Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Brexiteers should have been prepared for the shattering intervention of the
US. The European Union always was an American project.
It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and
funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon
administrations.
While irritated at times, the US has relied on the EU ever since as
the anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO.
There has never been a divide-and-rule strategy.
The eurosceptic camp has been strangely blind to this, somehow supposing
that powerful forces across the Atlantic are egging on British secession, and
will hail them as liberators.
The anti-Brussels movement in France - and to a lesser extent in Italy and
Germany, and among the Nordic Left - works from the opposite premise, that the
EU is essentially an instrument of Anglo-Saxon power and 'capitalisme
sauvage'.
France's Marine Le Pen is trenchantly anti-American. She rails against
dollar supremacy. Her Front National relies on funding from Russian banks
linked to Vladimir Putin.
Like it or not, this is at least is strategically coherent.
The Schuman Declaration that set the tone of
Franco-German reconciliation - and would lead by stages to the European
Community - was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a
meeting in Foggy Bottom. "It all began in Washington," said Robert
Schuman's chief of staff.
It was the Truman administration that browbeat the French to reach a modus
vivendi with Germany in the early post-War years, even threatening to cut off
US Marshall aid at a furious meeting
with recalcitrant French leaders they resisted in September 1950.
Truman's motive was obvious. The Yalta settlement with the Soviet Union was
breaking down. He wanted a united front to deter the Kremlin from further
aggrandizement after Stalin gobbled up Czechoslovakia, doubly so after
Communist North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the South.
For British eurosceptics, Jean Monnet looms large in the federalist
pantheon, the emminence grise of supranational villainy. Few are aware that he
spent much of his life in America, and served as war-time eyes and ears of
Franklin Roosevelt.
General Charles de Gaulle thought him an American agent, as indeed he
was in a loose sense. Eric Roussel's biography of Monnet reveals how he worked
hand in glove with successive administrations.
It is odd that this magisterial
1000-page study has never been translated into English since it
is the best work ever written about the origins of the EU.
Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department
archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for
decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the
project.
As this newspaper first reported when the treasure became
available, one memorandum dated July 26, 1950, reveals a campaign to promote a
full-fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head
of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the Central
Inteligence Agency.
The key CIA front was the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE),
chaired by Donovan. Another document shows that it provided 53.5 per cent of
the European movement's funds in 1958. The board included Walter Bedell Smith
and Allen Dulles, CIA directors in the Fifties, and a caste of ex-OSS officials
who moved in and out of the CIA.
Papers show that it treated some of the EU's 'founding fathers' as hired
hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding that would have
broken reliance on Washington.
There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely in
the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a
roaring success.
There were horrible misjudgments along the way, of course. A memo
dated June 11, 1965, instructs the vice-president of the European Community to
pursue monetary union by stealth, suppressing debate until the "adoption
of such proposals would become virtually inescapable". This was too clever
by half, as we can see today from debt-deflation traps and mass unemployment
across southern Europe.
In a sense these papers are ancient history. What they show is that the
American 'deep state' was in up to its neck. We can argue over whether Boris
Johnson crossed a line last week by dredging up President Barack Obama's
"part-Kenyan ancestry", but the cardinal error was to suppose that Mr
Obama's trade threat had anything to do with the ordeals of his grandfather in
a Mau Mau prison camp. It was American foreign policy boilerplate.
As it happens, Mr Obama might understandably feel rancour after
the abuses that have come to light lately from the Mau Mau repression.
It was a shameful breakdown of colonial police discipline, to the
disgust of veteran officials who served in other parts of
Africa. But the message from his extraordinary book - 'Dreams From My Father' - is that he strives to rise
above historic grudges.
Brexiteers take comfort that Republican hopeful Ted Cruz wants a
post-Brexit Britain to jump to the "front of the line for a free trade
deal”, but he is merely making campaign hay. Mr Cruz will conform to
Washington's Palmerstonian imperatives - whatever
they may be at that moment - if he ever enters the White House.
It is true that America had second thoughts about the EU once the
ideological fanatics gained ascendancy in the late 1980s, recasting the union
as a rival superpower with ambitions to challenge and surpass the US.
John Kornblum, the State Department's chief of European affairs in
the 1990s, says it was a nightmare trying deal with Brussels. "I ended up
totally frustrated. In the areas of military, security and defence, it is
totally dysfunctional."
Mr Kornblum argues that the EU "left NATO
psychologically" when it tried to set up its own military command
structure, and did so with its usual posturing and incompetence. "Both
Britain and the West would be in much better shape if Britain was not in the
EU," he said.
This is interesting but it is a minority view in US policy circles. The
frustration passed when Poland and the first wave of East European states
joined the EU in 2004, bringing in a troupe of Atlanticist governments.
We know it is hardly a love-affair. A top US official was caught two years
ago on a telephone intercept dismissing Brussels during the Ukraine crisis with
the lapidary words, "fuck the EU".
Yet the all-pervading view is that the Western liberal order is under
triple assault, and the EU must be propped, much as Britain and France propped
up the tottering Ottoman Empire in the 19th - and wisely so given that its slow
collapse led directly to the First World War.
Today's combined threats comes from Jihadi terror and a string of
failed states across the Maghreb and the Levant; from a highly-militarized
pariah regime in Moscow that will soon run out of money but has a window of
opportunity before Europe rearms; and from an extremely dangerous crisis in the
South China Sea that is escalating by the day as Beijing tests the US alliance
structure.
The dangers from Russia and China are of course interlinked. It is
likely - pessimists say certain - that Vladimir Putin would seize on a serious
blow-up on Pacific rim to try his luck in Europe. In the eyes of Washington,
Ottawa, Canberra, and those capitals around the world that broadly view Pax
Americana as a plus, this is not the time for Britain to lob a stick of
dynamite into Europe's rickety edifice.
The awful truth for the Leave campaign is that the governing establishment
of the entire Western world views Brexit as strategic vandalism. Whether fair
or not, Brexiteers must answer this reproach. A few such as Lord Owen grasp the
scale of the problem. Most seemed blithely unaware until Mr Obama blew into
town last week.
In my view, the Brexit camp should be laying out plans to increase UK
defence spending by half to 3pc of GDP, pledging to propel Britain into the
lead as the undisputed military power of Europe. They should aim to bind this
country closer to France in an even more intimate security alliance. These
sorts of moves would at least spike one of Project Fear's biggest guns.
The Brexiteers should squelch any suggestion that EU withdrawal means
resiling from global responsibility, or tearing up theEuropean Convention (that British-drafted,
non-EU, Magna Carta of freedom), or turning our backs on the COP21 climate
accords, or any other of the febrile flirtations of the movement.
It is perhaps too much to expect a coherent plan from a disparate group,
thrown together artificially by events. Yet many of us who are sympathetic
to the Brexit camp, who also want to take back our sovereign self-government
and escape the bogus and usurped supremacy of the European Court of Justice,
have yet to hear how Brexiteers think this extraction can occur without
colossal collateral damage and in a manner consistent with the honour of this
country.
You can quarrel with Europe, or you can quarrel with the US, but it is
courting fate to quarrel with the whole democratic world at the same time.
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