The latest warning from Pete Hegseth, a man who seems to have mistaken the Pentagon for a particularly ambitious think tank, is just the kind of bracing slap that this nation of shopkeepers so desperately needs. A US troop pullout from Europe? Good.
Let the continent stew in its own juices. But for Britain, this is not a tragedy. It is an opportunity to finally shake off the last vestiges of a decadent century where we outsourced our very survival to a superpower that, let’s face it, has never really understood us.
The fall of Rome did not happen overnight. It happened when the legions started to look inward, when the periphery was abandoned, and the barbarians were let in through the gates. The Americans are not abandoning Europe.
They are abandoning a Europe that has abandoned itself. And Britain, poor dear Britain, has been sleepwalking through this slow-motion collapse, clinging to the fading hope of a special relationship that has become increasingly one-sided. Hegseth’s warning is a clarion call.
It is time for this island to look to its own defences. Not in some jingoistic, flag-waving fashion, but with the cold, hard logic of a nation that has survived for centuries without the constant presence of a foreign army. We need to rebuild our military.
Not for some outdated notion of empire, but for the simple, brutal reality that if you cannot defend yourself, you will be defended by someone else. And that someone else will always have their own interests at heart. The intellectual decadence that has gripped our elites is the real enemy.
They see the American troops as a permanent fixture, a rent-a-cop they can ignore while they focus on more important matters like gender-neutral pronouns and net-zero targets. They have forgotten that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And that vigilance must be British.
Not American. Not European. British.
So let the Yankees go. Let them take their tanks and their drones and their burgers. We will take back our hills.
We will rebuild our navy. We will once again become a nation that is feared and respected, not pitied and ignored. The fall of the Second Rome is upon us.
But for Britain, this is not the end. It is the beginning of a new chapter. One where we once again stand on our own two feet.
Or we sink into the mud of history, forgotten and irrelevant. The choice is ours. And it must be made now.
