Sturgeon’s delusional foreign policy is a masterpiece of contradiction
IWanting an independent Scotland to join Nato while opposing Trident are ideals that don’t add up
The SNP leader makes unkeepable promises and advocates irreconcilable positions
n the latest phase of her pretence at international statesmanship, Nicola Sturgeon turned up in Washington DC last week to address the Brookings Institution about her belief that an independent Scotland’s membership of Nato was “right and essential”: a rightness and essentialness, she added, that had been confirmed by Russia’s assault on Ukraine.
It was one of the more tactful things she said on her trip to the United States: when taking questions after her speech she told her audience, “Don’t re-elect Donald Trump at any point,” violating the first rule of international statesmanship: which is not to interfere in the internal politics of other countries when visiting. But then Ms Sturgeon can’t see a grandstand without clambering up into it and turning on her megaphone.
However, it was clear from her remarks about Nato that international and diplomatic relations remain a steep learning curve for the Scottish First Minister. Her party, the SNP, opposed Nato membership until 2012, when it became clear even to some of the meaner intelligences within the separatist movement that this opposition prevented their being taken seriously by those they aspired to emulate.
An independent Scotland would desperately want and need membership of Nato. There were widespread reports in 2014, shortly before the independence referendum, that soldiers in Scottish regiments were flooding the Ministry of Defence with enquiries about how to transfer to English regiments if the worst happened. The Scottish Air Force and the Scottish Navy remain figments of the imagination.
Of course, Scotland does retain a crucial Royal Navy base, Faslane, “home to the core of the Submarine Service”, according to the MoD, and serviced by the Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Coulport, eight miles away.
These are vital parts of Nato’s operational capacity, home to the nuclear deterrent and a new generation of hunter-killer submarines. Yet Ms Sturgeon and her colleagues want Faslane closed, because they are opposed to the Trident Deterrent Missile System, maintained by Coulport, and carried on the submarines that slip in and out of Faslane. How she reconciles her visceral opposition to a central element of Nato’s deterrent effect with her support for the organisation we had better leave it to her to explain: it will be a long wait.
The Royal Navy says its Submarine Service is the best in the world, and who would doubt them? It is why we can sleep soundly at night, and part of the reason why the swaggering, incoherent brute Putin, for all his talk of starting a nuclear war, hasn’t done so and almost certainly won’t.
But Ms Sturgeon believes she can remain in Nato and, by removing the nuclear deterrent from Scottish waters, satisfy the safety of her people and her own increasingly selfrighteous ego. Sadly she can’t; and even her relatively new-found love of Nato is causing problems.
The SNP now governs in a coalition with the Scottish Green Party, whose co-leader, Patrick Harvie – the “Minister for Zero Carbon Buildings, Active Travel and Tenants’ Rights” in the Scottish Government – recently said there was “no appetite” among members of his Party for reversing their opposition to Nato membership.
Having been sucked into politics after attending a CND rally at a tender age, Mr Harvie’s ideological background suggests that he would find it harder to endorse Nato, with its possibilities of engaging in Armageddon, than even Ms Sturgeon.
But then again, the SNP leader has form in contradicting herself, making unkeepable promises and advocating irreconcilable positions. She thinks Nato will find Scotland so irresistible that it will grant the Scots membership on whatever terms they dictate – even though the only reason Scotland would be a valuable member is one Ms Sturgeon threatens to throw away.
She governs in league with a party of cranks and crackpots fit to match even her own, but which disagrees with what she now proclaims as the main plank of her security, defence and foreign policies.
On top of that, she still seems to imagine that the EU would welcome her independent nation as a member, even though the Spanish, fighting to retain Catalonia, have made it clear they would not countenance such a thing.
Nor is she any closer to solving the problem of the currency of an independent Scotland, the best bet for which is the country “unofficially” using the pound sterling in the way that Caribbean islands use the dollar, but of course having absolutely no control over the economic policy that creates value or removes it from that currency.
A year ago, an adviser to the World Bank told the SNP that if they chose to launch a Scottish pound it would be worth 22 per cent less than sterling, with horrific results for the country’s standard of living.
As with her incomprehensible stance on Nato and the nuclear deterrent, Ms Sturgeon prefers not to address these issues, relying instead on a Monty Pythonesque strategy of contradiction and denial. Just as her party is split over these issues, so the nationalist movement is split too, with Alex Salmond, her ex-mentor, leading a similarly delusional offshoot group.
Ms Sturgeon gets away with such absurdities because the Conservative Government of the United Kingdom lacks credibility in Scotland, and is unlikely to gain any unless someone gets on his knees and begs Ruth Davidson to leave retirement.
And the longer Ms Sturgeon is allowed to parade her preposterous assertions without a voice of reason and sanity to take her on, the more ordinary people will be gulled into believing her. Just pray she isn’t the key to a Starmer coalition in 2024.