Target Number One, the End of Atlanticism

This is a scene from The Diplomat (season 2, episode 6) – available to view on Netflix.

pic.twitter.com/0xLWhLbJQ2

— BELLA CALEDONIA (@bellacaledonia) January 19, 2026

It’s a moment of drama that speaks directly to our current nightmare as all of our old shibboleths and assumptions about how the world is constructed melt around us.

NATO and the Western Alliance, which has been in place since 1949, stands completely exposed by the rogue behaviour of its most powerful member. Amid the froth and fury of the Trump administration’s aggression towards Greenland sits Scotland, home to the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons. But the argument that has been on peace campaigners’ minds for half a century  – this is not an independent nuclear deterrent, it is a US weapons system based on the west coast of Scotland – has gone from being a theoretical one to an existential one.

Keir Starmer says our nuclear deterrent requires us to have a good relationship with the United States.

But I thought we’re always told our nuclear deterrent is independent. pic.twitter.com/bqUvR39tD0

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) January 19, 2026

This, as The Diplomat shows so brutally, is one of the reasons why Britain will not let go of Scotland. As occasional Bella contributor Dougie McCann writes: “This was warned about in the 2006 Defence White Paper: “One way the USA could show its displeasure would be to cut off the technical support needed for the UK to continue to send Trident to sea.” The simple fact is it’s a myth that the U.K. has an Independent Nuclear Deterrent.

Meanwhile, the good people of Rosyth are being offered potassium iodate tablets to block radiation in the event of an emergency as nuclear subs come into dock. Apparently, Rosyth is the ONLY place they could berth nuclear subs, and Faslane is the ONLY place they could host Trident.

Believe that, and I’ve got a bridge over the Atlantic to sell you.

London, the City of Capitulation

In a crowded press conference in London, a journalist asks the Prime Minister:

“Is this the most serious crisis in transatlantic relationship in the last decade?”

“The US remains a close ally, but we must stand up for our values.” the Prime Minister replies.

No-one, including Keir Starmer, knows what that means.

“The UK and the US are close allies and close partners, that relationship matters profoundly” he continued. Increasingly, these seem to be just words that he says, words that come out of the mouth of the Prime Minister that are recognisable as words but don’t have any real meaning at all.

Another journalist asks Starmer:

“Your entire approach is predicated on the idea that Donald Trump is amenable to reason, and respects the rule of law.”

“But it’s patently that neither of those two assumptions are true.”

“So when will you consider some kind of economic retaliation through tariffs.”

“And will you talk to the Monarch, The King, about not going to America to celebrate 250 years of independence?”

I mean, ‘The King’ NOT going to America is the sort of really heavyweight power that Britain carries these days.

From Britannia Unleashed to Britain On the Leash

Now there is a divide between Europe and Britain’s response to Trump’s sabre-rattling. Keir Starmer said today he will take any form of tariff retaliation off the table, and that Britain will only respond privately, it seems, not with public action. Meanwhile, the EU is pressing ahead with a 90 billion euro retaliation package as a last resort. Post-Brexit, Britain is predictably floundering and exposed between its erstwhile (now mad) ally, and its former continental allies in Europe.

Remember the heady days of ‘Britannia Unleashed’?

It’s a long way from the Sunlit Uplands to the Gare Loch.

Capitulation, which the PM has outlined as his main strategy today, is catching. Luckily, the British media is bristling with Vichy-style columnists, increasingly looking like 5th Columnists. Here’s the bold Tim Stanley urging Britain to roll-over.

Whatever happened to all that Spitfire Nationalism? Remember, pre-Brexit our newspapers and airwaves were filled with lots of testosterone-fuelled declarations of probable heroism, mixed with a ton of highly dubious anti-Johnny Foreigner rhetoric?

Two years ago we noted [After Britain]:

“Living on the outskirts of Anglo-Britain’s wreckage, viewed from the Celtic Fringe, Britain has been a memefest of indulgence in hyper-nostalgia for the last decade, the new version of Spitfire Nationalism allows you to hurtle even further back. Scattered among the poppies and the royals and the endless remembrance is a recurring meme carefully cultivated by the Leave leadership, that of conflating Brexit – and specifically No Deal Brexit – with “our finest hour”. In this landscape it’s no wonder that Britishness has died.”

If Brexit and the collapse of Atlanticism has left Britain exposed, it also surely erodes further any notion that this is a polity, or a political culture you could be tied to. In this era, in this moment, what exactly does ‘being British’ even mean? As a vassal state tied to a maniacal superpower, what is the point of Britain?

We have, for a very long time, marked the extent to which Britain, and especially Scotland, is a militarised zone.

This is the toxic legacy of the British State, or Scotland the Dump:

[this poster (A2 420×594) we created in collaboration with graphic artist Andy Arthur is available for £10, contact us to arrange]

Of course it’s not just Scotland. As the journalist Matt Kennard posted: ‘Europe should immediately close down these huge US military bases’:

RAF Lakenheath (UK)
RAF Mildenhall (UK)
RAF Croughton (UK)
Ramstein (Germany)
Kaiserslautern (Germany)
Rota (Spain)
Morón (Spain)
Aviano (Italy)
NAS Sigonella (Italy)
NSA Naples (Italy)
Souda Bay (Greece)

In this bizarre, grotesque time, the prize of Trident becomes all the more reason for Britain to cling on to Scotland for dear life, as The Diplomat lays out. But having a prize location, as perceived by a collapsing and decrepit former imperial power can be a useful bargaining chip.

Bairns not Bombs, as the slogan goes

The logic of ‘security’ through W.M.D or M.A.D was always curious, and subtly psychopathic. A classic essay on the subject, from 2016, by the much maligned journalist Ian Jack, is well worth re-visisting: Trident: the British question | Trident.

In it, he dispelled the myths of an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ and charted the history of this myth to its origins:

“…in 1961 the US Navy had established a forward base for its Polaris fleet at the Holy Loch, which lies only seven or eight miles across the Clyde from the Gareloch. During the negotiations over the site, the British side raised the idea that one day Britain might obtain Polaris missiles for itself. The Americans resisted the idea; they distrusted British behaviour after the Suez invasion five years earlier and, more broadly, believed that the fewer countries that possessed their formidable new weapon the better. Enmities developed. There were rumours that Washington wanted to push the UK out of the nuclear business.”

“It was in this context – and only a fortnight before Macmillan met the US president, John Kennedy, at a specially convened summit in Nassau in December, 1962 – that Kennedy’s foreign policy adviser, Dean Acheson, delivered a speech at the West Point military academy. “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” he said in the speech’s most celebrated passage. “The attempt to play a separate power role … apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength – this role is about played out.”

Jack’s passage about how Trident came to Faslane is worth re-visiting:

“Civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, then novel techniques to Britain, gave the demonstrations unprecedented publicity. The Holy Loch protest that I joined on a September afternoon in 1961 had its farcical dimension; a gale prevented our ferry from landing its cargo of several hundred protesters, sending us back across the Clyde to march miles away from the base. Nevertheless, more than 350 people did manage to get arrested at a sit-in at the base’s gates, where American sailors making their entrances and exits were taunted and teased with chants of “Yankees go home!” and “Ye canny spend a dollar when ye’re deid” (to the tune of “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain”). The anti-nuclear cause in Scotland had a distinct and memorable flavour, less solemn than the protests in the south – the songs had a Glasgow swagger and wit – but also more xenophobic, because the nuclear weapons being protested against weren’t even our own.”

“There was another difference, which in terms of Scottish political attitudes may be the Holy Loch’s most important legacy: one of the most beautiful seascapes in Europe – of longstanding aesthetic and recreational value to industrial Scotland – had been chosen by the United States as the site for a nuclear base with the connivance of a British government.  It was hard to resist the conclusion that the British government worried more about preserving the safety and landscape of southern England than it did about those things in western Scotland. The SNP at the time was insignificant as a political influence, but its opposition to Polaris at its 1961 conference, extended to all nuclear weapons two years later, began to rouse a slumbering grievance.”

The Americans chose the site. Now we’re ruled by a hostile power, them.

The mythology of the idea of ‘an independent nuclear weapon’ owned by Britain is destroyed Over and Over.

Read this evidence to UK Parliament’s Select Committee on Defence

Where does all of this leave us?

Presumably, the Unionists defending the tin-pot remnants of Late Britain will continue the Project Fear that ‘now is not the time’ and that such wildly unstable times are not the moment to leave the Mothership. Except that is all broken and all those arguments are left destroyed, bankrupt, useless. The collapse of the post-war order; the end of the ‘Special Relationship’, the debacle of England’s spasm of self-harm over Brexit; and the British state’s subsequent vulnerability in being tied to Trump’s madness render all of their arguments and logic redundant.

Beyond all of this, the British political order is collapsing in real time, and waiting in the wings is Trump’s supplicant, Mr Farage, with his plans for detention camps and mass deportations.

In the Union, we remain Target Number One. Your choice.