By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 10/31/24

During the period of the Wagner Group insurrection in the spring of 2023, the biography of the mercenary group’s founder and principal owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was spread far and wide. The fact that he had once served meals to Vladimir Putin prompted sniggering among our mainstream commentators. Just imagine that such a person could rise to the power, influence and wealth of Prigozhin! This was proof positive of the endemic corruption and distorted values of the ‘Putin regime,’ they opined.

However, my point in writing today’s installment is to demonstrate that upward mobility of those with great talent and imagination has long been and remains a competitive advantage of Russia. That was so under Peter the Great in the first quarter of the 18th century, it was certainly true in much of the Soviet period until the 1980s. And it revived very nicely in the ‘Roaring 90s’ when the hero of this piece, Sergei Gutzeit, restaurateur, vineyard owner, restorer of landmark buildings at his own expense, founder and chief benefactor of a lyҫėe for aspiring talents from the lower classes began his steep rise up the success ladder in the circle of another rising star, Vladimir Putin.

All of these issues came to mind this afternoon when my wife and I took lunch in Gutzeit’s first and still best earning restaurant Podvorye located in the Petersburg suburb of Pavlovsk where he has kept his primary residence and focus of his charitable works for decades.

Pavlovsk is named for the Emperor Pavel (Paul I), son of Catherine the Great and father of Emperor Alexander I, best known as the conqueror of Napoleon. Paul’s elegant and modestly sized palace is a ‘must see’ tourist destination for both foreign and domestic visitors to Northwest Russia, alongside the much larger and more demanding Summer Palace of Catherine in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), 5 km away.

However, the success of Gutzeit’s restaurant opposite the palace park had little to do with location, location, location. Gutzeit opened the Podvorye in 1994 on an unpromising plot of land that the grudging city authorities offered him. It is wedged between the train tracks on one side and a busy local highway on the other. It was his unique architectural solution and his talents in hospitality services that won him a loyal clientele from among the top business and political circles of Petersburg after a very few years.

As for architecture, the Podvorye restaurant and the ensemble of outbuildings adjacent to it are made from immense stripped logs in a style that resembles the stage settings for 17th century or still earlier Russia as shown in Rimsky Korsakov operas in the Mariinsky Theater. The basic menu was built entirely around traditional hearty Russian cuisine that is very well turned out, in copious portions and priced very fairly. And on weekends it was the rule to regale diners with rounds of Russian folk songs by musicians who invited the children especially to join in.

Gutzeit’s fortune was assured in October 2000 when Vladimir Putin decided to celebrate his first birthday as president in…the Podvorye. The specially prepared meal for the presidential party remains on page one of the printed menu and is currently priced at 55 euros in ruble equivalency. In typical Russian fashion, the meal opens with a shock and awe array of eight different meat, fish, salted vegetable, marinated forest mushroom and other appetizers which invite rounds of vodka shot glasses, then moves on to a fish or meat soup followed by the mains of fried fish or meat. Fasting for a day ahead of such a meal is a good idea.

On the other hand, for normal dining, the out of pocket cost is much lower. By way of example, I mention that our favorite dish is half a roast duck served with stewed cabbage and a baked pear with lingonberry filling. One portion is more than sufficient to serve two and today costs the equivalent of 12 euros. Back in the 1990s, when Russian farming was reeling from the shock therapy administered at the advice of Western advisers, Gutzeit had to import his ducks frozen from France to be satisfied with quality and uniform portions. Then when relations with France soured, he shifted to frozen ducks from Hungary. Now chef assures me that they arrive fresh from farms in Rostov (Russia) and I assure you that the quality is superb.

But, to resume my story of Gutzeit’s rise: once word of the President’s visit got around, the Podvorye was filled daily to capacity. Back in the 1990s and early in the new century, the diners were predominantly foreigners whose reservations were made for them by the premiere hotels in St Petersburg where they were lodged. I recall how in about 2004 my wife and I spotted former British prime minister John Major at another table.

Those were the glory days when Gutzeit made a fortune that he immediately invested in other commercial ventures and also in charitable works, the first of which, was a free of charge soup kitchen for the poor run daily from a large, specially built canteen adjacent to the restaurant.

Nowadays the clientele is almost exclusively middle class Russians from near and far. They arrive as couples, as families with kids, and as groups of friends.

Aside from opening other restaurants in the region, Gutzeit created the ‘Russian Village’ in Upper Mandrogi, a Russian equivalent to America’s Williamsburg on a riverbank site jointly agreed with tour operators of cruises in the rivers and canals running north from Lake Ladoga that are very popular in the summer season. This venture provided work opportunities to artisans in traditional decorative handicrafts.

With the proceeds of his businesses, with his own money Gutzeit undertook the restoration of dilapidated buildings from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries in the Pavlovsk area. In one of these complexes he opened what I would call his most ambitious and far-sighted project which was inspired by the lyҫėe within the Catherine Palace which Alexander I created initially with a view to educate his younger brothers together with a small group of talented students from outside the royal entourage. Today it is best known as the school where the young Pushkin studied. Gutzeit’s vision was to help create a new patriotic but broadly educated and widely traveled elite to help guide the country’s future.

The school was named for Russia’s revered Foreign Minister in the second half of the 19th century, A.M. Gorchakov. Gutzeit directly oversaw the selection of the 18 candidates for the first class and following classes from among children of low income intelligentsia families. He oversaw the program of travel abroad in the West and domestically around Russia that the students were given gratis. The school is still going strong and I expect to hear more about its graduates when I meet with Gutzeit at the start of next week.

In reviving the tradition of what was called in Pushkin’s time the Tsarskoye Selo lyҫėe, Gutzeit was a good 20 years ahead of the Putin government. It is only now that a project to revive that school in the original Catherine Palace complex is being realized.

Meanwhile, Gutzeit never abandoned the love for fresh produce that directed him to cooking and restaurant ownership. Originally born and educated in Odessa (Ukraine), Gutzeit got his start in business in the food markets of the north where he traded in vegetables. The latter partly explains his decision early in the new millennium to buy a farming estate in the Crimea. His main crop there is grapes for wine, and he began well before it became popular for Russian arbiters of taste like Dmitry Kiselyov, director of all Russian state television news, to become a vineyard owner in Crimea. Gutzeit indulges in his gentleman farmer avocation in the south from late spring to autumn.

His most recent acquisition, agricultural land near the regional center Gatchina, brings together various interests. The location has its own logic: Paul 1 had his earliest palace in precisely Gatchina. On this farm, Gutzeit is now growing most of the fresh vegetables, herbs, fowl and dairy products that will be featured in Podvorye. With this latest accent on cooking mainly what you get from your surroundings and can personally control, Gutzeit’s restaurant is sure to vie for a star in the Michelin guide if and when sanctions are lifted.

That, in a nutshell, is my Exhibit Number 1 of a successful and wealthy benefactor of his society with outstanding vision who began, like Prigozhin, as ‘a waiter to Putin.’ When you care to scratch the surface, this country has a great many surprises that help you to better understand why it is now the fourth biggest economy in the world as measured by Purchasing Power Equivalency and likely has the number one army in the world.

YouTube link here.

This interview was recorded on 12/9/24.

By Olena Hrazhdan, Kyiv Post, 11/23/24

130,000 Ukrainians have returned to their homes in the Russian-occupied Donbas territories in the last year due to the difficulties they faced living as internally displaced people since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.

The returnees all travel through Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow to make the trip, Mariupol mayor advisor Petr Andriushchenko told Kyiv Post. Russia closed the last land border crossing between the Sumy region in Ukraine and the Kursk region in Russia when Kyiv launched its counteroffensive into the area over the summer.

Andrushchenko said he obtained the data from Russian officials overseeing the Sheremetyevo checkpoint, showing that the root cause for their return is finances.

“This wave last year began after Ukraine’s government canceled the social wage of Hr.2,000 ($48) for internally displaced Ukrainians. But the main reason is that they don’t have a place to live,” Andriushchenko said.

The average salary of a Ukrainian worker who fled Donbas in 2022 does not exceed the price of a monthly apartment rental in most of Ukraine, he added. This also keeps Ukraine’s most popular mortgage program, yeOselya, out of reach for IDPs, he added. Internally displaced Ukrainians only comprise 2% of the program’s 13,000 borrowers.

“[The program] fits refugees from Kyiv, Bucha, Hostomel but people from Mariupol, Berdyansk, Volnovakha, Tokmak, and Melitopol cannot afford it.”

Cities like Kyiv have more jobs, which is why refugees tend to stay more often. Other regions do not share the same positive prospects, according to Andrushchenko. More people return from the west of Ukraine, but less from Dnipro.

In some regions, there are few refugees because the regions are “unfriendly for internally displaced persons” – meaning they could not find a job, the local prices were too high to get by, or the local society appeared “closed.”

Why Ukrainians Choose Sheremetyevo

After Russia closed the Kursk crossing along with its land entry points into Latvia, the airport became the only official way to enter the country for Ukrainians. The route involves traveling from Kyiv to Warsaw by bus, then to Minsk, and finally to Moscow by plane.

Upon arrival, Ukrainians must undergo “filtration.” Russian border officers interrogate them for fealty or affiliation to Ukraine. They check their documents and go through their phones to search for contacts, photos, messages, or any other record that could reveal a pro-Kyiv stance that would make them illegible to return to Russian-occupied Donbas.

“We were kept on the floor in a little room for 27 hours,” Angelina, a young woman who recently returned home to occupied Donetsk to sell property, told Kyiv Post.

“They handed me a questionnaire with absurd questions. For instance, ‘How do you feel about the Special Military Operation?’ – as the Russians call the war. If you express non-support for the war against Ukraine, you’ll face problems. If you say you support it, they might let you pass, but you’ll be at risk, as your profile could fall into the hands of Ukrainian special services – what then?”

“It’s a heavy moral burden,” she said.

Even after waiting days without food or much water, there is still no guarantee returnees will be allowed to enter Russian-controlled territory.

The Slippery Statistics

Andriushchenko’s team checked the data they received from Russian officials against initial from informants “who are based inside Mariupol,” he told Kyiv Post. They believe several thousand more people have tried to return home but have been pushed back at the border.

“Apart from the 120,000-130,000 people who entered occupied territory, around 200,000 were refused entry,” the Mariupol city council adviser said. “Another 50,000-70,000 were banned from entering Russia through the border crossing point at Minsk.”

The 130,000 estimate was given in August by lawmaker Maksym Tkachenko. Tkachenko is part of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party and chairs a parliamentary group representing the rights of internally displaced Ukrainians. One local government representative from the East told Kyiv Post that the figure could be as high as 300,000, but Andriushchenko said he believed such figures to be “hype.”

The Russians have provided humbler statistics. Sheremetyevo border control representative Oksana Myshchenko told Russian TV channels that a total of 107,000 Ukrainians have arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport since October 2023 and just 83,000 were allowed to enter.

One conclusion is clear – at least 100,000 Ukrainians have made it back into Russian-occupied territory. This number is striking.

“Over 100,000 Ukrainians is quite a large number already,” Volodymyr Vakhitov, director of the Institute of Behavioral Studies at the American University in Kyiv, told Kyiv Post. “However, this number still represents a wide range of vague estimates voiced out by different officials from both sides of the border rather than hard evidence based on samples or surveys,”

Failing to Protect Internally Displaced Ukrainians

Lack of local infrastructure, accommodation, and jobs in host cities are also major problems for IDPs, Vakhitov said. With the scope of the problem millions large, cities and regions need to be supported by national policies, created at the national level.

Despite a successful decentralization reform in Ukraine, local governments in Ukraine still rely on administration in Kyiv to create solutions for IDPs, Vakhitov said. Local communities that host large numbers of people face scale-up challenges as they lack resources to quickly expand the local infrastructure, the AUK Institute for Behavioral Studies deputy director Nataliia Zaika added.

“The major issues they encounter include outdated residential norms, job market regulations and skills mismatch, and securing sufficient resources without additional assistance from the central government.”

Both of these pieces were published recently by The American Conservative. Which piece do you think is a more realistic take on Trump”s choices for his national security team and what he might do with respect to the Ukraine war? Let me know in the comments. – Natylie

Will Trump Channel Nixon in Ukraine?

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 12/5/24

The similarities between this most recent presidential election and that of 1968 are several. Like Joseph R. Biden, Lyndon B. Johnson was an increasingly polarizing and unpopular wartime president who declined to run for re-election. Their respective vice presidents were each hobbled by their records and paid the price at the polls in November. The Republican candidates in both ’68 and ’24 were, each in their own ways, the authors of their own political resurrections. And during the campaign, both Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump claimed to possess plans to end the increasingly unpopular wars of their predecessors.

Upon winning the New Hampshire primary in March 1968, Nixon promised “to end the war and win the peace in the Pacific.” Still more, in a series of private meetings with editors and reporters, Nixon claimed that once he was in office he would convene a summit with Soviet leaders to get their assistance to help end the war. As the Christian Science Monitor’s longtime Washington bureau chief, Godfrey Sperling, recalled,

it was from these “off the record” briefings that a story began to circulate among those who wanted the U.S. out of the war: that Nixon had a “secret plan” to bring the boys home. He doubtless was able to win some dove votes from those who felt Humphrey had been too closely tied to President Johnson’s acceleration of the war.

Of course, Nixon had no such plan. Instead, he increased the intensity of bombing over North Vietnam and expanded the war to Cambodia. 

As with Nixon, Trump’s campaign pledge to end the Ukraine conflict “in 24 hours” probably attracted dovish voters. And there are several indications he may follow in the footsteps of Nixon by escalating the war in an attempt to end it.

Trump’s appointment of the retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg as his Ukraine envoy is one such indication. Kellogg, a longtime Trump adviser and the co-chair of America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Center for American Security, seems to see the war in Ukraine through the same lens the Biden administration views it. Writing in the once-respected National Interest in October, Kellogg claimed, “Russia has invaded Ukraine for a second time with the goal of ending its sovereign existence.” (The goal was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but never mind.) And Kellogg’s professed vision of a post-war settlement seems more in sync with the demands of the maximalists in Kiev than with anything remotely achievable at this point in the conflict. Writing, again, in the National Interest, Kellogg proposed that

a ceasefire along the current lines and subsequent negotiations would preserve a sovereign, democratic Ukraine anchored in the West and capable of defending itself. Kyiv would maintain its internationally-recognized claims to sovereignty over all of Ukraine. A halt to hostilities would also facilitate the provision of reliable security guarantees, including possible NATO and EU membership, to deter Russia from resuming the conflict.

If he hasn’t yet, Kellogg ought to be informed that Ukraine’s membership in NATO was the war’s casus belli, and as such, holding out any possibility of Ukrainian’s membership in the future will be a non-starter for Moscow. 

In an April 2024 research report for AFPI, Kellogg and his colleague Fred Fleitz wrote that in order to end the war, Trump “would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement.”

In addition to calling for (yet another) bilateral defense agreement with Ukraine, Kellogg and Fleitz also called for “placing levies on Russian energy sales to pay for Ukrainian reconstruction.” 

Do such proposals seem more likely or less likely to draw Putin to the negotiating table?

That Kellogg was appointed to such a sensitive position in the first place should worry those who supported Trump on the assumption that he would bring much needed change to the conduct of US foreign policy. Reasonable people might ask: Where are men of experience and imagination, like the retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, senior fellow at The American Conservative? Unlike Macgregor, Kellogg knows nothing about Russia or its interests, let alone its historic sensitivity to Ukraine’s strategic importance. Macgregor has decades of scholarship invested in Russo-German relations and Moscow’s role in Europe and Asia. But Macgregor is nowhere to be found among the incoming team. Perhaps Howard Luttnick and Linda MacMahon were too busy campaigning for cabinet appointments to do what they should have been doing: selecting the most competent men and women for the most sensitive positions.

Alas, we will have to leave for another time the question of why the president-elect has staffed his national security team with a veritable roster of Fox News personalities and a recent immigrant with suspected ties to foreign intelligence such as Sebastian Gorka. The British-Hungarian Gorka has claimed that Trump will “force” Putin to the negotiating table by threatening a massive increase in military aid to Ukraine. Faux-machismo aside, there is little to indicate that—even if Trump pursues such a plan—there is much left to provide. Indeed, there is little evidence Putin is likely to be swayed by inducements from Washington. 

With regard to Ukraine, the playbook of the bipartisan Washington blob still rules. And while it has only been a month since the election, the president-elect has provided few signs that he plans on deviating from the script left by Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan.

James W. Carden is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and a former adviser to the U.S. State Department.

***

The Hidden Logic of Trump’s National Security Picks

By Lyle Goldstein, The American Conservative, 12/6/24

As President-elect Donald Trump announces his selections for cabinet posts, there is a definite pattern of choosing figures from outside the political mainstream. That is perhaps understandable for a candidate that had many cabinet-level appointments turn abruptly against him in his first term. Some of the selections even seem to constitute brazen challenges to the nation’s governing elite and their institutions. To be sure, these unconventional choices also reflect Trump’s new power deriving from his significant electoral victory—taking all seven battleground states, the popular vote, and both chambers of Congress.

In the national security realm, Trump has promised the American people “peace through strength” and found widespread support for this formula, which may hark back to the golden era of Ronald Reagan. And that’s one consistent theme among all of his foreign policy choices, who come from a variety of backgrounds.

Several of the picks could be considered classic conservative “hawks” in that they have continuously advocated for military escalation against rivals. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), nominated to the key positions of secretary of state and national security advisor respectively, certainly fit in this category. Nonetheless, we can already see examples of Trump’s unique approach influencing his top advisors. Thus, Waltz actually decried President Joe Biden’s recent decision to allow Ukraine to fire U.S.-made missiles directly into Russian territory: “This is another step up the escalation ladder, and no one knows where this is going.”

Two other picks in the national security domain, Peter Hegseth for secretary of defense and Tulsi Gabbard for the director of national intelligence, correspond more closely with Trump’s vision for American foreign policy. Notably, they are both from a National Guard background, which may partially explain their shared strong inclination against U.S. military interventions abroad. Hegseth, for instance, endorsed a law in New Hampshire that would prohibit sending National Guard troops into conflicts overseas without the constitutionally mandated declaration of war from Congress. Hegseth, a veteran-turned–Fox News defense analyst, was one of the most unusual of Trump’s selections; now his nomination unfortunately seems to be in significant trouble due to allegations of malfeasance.

Like Hegseth, Gabbard also served with distinction in America’s wars in the Middle East and came away disturbed by what she saw there. During her service in Iraq, Gabbard witnessed first-hand the devastation and enormous costs of that war, including to her fellow American soldiers. As an Iraq War veteran, Gabbard may well be particularly suited to serve as director of national intelligence, coordinating America’s myriad, sprawling intelligence agencies. She is well aware that intelligence has too often skewed assessments—including with respect to nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction—with devastating results. The paradigmatic case for the misuse of intelligence is the Iraq War, but intelligence failure has also haunted the U.S. government more recently—for example, when overly optimistic estimates of “progress” in Afghanistan kept the U.S. stuck in that quagmire far longer than was necessary for U.S. national security.

The sad reality is that nuclear weapons are once again emerging as a salient issue for American defense policy, and the next director of national intelligence will need to bring focus on this crucial domain of national security. Gabbard chose to make the nuclear threat a centerpiece of her presidential campaign back in 2020. Today, her stark warnings seem all too prescient, especially as the Ukraine–Russia War seems to be expanding in scope, with Ukraine losing ground to the country which hosts the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Biden himself admitted in October 2022 that major U.S.–Russia tensions mean that “we have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going… We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since … the Cuban missile crisis.” Gabbard’s long focus on nuclear strategy, crisis stability, and arms control will be an asset in a world where Russia has lowered the threshold for nuclear use, China and North Korea are rapidly expanding their nuclear arsenals, and Iran could suddenly test a nuclear weapon.

While it may not be clear at first glance what unites all of President-elect Trump’s national security picks, his national security team is well-positioned to implement, rather than thwart, his agenda—and this “team of rivals” approach will ensure that a spectrum of views will be represented before the commander-in-chief makes the ultimate decisions about the most consequential issues. Instead of a unanimous “blob” adhering to the status quo or a coterie of “yes men,” Trump will surround himself with competing and alternative views. This is essential, since foreign policy is where the president’s authority and power are greatest.

There are reasons for hawks and realists and so-called “Asia firsters” to be encouraged by the emerging Trump team—people from different experiences and with varying perspectives. Having dissenting opinions within the president’s official circle is vital for effective national leadership. Having objective intelligence assessments, free from institutional biases or erroneous threat inflation and informed by multifarious perspectives, will be key to helping Trump make the right decisions on the crucial matters of war and peace.

Whether Trump is able to replicate his first term, during which he avoided starting a new war, only time will tell. But there is a case to be made that disrupting the status quo could form a necessary, but not sufficient, first step toward mending our broken foreign policy and putting the American people and American interests first.

By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 11/24/24

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On November 15th, The Times published a remarkable report, revealing serious “questions” are being asked about the viability of Britain’s two flagship aircraft carriers, at the highest levels of London’s defence establishment. Such perspectives would have been unmentionable mere months ago. Yet, subsequent reporting seemingly confirms the vessels are for the chop. Should that come to pass, it will represent an absolutely crushing, historic defeat for the Royal Navy – and the US Empire in turn – without a single shot being fired.

The HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales first set sail in 2017 and 2019 respectively, after 20 years in development. The former arrived at the Royal Navy’s historic Portsmouth base with considerable fanfare, a Ministry of Defence press release boasting that the carrier would be deployed “in every ocean around the world over the next five decades.” The pair were and remain the biggest and most expensive ships built in British history, costing close to $8 billion combined. Ongoing operational costs are likewise vast.

Fast forward to today however, and British ministers and military chiefs are, per The Times, “under immense pressure to make billions of pounds’ worth of savings,” with major “casualties” certain. Resultantly, senior Ministry of Defence and Treasury officials are considering scrapping at least one of the carriers, if not both. The reason is simple – “in most war games, the carriers get sunk,” and are “particularly vulnerable to missiles.” As such, the pair are now widely perceived as the “Royal Navy’s weak link.”

Matthew Savill of British state-tied Royal United Services Institute told The Times that missile technology is developing “at such a pace”, carriers are rapidly becoming easy for Britain’s adversaries to “locate and track”, then neutralise. “In particular,” he cautioned, China is increasing the range of its ballistic and supersonic anti-ship missiles. Meanwhile, Beijing’s “hypersonic glide vehicle”, the DF-17, “can evade existing missile defence systems,” its “range, speed and manoeuvrability” making it a “formidable weapon” neither Britain nor the US can adequately counter.

Savill advocated “cutting one or both of the carriers,” as this “would free up people and running costs and those could be reinvested in the running costs of the rest of the fleet and easing the stresses on personnel”. Nonetheless, he warned that scrapping the carriers would be a “big deal for a navy that has designed itself around those carriers…and the £6.2 billion paid for them would be a sunk cost.”

That the Royal Navy has “designed itself” around the two aircraft carriers is quite an understatement. For just one to set sail, it must be supported by a strike group consisting of two Type 45 destroyers for air defence, two Type 23 frigates for anti-submarine warfare, a submarine, a fleet tanker and a support ship. This “full-fat protective approach”, Savill lamented, means “most of the deployable Royal Navy” must accompany a single carrier at any given time:

“You can protect the carriers, but then the Navy has put all of its eggs in a particularly large and expensive basket.”

‘National Embarrassment’

March 2021 saw publication of a long-awaited British government report, Global Britain in a Competitive Age – “a comprehensive articulation” of London’s “national security and international policy,” intended to “[shape] the open international order of the future.” The two aircraft carriers loomed large in its contents. One passage referred to how HMS Queen Elizabeth would soon lead Britain’s “most ambitious global deployment for two decades, visiting the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific”:

“She will demonstrate our interoperability with allies and partners – in particular the US – and our ability to project cutting-edge military power in support of NATO and international maritime security. Her deployment will also help the government to deepen our diplomatic and prosperity links with allies and partners worldwide.”

Such bombast directly echoed the bold wording of a July 1998 strategic defence review, initiated a year earlier by then-prime minister Tony Blair. Its findings kickstarted London’s quest to acquire world-leading aircraft carriers, which culminated with the birth of HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. Britain’s explicit objective, directly inspired by the US Empire’s dependence on carriers to belligerently project its diplomatic, economic, military and political interests abroad, was to recover London’s role as world police officer, and audaciously assert herself overseas:

“In the post-Cold War world, we must be prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us. So we plan to buy two new larger aircraft carriers to project power more flexibly around the world…This will give us a fully independent ability to deploy a powerful combat force to potential trouble spots without waiting for basing agreements on other countries’ territory. We will…be poised in international waters and most effectively back up diplomacy with the threat of force.”

Blair’s reverie appeared to finally come to pass in May 2021, when HMS Queen Elizabeth set off on a grand tour of the world’s oceans, escorted by a vast carrier strike group. Over the next six months, the vessel engaged in a large number of widely-publicised exercises with foreign navies, including NATO allies, and docked in dozens of countries. Press coverage was universally fawning. Yet, in November, as the excursion was nearing its end, an F-35 fighter launched from the carrier unceremoniously crashed.

The F-35’s myriad issues were by that point well-established. The jet, which has cost US taxpayers close to $2 trillion, entered into active service in 2006 while still under development. It quickly gained a reputation for hazardous unreliability. In 2015, a Pentagon report acknowledged its severe structural issues, limited service life and low flight-time capacity. Two years later, the Department of Defense quietly admitted the US Joint Program Office had been secretly recategorising F-35 failure incidents to make the plane appear safe to fly. 

Despite this, the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales were specifically designed to transport the F-35, to the exclusion of all other fighter jets. However, Britain has consistently struggled to source usable F-35s, which produces the ludicrous situation of the two carriers almost invariably patrolling seas with few if any fighters aboard at all, therefore invalidating their entire raison d’etre. In November 2023, the Daily Telegraph dubbed these regular “jet-less” forays a “national embarrassment”.

‘Carrier Gap’

An even graver embarrassment, rarely discussed with any seriousness by the British media, is that the two aircraft carriers have been plagued with endless technical and mechanical issues as long as they’ve been in service. Flooding, mid-operation breakdowns, onboard fires, and engine leaks are routine. Both vessels have spent considerably more time docked and under repair than at sea over their brief lifetimes. In 2020, an entire HMS Prince of Wales crew accommodation block collapsed, for reasons unclear.

As elite US foreign policy journal National Interest acknowledged in March 2024, “the Royal Navy remains unable to adequately defend or operate” its two carriers “independently” – code for the Empire being consistently compelled to deploy its own naval and air assets to support the pair. This is quite some failure, given British officials originally intended for the vessels to not only lead NATO exercises and deployments, but “slot into” US navy operations wherever and whenever necessary.

The Empire’s inability to outsource its hegemonic duties to Britain has precipitated a critical “carrier gap”. Despite maintaining an 11-strong fleet, Washington cannot deploy the vessels to every global flashpoint at once, grievously undermining her power and influence at a time of tremendous upheaval worldwide. In a bitter irony, by encouraging and facilitating London’s emulation of its own flawed and outdated reliance on aircraft carriers, the US has inadvertently created yet another needy imperial dependant, further draining its already fatally overstretched military resources.

Several Royal Navy destroyers were originally part of abortive US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, launched in late 2023 to smash AnsarAllah’s righteous anti-genocide Red Sea blockade. Almost immediately, it became apparent the British lacked any ability to fire on land targets, therefore rendering their participation completely useless. Subsequently, photos emerged of areas on Britain’s ships where land attack cruise missiles should’ve been situated. Instead, the spaces were occupied by humble treadmills, for use as on-board gyms.

It transpired that the appropriate weapons hadn’t been purchased, due to a lack of funds – the money having of course been spent instead on constructing barely operable aircraft carriers, which now face summary defenestration. By investing incalculable time, energy, and money in pursuing the mythological greatness associated with carrier capability, Britain – just like the US Empire – now finds itself unable to meet modern warfare’s most basic challenges. Meanwhile, its adversaries near and far have remorselessly innovated, equipping themselves for 21st century battle.

Days after The Times portended the impending death of London’s aircraft carriers, mainstream media became awash with reports of savage cutbacks in Britain’s military capabilities, in advance of a new strategic defence review. Five Royal Navy warships, all of which have lain disused due to staff shortages and structural decay for some time, were among the first announced “casualties”. What if anything will replace these losses isn’t certain, although it likely won’t be aircraft carriers.