The accession to Downing Street by Boris Johnson could hardly come at a more precarious time as tensions mount between the US, Britain and Iran. Fears of a war breaking out are heightened by Johnson as prime minister.
Of concern is his very undiplomatic blabber-mouth and an incorrigible knack for dropping verbal clangers, rubbing people up the wrong way.
The British government and the Foreign Office are in disarray with several senior ministers already handing in their resignations this week in protest over Johnson’s replacement of Theresa May. One of those quitting was Alan Duncan who was in charge of UK relations with Washington and the European Union. The lack of senior advisers in the Foreign Office will, dreadfully, give Boris Johnson a freer license to be the bumbling, reckless figure he is. Handling a combustible geopolitical situation is not something to entrust him with.
The same deferential lackey attitude was seen again when Trump was widely condemned both by US and European politicians for using racist diatribes to attack four minority ethnic congresswomen. In a British televised debate, Johnson said Trump’s rhetoric was “inappropriate,” but he pointedly refused to condemn the president’s incendiary language as racist.
Trump has returned the compliments, endorsing Johnson as a “great leader” even before this week’s election by the Conservative Party. Trump is an ardent supporter of Johnson’s plan for a ‘hard Brexit’ departure from the European Union this autumn. It was Johnson after all who – along with arch eurosceptic Nigel Farage – pushed the whole Brexit issue to the referendum result in 2016. As an abrasive hard Brexiteer who has openly disdained soft diplomacy with Brussels, Prime Minister Johnson will likely crash the United Kingdom out of the EU without any follow-on trade pact with the bloc.
Like other hard Brexiteers, Johnson suffers from delusions of “Great Britain” and its renaissance as a global free-trading power as in the halcyon days of empire more than a century ago. It is this chauvinistic delusional arrogance that drives Johnson to bend over backwards to pander to Trump because he knows that without the EU umbrella, Britain will need to cut a trade pact with the US as a lifeline.
The caricature of Britain being a lapdog to US global power projection is set to become even more accurate under Johnson’s premiership.
During the Tory party contest for new prime ministership, Johnson castigated the European Union and Germany in particular for “soft peddling” towards Russia.
Recall that it was Johnson who, as foreign secretary, launched the wildly speculative accusations against Russia. He even, crassly, laid the blame for the alleged plot on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Such slander not only betrays outrageous breach of international norms but a deep-seated mental defect of Russophobia. Johnson was later found out to have told lies about his alleged information implicating Russia.
Barmy Boris even declared during his bid for premiership this month that Britain was “at the forefront of Putin’s aggression” against Western states.
His imbecilic understanding of history – despite his pretensions of being an expert scholar – were illustrated previously when he compared Russia’s hosting of the 2018 World Cup to Nazi Germany staging the 1936 Olympic Games. The absurd comparison was beneath contempt. Russia’s Foreign Ministry rebuked his “venomous hatred” at that time and stated: “It’s scary to remember that this person represents the political leadership of a nuclear power.”
Scary indeed. He is now the British leader.
Johnson has further disgraced himself by claiming that Russia’s “annexation” of Crimea was comparable to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938. He admonished that failure by the US and the rest of Europe to take punitive action against Russia was tantamount to the appeasement policy towards Hitler during the 1930s leading up to World War II. “It is wholly apposite” to equate the Third Reich with Putin’s “Russian regime.”
Having a lickspittle and ignorant buffoon with an inflated sense of superiority as Britain’s prime minister is a dangerous development for exacerbating already volatile international tensions, not just with regard to Iran, but also between the US, Europe and Russia.
Boris Johnson is an unrestrained clown-figure whose access to levers of power will end in tears. We can only hope that those tears will be his and not the rest of the world.