe fleeces the US economically.
The telltale is the reaction to the US wanting to change the relationship. The old European powers are up in arms and in disarray over the prospect that things aren’t going to carry on as they were.
That is certainly not the reaction you’d expect from the subservient, badly treated side.
‘The US’ shares access to some of its military infrastructure, especially in the area of satellite reconnaissance, with its NATO partners, and the NATO is procedurally geared towards being led by American officers. As always, the American armament industry also plays a prominent role here but in form of providing products in exchange for money. Lastly, the USA still has quite a lot of nukes and thus, maintain the nuclear balance of power, of however questionable usefulness this might be. Both Great Britain and France have their own nuclear deterrent and France isn’t even part of the military structures of the NATO since de Gaulle withdrew from them. Germany, as usual, is prohibited from owning or controlling any nukes. Great reason for Trump to whine about it not having any.
The USA has a standing army of less than 500,000 soldiers and the combined forces of the European NATO states easily outnumber that. Further, Germany, traditionally one of the larger military powers in Europe, is prohibited from maintaining more than a pretty tokenistic military force by the so-called “2 + 4 treaty” where the USA was a part of the 4 (the two were the FRG and the GDR). There’s no “US protection” in this area. A nice example of this would be the Enhanced Forward Presence of the NATO in Eastern Middle Europe: This is exclusively European in all areas where even a remote danger exists while pretty nominal US troops are only in safe positions in in eastern Poland.
Well, you better get in touch with all the European leaders to let them know because they all seem in a panic about the poential withdrawal of US military protection.
You’d better come up with some kind of counter-argument in case you want to prove my statement wrong instead of jumping to making untrue statements about a different topic.
You also still haven’t answered the question what kind protection the UK derives from serving as sort-of an US aircraft carrier for offensive military operations elsewhere.
Innocent ascriber inclined to Micawberomics here. Article and preceding comments amount to – Follow the money, the militarism and the myths?
Sirens? Pah! Ambulances should have bells.
They had the Green Goddesses on a brief return during the Fire strike back in 2002.
Britain’s economic and military decline is the product of an education system biased towards the Arts rather than science, and towards pure science rather than technology and engineering. The madness of Net Zero could only happen in a country run by people who are completely clueless about engineering and technology.
Britain’s participation in the “war on terror” (and the disastrous failure of that war) stems from a common failure to understand islam on the part of both Britain and Americans.
As Julian Assange puts it, the Afghan War was a long protracted money laundering operation by design.
‘Twas ever thus. Back in the 1960s, my father (an engineering lecturer at a Technical College, that later morphed into a Poly offering Business Studies, and is now a University offering a degree course in Comedy Studies) lamented the arts and humanities graduates running the country.
I’d extend “technology and engineering” to encompass trades like electrician and plumber that require technical knowledge and practical skill. Usually well-grounded and in demand, in my experience.
Presumably the book doesn’t deal with the way membership of the EU meanwhile chewed at Britain’s administrative legs making it insecure in standing on its own after Brexit.
Presumably, when Starmer says record investment is coming in to the UK he means more of our home-grown enterprise is being bought by foreigners.
Dear oh dear that ‘special relationship’ notion again. Old Mother Britain (or should it be England?) still thinking of the USA as her little baby, failing to notice the larger number of German and other European populations among its 19 C settlers, and of course numerous other nationalities whose influence on US character and interests is more important.
Like it or not societies need leaders because the majority of any population want no more than secure sources of food, warmth and shelter without having to fight for them. Our British leading class blundered into the 1914 war, destroyed itself and has been replaced by others pursuing personal gain in much larger markets for money, goods and ideas.
If you are running a humongous trade deficit, which we are and have been for decades, you have to export something to pay for those imports. And we have been exporting our industries themselves. We have been selling our country for trinkets.
The alternative is to have a huge devaluation in your currency. Personally I would prefer that. (Sterling does seem to be significantly overvalued, with computer equipment that costs £1,000 in the UK for example, costing $1,000 in the USA.) But people don’t like that. The trinkets get expensive.
There is one other alternative of course. Reciprocal tariffs to keep out artificially cheap imports. But the great and good tell us that could never work so obviously it’s a non-starter.