In the 1800s, Britain was the world’s superpower. Now, Britain’s Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson says that Britain could return to being a “true global power” after Brexit.
According to Williamson, Britain will become a much more important world player after Brexit:
This is our biggest moment as a nation since the end of the Second World War, when we can recast ourselves in a different way, we can actually play the role on the world stage that the world expects us to play.
For so long – literally for decades – so much of our national view point has actually been coloured by a discussion about the European Union.
This is our moment to be that true global player once more – and I think the armed forces play a really important role as part of that.
I am very much looking at how can we get as much of our resources forward based, actually creating a deterrent but also taking a British presence. We are looking at those opportunities not just in the Far East but also in the Caribbean as well.
Williamson did not specify where the bases would be, but unnamed sources say that one could be sited in Singapore or Brunei, adjacent to the South China Sea. The other could be Montserrat or Guyana in the Caribbean. The bases would be created “within the next couple of years.”
The U.K. already has bases in Cyprus, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and Diego Garcia. Williamson said he expected a dramatic shift in political focus after Brexit – with the UK building deeper relationships with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Caribbean states, and nations across Africa.
China claims the entire South China Sea as its sovereign territory, based on some fantasy historical claims. In 2016, the Philippines won a historic case in the United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague thoroughly humiliating China by ruling that all of China’s activities in the South China Sea are illegal and in violation of international law. However, as a criminal outlaw state, China has continued building illegal military bases in the South China Sea, annexing the region illegally just as Hitler annexed Poland.
The Chinese claim that they would be a great nation today if they had not been victimized by Britain in the Opium Wars of the 1840s. The Chinese claim that they have been repeatedly victimized and humiliated by the West for 170 years, when in fact the Chinese have repeatedly been so credulous and so incompetent at governing themselves, they actually allowed themselves to be humiliated time after time.