The Fusion Doctrine – no, not the title of the next Bond movie, the name of the UK’s new security and defense strategy.
And, yes, you guessed it: a key threat cited within this security strategy, set out in a new UK government report, is Russia.
Described as a mechanism to “strengthen [Britain’s] collective approach to national security,” the Fusion Doctrine aims to combine and harness the UK’s economic, security, technological, and military capabilities with this objective in mind.
As mentioned, among the array of threats cited, Russia, predictably, has been placed front and center. This is on the basis that Moscow was allegedly responsible for, with regard to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, the “indiscriminate and reckless use of a military-grade nerve agent on British soil.”
It gets worse. The Skripal poisoning, we are told, “happened against a backdrop of a well-established pattern of Russian State aggression. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea was the first time since the Second World War that one sovereign nation has forcibly taken territory from another in Europe. Russia has fomented conflict in the Donbas and supported the Assad regime, including when the regime deliberately ignored its obligation to stop using chemical weapons. Russia has also violated the national airspace of European countries and mounted a sustained campaign of cyber espionage and disruption, including meddling in elections.”
The scale of the distortion incorporated in the aforementioned passage is simply breathtaking. It confirms that in Whitehall ideological blinkers are mandatory when it comes to surveying a world that London, in its capacity as a key pillar of the Pax Americana that ensued after the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, has played an egregious role in helping to destabilize.
This pattern of destabilization includes the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, culminating in the bombing of Serbia in 1999 (of which more later); the destruction of Iraq in 2003; the destruction of Libya in 2011, leading not to the birth of liberal democracy, as claimed, but instead to the country being transformed from a functioning state into a failed state, precipitating the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War. This pattern also includes an attempt to topple the legitimate Syrian government over the past seven years with support for an opposition dominated by sectarian extremists intent on turning Syria into a vast killing field of its minority communities.
As for Crimea, I deal with the fatuous claim of Russian aggression here. Suffice to say that in 2014 a democratically elected and internationally recognized government in Kiev was overthrown in a violent coup, actively supported and sponsored by Western governments, including London.
The coup – which went by the suitably benign name of Euromaidan, after Maidan Square in central Kiev, where peaceful protests turned into armed confrontation with Ukrainian police and security personnel after neo-Nazis and fascists took charge – was a brutal violation of the democratic rights of millions of Ukrainian citizens, including millions of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, people whose physical well-being was placed in danger as a consequence.
The claim that Russia’s actions in the aftermath of these ugly events can be described as aggression is ludicrous. On the contrary, the intervention undertaken by Moscow compares favorably to NATO’s intervention in the internal affairs of internationally recognized governments, specifically the bombing of Serbia in 1999, which led to the establishment of Kosovo as an independent state in 2008.
The key differences between Kosovo and Crimea are: 1) unlike the former, not one bomb or missile was dropped and not one shot was fired during Russia’s intervention, and 2) unlike the people of Kosovo, the people of Crimea were afforded the right to decide their future in a democratic referendum thereafter.
Theresa May’s assertion that Russia was responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury is at the time of writing as baseless as the accusation of Russian state interference in the 2016 US presidential election, the Brexit referendum of the same year, or indeed the litany of national elections that have failed to turn up the desired and expected result in recent times.
Rather than base her assertion on concrete evidence, May has allowed her government to be led by a feral media, which has whipped up toxic Russophobic tropes redolent of the 19th rather than 21st century, into adopting a new Cold War paradigm.
The real motive for this paradigm is not concern over any threat Moscow may pose to Western democracy or security, as claimed. The real motive for this new Cold War paradigm is Russia’s refusal to bow to Western hegemony – the very same that has been responsible for unremitting chaos and carnage in the name of democracy.
Thus the UK’s new Fusion Doctrine should be renamed the Confusion Doctrine.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.