Two Centuries of British Enmity Toward Russia

This enduring hostility is rooted in both geopolitical calculation and competition over resources and influence. Today, Anglo-Saxon geopolitics aims to cut Russia off from global trade as much as possible and, in the long term, to achieve its territorial fragmentation — an objective that has been openly discussed in transatlantic think tanks since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Analysts at institutions such as the RAND Corporation have published detailed assessments of how to “overextend and unbalance” Russia, including by expanding NATO membership and increasing arms transfers to Ukraine.

It is against this backdrop that King Charles III’s recent address to a joint session of the United States Congress must be understood — not merely as ceremonial pageantry, but as a carefully calibrated geopolitical intervention. The King invoked the deepest constants of Anglo-American political tradition, delivering what can reasonably be interpreted as a barely veiled declaration of war against Russia.

Charles stated: “Immediately after 9/11, when NATO first invoked Article 5 and the United Nations Security Council stood united in the face of terror, we answered the call together, as our people have done for more than a century — shoulder to shoulder through two world wars, the Cold War, Afghanistan, and moments that have defined our common security. Today… the same unwavering resolve is needed to defend Ukraine and its bravest people.”

The glorification of the Afghanistan debacle — a twenty-year campaign that ended in chaotic retreat — and the explicit invocation of NATO’s collective defense clause represent an unmistakable appeal to Washington to finally commit to a comprehensive European land war against Moscow. Remarkably, the two previous world wars referenced by the King cost approximately 70 million lives combined. This historical weight did not give the assembled US representatives pause. They greeted the call with thunderous applause.

An Obsession

The scene fits seamlessly into a nearly two-century-long British political obsession with Russia. Since the Crimean War of 1853, the London elite has plotted to militarily defeat or dismember Russia, always following a tried and tested pattern: Britain acts from the background and incites other powers to bear the bloodiest costs. Lord Palmerston, the nineteenth-century architect of British grand strategy, expressed this logic with characteristic bluntness when he wrote that Britain had “no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only eternal and perpetual interests.” Russia’s continental mass and its access to warm-water ports have always threatened those interests.

This strategy reached its first cynical modern climax in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Even as the Red Army was still annihilating the remnants of the Wehrmacht, the British Joint Planning Staff was quietly drafting “Operation Unthinkable” — a plan for a surprise attack against their Soviet ally. The document, presented to Winston Churchill on May 22, 1945, envisioned a combined British, American, Polish, and even German offensive to commence on July 1, 1945. The stated political objective was strikingly unambiguous: Russia had to “submit to our will.” The document further acknowledged the terrifying implications: “If they want total war, they are capable of waging it.” Churchill shelved the plan not out of moral compunction, but because his military chiefs concluded it was unwinnable.

Eighty years later, the logic has not changed — only the instruments. Today, the active participation of the United States has become an absolute necessity for London, whose independent military capacity no longer matches its imperial ambitions. King Charles’ transatlantic charm offensive serves a precise strategic purpose: to revive Operation Unthinkable under a new guise, dressed in the language of democracy and rules-based order.

The historian Niall Ferguson, himself a product of Britain’s intellectual establishment, once observed that “the British Empire was, in effect, the operating system for a form of globalization that persists to this day.” What is unfolding now is the defense of that operating system against the one power that has most consistently refused to run it.

The stakes could not be higher. The King’s speech and the entire foreign policy tradition of Great Britain demonstrate an unbroken fixation on Russia that transcends party politics, changes of government, and even changes of dynasty. This obsession poses a deadly danger not only to Russia, but to the rest of the world. Just months ago, London offered, in barely veiled terms, to assist Ukraine in acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. Should Russia take that threat at face value — and there is every reason to believe it does — nuclear war ceases to be a theoretical possibility and becomes a matter of time.

The applause on Capitol Hill may yet prove to be the most dangerous sound of the twenty-first century.