Reprinted with permission from the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA).
Peter Ford is deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain which bills itself as something quite unheard of in America: socialist and socially conservative.
Ford was a career British diplomat, serving as Ambassador to Bahrain (1999-2003) and Syria (2003-2006). Until 2015 he served as representative of the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in Amman, Jordan.
He is that rarest of creatures of the British (or any) foreign policy establishment: principled and fearless.
~ James W. Carden
Carden: Today I am talking with Ambassador Peter Ford. So Peter, I understand you might soon be standing for office for the Workers Party. Can you tell us a little bit about the Workers’ Party?
Ford: Well, the Workers’ Party hasn’t been around for very long, only four or five years, but it came to prominence a year ago when the leader, George Galloway, who is a veteran actor in British politics on the left, last year got himself elected in a by-election in Rochdale, and made quite a splash because he is an extremely effective orator and he dedicated his victory to the people of Gaza. And that is an important part of the Party’s appeal, as it is pro-peace, anti-imperialism, anti-militarism while being common sense socialist.
Hopefully we can repeat that success in Runcorn [an industrial town of about 60,000 near Liverpool] although the odds will be stacked against us, folks in my hometown not being overly concerned about Gaza.
Carden: You described the Workers’ Party as pro-peace. What other parties would you say occupy that kind of space in the UK?
Ford: Amazingly, historically the British Labor Party occupied some of that space and used to campaign for nuclear disarmament and was generally pro-peace when it was in opposition. But whenever it was in power, it would become very centrist if not downright right-wing and very pro-NATO and would go into any war that was led by the United States.
It was Blair’s Labor Party that was highly instrumental in kicking off the Iraq war. So there’s really not much left of the peace strand of the Labor party. Having said that, Jeremy Corbyn became leader of Labour a decade ago now and for a few years cleaved to that pro-peace position, until he was ousted in a kind of Labour palace coup.
So Labour is now totally extreme centrist, meaning that it’s a war party as much as any of the other parties including the British Green Party who are at the moment extremely pro-Ukraine.
Carden: So the Green Party’s trajectory in the UK is sort of similar to the Green Party in Germany?
Ford: Not quite as extreme as in Germany, where they’ve been part of the ruling coalition and have been able to indulge their Russophobia to the hilt. But the Green Party here try to masquerade as something of a peace party. But when it comes to concrete issues they are pro-Gaza, but they could not with conviction call themselves anything like a peace party.
Carden: I do want to get to Russia and Ukraine because your prime minister has been very busy over the past couple of weeks. But first, I do want to get a sense of the view within the UK generally about what has been going on in Gaza.
Is it similar to the US? I think, as is well known, Washington pretty much falls lockstep behind whatever Netanyahu wants and we know why that is. There are various domestic constituencies (Evangelicals, Zionists) which are very influential, particularly on Capitol Hill. Is it as monolithic as it is in the United States or are there people who share the views of people like you and Galloway?
Ford: The last couple of years, it’s moved very much in the same direction as the United States. So it would be extremely hard to point to any concrete practical differences between Starmer’s ruling Labour Party and Trump’s administration on Israel.
The history to this, as I mentioned earlier, is that Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, was ousted and a key element in his ouster was his support for Palestine. And when Labour defenestrated Corbyn, it was over trumped up charges of antisemitism. And after that, the Labour Party made an absolute fetish of being pro-Israel, in order to live down the previous manufactured stigma and make themselves more respectable in the eyes of the Israel-influenced media.
And it’s proved to be quite a winning formula for them.
There’s been some contesting from marches in the street and on our campuses – as in America, and there has been some contesting of Labour’s pro-Israel positions, such as its refusal to support the charges of genocide level by the ICJ—but there’s been no opposition from any political party other than ours, and we don’t get heard.
Carden: You were the UK’s ambassador to Syria from 2003 to 2006, then from 2006 to 2015 you were with UNRWA…
Ford: …Just down there road in Amman. My work in Jordan also covered an area that included Syria. So I’ve been following Syria closely. When I was there, it was the period of the Iraq War when relations with Syria deteriorated, and then later, while I was in Amman, the Arab Spring spread.
Carden: So last year al-Jolani came to power in Syria. Some of us in America viewed the ultimately successful overthrow of the Assad regime with some trepidation. Critics of the Obama-Biden-Trump regime change policy thought that it was a bad idea for the United States to try to overthrow a secular multi-confessional leader and put people linked to al-Qaeda in his place.
Can you tell us how you see things shaking out now that Assad is in Russia? What we might reasonably expect from someone like al-Jolani?
Ford: Well, perhaps the first thing to say, in all honesty, is that the worst has not happened. [Note: Our discussion took place before reports surfaced of the massacres of Alawites and Christians now coming out of Syria]. The Islamist regime, which is now in control in Damascus, although it’s the same people who were in Al-Qaeda and even ISIS—it’s the same people with the same ideology—but in power.
Their actions are almost indistinguishable from those of any Arab US satellite. And indeed they are so weak, so dependent for survival on the Western powers that they curry favor with the West to a shameful degree, to a degree that leads them to profess an undying love for Israel and to tolerate without resistance the Israelis now claiming swathes of southern Syria, moving troops across the demarcation line and threatening to incorporate parts of Syria into the Israeli empire.
So from the selfish Western point of view, with the advent of an al-Qaeda regime, the worst has not happened. Syria has not become a hub for international Islamist terrorism. However, these are early days and it may yet come to pass that the Jolani regime will be removed by ISIS who are by no means a spent force in Syria. The weakness of the new regime could also lead to complications and conflict.
Carden: I wanted to get a sense of the political establishment here – maybe help me to try and understand why the British political establishment is so similar to the American political establishment when it comes to Russian and Ukraine.
Ford: Well, the arrogant British establishment assumes that they can exert influence on Trump and pull him over to the British Russophobic way of thinking. Now I honestly find it difficult to explain why this country is quite so Russophobic. You have to reach back into history, to what was called the Great Game for control of Asia back in the Victorian era, the Crimean war, and then the Russophobia during the Cold War.
But somehow that doesn’t quite explain why we are so Russophobic today. But it’s a fact and it is shared throughout the British establishment and especially the legacy media—and therefore it is broadly felt at all levels of society.
And there are no pro-Russian voices here. This great free country of ours banished RT and the Russian point of view never gets seriously defended in the mainstream media.
The British are arrogant, I’m sure this has been picked up on by Trump who is playing Starmer like a cat with a mouse, allowing Starmer to pose as an intermediary with Europe all the while doing Trump’s actual bidding. And I sense that at any moment Trump could put the dagger in Starmer’s ribs, but he chooses not to because the prime minister is proving a useful tool.
But as you’ll see from today’s British newspapers, the establishment is preening over the British “success” in mediating between Zelensky and Trump. And this is what we do in our impoverished post-imperial state. We present ourselves as, if not powerful, then clever, more clever than the Americans. And the situation today with Ukraine reminds me of what happened during Trump I when Boris Johnson flew to Washington before the inauguration to dissuade Trump from withdrawing US troops from Syria.
And with the help from the American deep state, this is what happened, against Trump’s better judgment. And those troops have been left in Syria, making very useful potential targets for Iran and doing nothing useful. But that is an example of how the British malign influence operates. But perhaps this time the boot is on the other foot, and Trump has had enough of being manipulated by the deep state and by clever British diplomats.
Carden: It seems like the establishment here is not dissimilar to our own; there’s kind of a willed ignorance with regard to how the war in Ukraine is going to ultimately play out.
Under no circumstances is Trump going to provide a US backstop, which is what Starmer says is his requirement to put UK troops in. Under no circumstances is Putin going to accept British or French or American troops as peacekeepers.
But over the last 48 hours or so, the media and the establishment here seems to have banished that from their minds. There’s a lot of preening, as you say, about Starmer’s success in dealing with Trump and Zelensky. But I am searching for it and I can’t find it. What am I missing?
Ford: You’re absolutely in the money, it’s a hoax. In fact, the British are in willful denial and the Europeans are in willful denial and for the reason you stated: Trump and his colleagues keep stating that there will be no US security guarantees and Russia won’t tolerate European troops on the ground in Ukraine anyway. It’s all an enormous hoax, but European politicians find it profitable in terms of playing to their domestic audiences and maybe Trump himself indulges them a little bit in order to placate his own domestic audience.
I’m struck when I watch US television, seeing how the whole Ukraine/Russia situation is only part of the bigger picture and that Trump’s domestic agenda is what really, really matters.
And he’s got to carry people along like these Republicans who, until just yesterday, thought that Russia was the devil and now all of a sudden are having to adjust to a president who thinks good relations with Russia is a good thing.
And this is some trick to pull off, and I may be misreading Trump here, you will know better as an American, but I think some of the things he comes out with, like appearing to support in principle the idea of the Europeans forming some kind of peacekeeping force, are designed to placate the anti-Russian Republicans and to just massage things along for these essentially domestic political reasons; sustaining this really stupid illusion that there could be a peacekeeping, or what is now more fashionably called a “reassurance” force. What a misnomer that is! It would be the absolute opposite. It would be a trip-wire likely to lead to World War III and Trump is absolutely right to resist it at all costs.
Fortunately, we can count on the adults in the room here, the Russians, to make sure that doesn’t happen and save us from ourselves.
And as you have noticed here in London, Trump is getting good media attention because of this useful fiction that there could be a peacekeeping force.
He must know surely, if he has an ounce of sense, that it is not going to happen. So he can promise this, that, and the other, knowing he’s going to be saved from himself by Putin. He’s not going to be saved from ponying up more for defense, which is a great pity. But the increase [in defense spending] is not going to be absolutely crippling for Britain.
It may yet be for Germany.
Carden: How do you see things playing out? Do you think that ultimately Trump can get to an agreement with Putin or will talks break down and the fighting continue until it’s absolutely clear to everyone that the Ukrainians can no longer sustain it?
Ford: He could do, but he’d have to bite the bullet and really withdraw military support and, above all, intelligence support targeting – that would bring Ukraine to its knees in quick time. If he doesn’t do that, he’s not going to get his way.
James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
