Britain’s opposition Conservatives, tipped to win power in an election next year, said yesterday they would pull the country’s 25,000 troops out of Germany as part of a reorganization of NATO forces.
Defense spokesman Liam Fox told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that other NATO allies could take over the role of continental defense and free up British forces for operations outside Europe, such as the war in Afghanistan.
Polls put the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, on course to oust British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party in an election scheduled by June.
“If other countries are willing to take up roles in continental defense, that leaves Britain and France able to take on expeditionary roles,” Fox said.
“Finding a more creative diplomatic solution in NATO will be a priority for an incoming Conservative government … it’s more important that we have more effective burden sharing so we can be freed up from some responsibilities,” he said.
Calls for NATO allies to step up their contributions to operations in Afghanistan, where Britain has 9,000 troops in the second largest deployment after the US, have caused tension within the alliance.
Fox said: “We need to be clear that there are constitutional and political reasons why some NATO countries will not be able to do the same amount when it comes to expeditionary warfare.”
“We can either hammer on about burden sharing, or we can start looking at what countries will be able to do within their political, constitutional and military constraints,” he said. “Far better in NATO that countries have roles which they are 100 percent willing to carry out.”
Britain has about 25,000 troops in Germany alongside US forces. They were there initially to guarantee German security against the Soviets in the Cold War and later, to ensure NATO could respond quickly to events on the continent.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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