We all waited for and listened to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin with bated breath, interview which just three days after its publication has amassed a total of almost 300 million views, not including the audience of national television stations that broadcast the interview everywhere in the world. There was a lot of criticism of Carlson, many said that he was too friendly with Putin, that he asked him far too easy questions, none about the alleged war crimes in Ukraine, others, like Cozmin Gușa, wished that he had asked about the crimes of the Americans in Ukraine ( Cozmin Gușă – Three hot topics that Putin avoided in the interview of the century ), but the mere fact that he managed to convince Putin to give an interview to the American media is to be lauded. Putin gave a rather propagandistic speech, avoiding inappropriate topics and offering an a la russe lesson in Ukrainian history for the first quarter of the interview. He also did not address the internal Russian issues regarding democracy and freedom of expression, not that in the West we truly have that much democracy and freedom of expression, but at least we all mention it in our speeches. Anyway, there were extremely many revelations in the interview (transcription of the interview). For example, Putin revealed that „the rate at which China’s cooperation with Europe is growing is even greater than that of the growth of Sino-Russian cooperation”, an incredible fact if we consider the perpetual criticism of China in the European press. At the same time, he noted that Russia is now the number one economy in Europe, ahead of Germany, so it is clear that Russia and China have a common ambition to dominate Europe, an ambition that has come true. Putin has also revealed the content of important locker room talks with figures like George Bush, both senior and junior, the most interesting being the one with Bill Clinton in 2000, when Clinton told him that Russia could join NATO but then quickly withdrew the offer. But the most important revelation in my opinion was the one about Boris Johnson, which I include in full below:

We negotiated with Ukraine in Istanbul, we agreed, [Zelensky] was aware of this. Moreover, the leader of the negotiating group, Mr. Arakhamia is his last name, I think he still leads the faction of the ruling party, the president’s party in the Rada. He still leads the presidential faction in the Rada, the country’s parliament, he’s still there. He even put his preliminary signature on the document I’m talking about. But then he publicly declared to the whole world: „We were ready to sign this document, but Mr. (Boris) Johnson, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, came and dissuaded us from doing so, saying that it was better to fight against Russia. They would have given everything necessary for us to return the territory that was lost during the confrontations with Russia. And we agreed with this proposal”. Look, his statement has been published. He said so publicly.

In response, Boris Johnson published an article in the Daily Mail in which he called Tucker Carlson „the stooge of the tyrant, the dictaphone to the dictator and a traitor to journalism”, stating that: „[Carlson] did not dispute the ludicrous suggestion that the UK government persuaded the Ukrainians to fight rather than surrender to Putin in the spring of 2022. As every member of the Ukrainian government, from Zelensky on down, will attest, nothing and no one could have stopped these brave-hearted Ukrainians lions to fight for their country – and nothing will” (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-13066311/BORIS-JOHNSON-Putin-Tucker-Carlson-interview-stooge-Hitler-charade.html). However, he did not directly deny Putin’s revelations, which raises several questions. First of all, how did the Prime Minister of Great Britain take it upon herself to destroy the peace process? Is it possible that the country that is now torn by strikes and protests is maintaining its status as an empire even today? What is Britain’s role in modern international relations? Second, why haven’t we received any justification for this action? Even in the article quoted above we were not given any details about Britain’s interests in the war in Ukraine, so are we to assume that all these decisions were made just for the sake of democracy? Let’s take them one at a time.

British Empire – the informal version

The US has long assumed the role of Britain’s „Big Brother”, replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana and leaving Britain to assume a new position as a harmless lamb compared to their previous imperial greatness. But Britain is now underappreciated, leaving us all to believe that all it is now is an important US proxy. Both the US and Britain are now characterized by a mismanagement of their own power, the decline of both empires driven by their declining ability to maintain a strong middle class. But here we must remember the force of financial capital and greedy corporations: both empires sacrificed their „welfare state” status (a term that refers to the promotion of citizens’ well-being by state institutions) in favor of corporatocracies led by big money. And nowhere is this more evident than in the heart of the British capital, the City of London. London remains an extremely powerful financial center today, the seat of the Rothschild family just like New York is the seat of the Rockefeller family. But even more importantly, the City of London is not only the force of British financial capital, but also the force of the capital of the former empire’s countries. We note here of course the capital of the Indian billionaires, recalling the current British Prime Minister of Indian origin Rishi Sunak whom they promoted, as well as the capital of the Arab sheikhs, who own almost everything in England, from Manchester City and Newcastle United to Sainsbury’s, McLaren and Harrods. In fact, Kuwait has been the largest foreign investor in the UK for 71 years. Brexit was a pretext to unleash Britain’s financial potential, with Indian, Russian, and Chinese billionaires now being able to play their financial games in their Kensington mansions without having to answer to Ursula. So, it is obvious that the old British empire continues to exist in an occult way, but in cooperation with „Big Brother”, the money of the ultra-rich from the former British colonies mostly invested in the City of London’s stock exchange. As a former formal empire and present informal empire, Britain remains in the fantastic power that allowed it to control the continuation of the war in Ukraine.

The USA is king or is it London big money?

Now that we have established from what position Britain is taking such a decision regarding the destruction of the peace treaties between Russia and Ukraine, we need to decipher why Boris Johnson would want to do this, and who it would benefit. There are two obvious hypotheses that we can approach: either Boris Johnson received an order from the Americans, or from the corporation giants like Blackrock who have great cachet in the City of London and will benefit from the reconstruction contracts in Ukraine. The first is clear from the point of view of the „special relationship” between the two Western brothers, with Britain playing the role of a positive and proactive proxy, and the second is, unfortunately, quite obvious in the capitalist Anthropocene, but cynical. Whatever the truth, Putin succeeded in proving to the West that the disaster in Ukraine on such a large scale was in fact at the hands of Western leaders and held a mirror up to us: the many billions of dollars going into weapons and reconstruction projects, more precisely in the pockets of Blackrock type corporations, are ordered by an unconscious British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was invalidated with great fanfare during the pandemic, whose supreme leader, leader-of-the-free-world Biden, is the first leader of an empire in history that was officially declared senile in office, aka mentally incapacitated. As many questions as he dodged, Putin at least managed to show us how far we have broken down and how far we have fallen as a collective West. And even so, while the Western empires are in societal, political, and economic decay, that doesn’t mean their capital won’t be put to good use in war efforts, reconstruction efforts, and, most importantly, in the pockets of the London City’s ultra-billionaires.

By Daria Gusa