The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.
You might wonder what this has to do with the issue of our Nuclear "deterrent", Trident, and a recent letter to the news, signed by former Defense secretaries and chiefs of staff. But please bear with me.
The essence of the letter is this:
In an uncertain world in which the number of nuclear weapons remains high and some states are increasing their holdings, we should not take risks with our security by downgrading to a part-time deterrent.
We cannot possibly foresee what threats will develop over the next 30 years. Reducing our submarine-based Trident capability would weaken our national security for the sake of a very small fraction of the defence budget. It is our view that if Britain is to remain a leading global power with strong defences, nothing less than a continuous at-sea deterrent will do.
The words "if Britain is to remain a leading global power" jumped out at me and it seems to me that this is the breathtaking anomaly in the argument; we are no longer a global power and we have no coherent foreign policy that will back up such an illusion.
How did we achieve global power in the first place? What sense does it make now?
I refer you to Mr Gekko. The power house of Britain's conquest was, to put it crudely, greed. The colonies were dominated by entrepreneurs and adventurers. They were protected and policed by what became the greatest sea power in the world and I for one don't condemn that. If it hadn't been us, it would have been the French, or the Spanish, or the Dutch.
Would that we could send Her Majesty's Navy to quell and control the excesses of the Brussels bureaucrats. Would that we could send a gun boat to police Gibralter and shoot a few Spaniards while we are at it. Would that we could Invade Rhode Island and take the USA back into British hands.
The point is that business is no longer conducted by gunship. Admiral Nelson was a hero of his time. Today, he would be the head of a multi-national corporation, or the IMF or maybe if we were lucky, Prime Minister. It is a certainty that, had he joined the Royal Navy today, nobody would ever hear about him.
Aggression, for want of a better word, is conducted in two ways - it is either ideological and nihilistic or it is financial, global and nihilistic. And we can control neither. We certainly cannot control them with the use of Nuclear Weapons.
Britain still appears to operate on a 19th Century model of Foreign Policy when it comes to defense. While pretending to maintain the remnant of a viable fighting force, it has ignored internal security and allowed the enemy to penetrate from within. The threats to our security from abroad come from our meddling in the affairs of countries whose culture we do not understand, together with a woeful lack of clearly defined Foreign policy.
The forces of "greed", the global economy, is impervious to nuclear attack. It thrives on being able to sell and exploit, and there is not much point in taking out your customers. As for the others, the tin-pot dictators and the rogue states, they too are impervious to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction because they are either deeply indoctrinated by some ideology or they are mad, or they are evil. There can be no doubt that the wounded leader of a country like North Korea would press the nuclear button if he realised that his own life was over. Hitler would have done it and so would Saddam Hussein if he had had the mythical WMD.
And the last fact is the crux of the argument. We were sent to war with Iraq on the word of a politician who lied and fluffed up the reasons to go to war. Why should we believe them now?
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