March 28, 2007
Rule Rue Britannia
Arthur Herman -- the acclaimed author of To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World -- has a great opinion piece in the New York Post.
By this time next year, the once-vaunted Royal Navy will be about the size of the Belgian Navy.
If that wasn't demoralizing enough, last Friday the Iranian Navy seized a patrol boat containing 15 British sailors and Marines, claiming they'd crossed into Iranian waters. They're now hostages and may well go on trial as spies.
The latest report is that the Britons were ready to fight off their abductors. Certainly their escorting ship, HMS Cornwall, could have blown the Iranian naval vessel out of the water. However, at the last minute the British Ministry of Defense ordered the Cornwall not to fire, and her captain and crew were forced to watch their shipmates led away into captivity.
There was a question whether the Blair government would end up leaving Britain with a navy too small to protect its shores. Now it seems to want a navy that can't even protect its own sailors.
[...]
The United States has grown used to doing the fighting and dying the other industrialized democracies refuse to do in order to defend themselves and their interests.
Britain has been an exception. America always looks better when a couple of frigates flying the Royal Navy's White Ensign are side by side with those flying the Stars and Stripes. U.S. sailors also know that in a real fight, the men of the Royal Navy, which our navy men still call the "Senior Service," will never let them down.
That contribution has never been vital to America - yet it was a badge of honor for Britain. It had echoes of past glory as an empire, of course, but also of Britain's historic role as protector of a civilized and stable world order, and specifically the role of the Royal Navy.
The British navy had wiped out the slave trade; it had single-handedly defied tyrants from Louis XIV and Napoleon to Hitler; and it served as midwife to the ideas of free trade and the balance of power.
Now those days are gone for good.
[...]
Today, British politicians seem determined to make the same mistake. They exude the spirit not of Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher but of diplomat and Labor Party stalwart Harold Nicolson, who used to sigh to friends in the dark days after France's surrender in 1940: "All we can do is lie on our backs with our paws in the air and hope that no one will stamp on our tummies."
From the land of Winston Churchill and Adm. Nelson to this.
How sad.
We truly are alone.
Posted by Mike Lief at March 28, 2007 07:40 AM
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Comments
Ugh, at first I thought it was just a bad case of the Brits being caught off guard, but as more information comes out I am starting to think that the powers that be sold those boys (and 1 woman) out.
Posted by: Trickish Knave at March 30, 2007 11:15 AM