A North London Marxist in Portland on British foreign policy, expensive coffee, and the mine-hunting drone
By Megan Amram | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Britain Sent One Drone to an International Crisis and Called This Foreign Policy: An American in Portland Is Not Impressed
I grew up in North London and I now live in Portland, Oregon, which means I get to observe British foreign policy from a comfortable transatlantic distance while drinking coffee that costs more than my first flat in Finsbury Park and has been described by three separate baristas as “a love letter to the bean.” I mention this because the cost of coffee in Portland and the cost of Britain’s international credibility are both, currently, quite high and slightly unjustified.
The Mine-Hunting Drone: A Marxist Analysis
Keir Starmer’s contribution to the Strait of Hormuz situation is one drone and a strongly worded communication. I want to contextualise this. The British military budget is approximately fifty billion pounds annually. The drone contribution is one drone. The letter contribution is one letter. The ratio of budget to output is the kind of number that would end a meeting in Portland in thirty seconds and would require approximately three years of parliamentary debate to produce the same result in Westminster.
The Guardian, which I still read every morning out of nostalgia and self-punishment, describes this as a “measured response.” Measured. There is the drone. I have measured it. It is small.
What We Do In Portland Instead
We march. We make signs with excellent graphic design because Portland has a surplus of graphic designers. We argue about whether the march achieved anything, at length, in a coffee shop, expensively. Bohiney Magazine’s piece on institutional overconfidence nails the pattern: announce a response, describe the response in maximalist terms, examine whether the response was sufficient only after it becomes embarrassing not to. Britain, America, Portland: all versions of the same bit. The drone is just the Portland march but with a wing span.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/cnn-discovers-taco-82nd-airborne-discovers-parachutes/
More satire: The Poke
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