Britain needs Trident as it cannot rely on US, says Blair

So, having marched our troops into Afghanistan and Iraq side by side with the Americans, and having attacked David Cameron for daring to suggest that there should be even as much a razor blade's difference between British and US foreign policy, Blair now gives us his reason why we need Trident.

It's because we can't trust the US.

Tony Blair has argued that Britain needs to buy a new generation of nuclear weapons because it might not be able to rely on the United States to protect it if it were attacked.

"Our co-operation with America is very close. But close as it is, the independent nature of the British deterrent is an additional insurance against circumstances where we are threatened but America is not," said Mr Blair. "These circumstances are also highly unlikely but I am unwilling to say they are non-existent."

In other words, if someone was threatening to nuke us but not the US then the US would likely not get involved.

Has Blair ever formulated a less convincing argument in his entire time in office? Is the man who stood shoulder to shoulder with Bush as he proclaimed, "You are either with us or with the terrorists" now seriously claiming that the US would not get involved were the mother county to be nuked?

The real reason Blair won't give up Trident is because he sees nuclear disarmament as blatantly Old Labour, and no amount of common sense or reasoning will shift his knee-jerk response to what he sees as policies that caused Labour eighteen years in the wilderness.

The fact that the Soviet Union has collapsed doesn't even factor in to Blair's thinking. Old Labour supported disarmament, therefore he will re-commission Trident. Britain is safe with new Labour and we are about to waste £26 billion in order to prove this.

As I predicted the other day, he is indeed using the fact that he is reducing the amount of warheads by 20% as a way of pretending that he is complying with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Mr Blair denied that replacing Trident would breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and sought to head off a Labour backbench rebellion by saying that Britain's stockpile of warheads could be cut from 200 to 160 and the number of submarines reduced from four to three.

In a political lifetime of employing dubious logic to justify his right wing politics, the fact that we can't trust the US has to be the most ludicrous he has ever employed. I have continually said that Blair always "sincerely believes" whatever happens to most politically expedient at the time. However, I simply cannot believe that even Blair does not know that he is engaging in blatant falsehoods when he makes this argument. Even he can't believe the words that he is spouting.

I'm sure the parents of young British soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan will find scant comfort in the Prime Minister's notion that the people we are fighting beside may not respond were enemies to nuke us.

It's a scandalous argument and Blair should be ashamed of having ever employed it.

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tag: Blair, Trident, US foreign policy