As the old gag goes, “Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they’re not after you”; in other words, more than one thing can be true at the same time. So too, with the ongoing saga of the withdrawal of US aircraft from first RAF Fairford, in Gloucestershire, and now, RAF Mildenhall, in Suffolk.
The US moves could be said to be acting out of an abundance of reasonable caution. But there is something else going on
In the Red Corner, there are those who are quick to point out that redeployment of scarce assets is ‘normal business’, and dispersal of aircraft, under some kind of threat is also routine. In the rather fetching Turquoise Corner, is Reform’s new defence spokesman, a recently retired RAF Regiment officer, someone who can reasonably be expected to know something about defending airfields, who lambasts the government for so failing to protect our country, that our closest military ally is forced to move its aircraft.
There is some truth in Angus MacIntyre’s accusations, as there is as also in the bromidic statements of the “nothing to see here”, brigade: routine redeployments are common but especially so if there are vague threats that can’t be easily quantified or mitigated against: “move now, route to follow”, is a hoary old military maxim. There is also no doubt about the Iranian threat.
The thwarted attack, if that is what it was, at RAF Fairford might seem amateurish and poorly executed but, evidently, it didn’t need to be more effective: the potential for a ground attack or, more likely, a drone attack was enough.
The very reasonable concern was that the Iranians would attempt a reprise of the highly successful Ukrainian operation, Operation Spiderweb of June 2025, that used unwitting Russian drivers to deliver apparently commercial loads close to Russian strategic bases. The loads turned-out to be ‘Wooden Horses’, containing 117 drones that caused $7 billion (£5.3 billion) worth of damage to Russian strategic aircraft, including nuclear-capable bombers, at airfields as remote from Kiev, as Murmansk in the North, to Irkutsk, close to Mongolia. Both the US B1 Bombers and KC-135 aircraft fit into the same ‘high-value’ target category and they are vulnerable: the bases are unhardened; and we have an active, and malevolent, Iranian intelligence presence, which the government seems unwilling to completely squash and is struggling to control. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps qua organisation was finally proscribed formally in July this year but it is still not illegal to belong to it, an astonishing lacuna.
In the circumstances, the US moves could be said to be acting out of an abundance of reasonable caution. But there is something else going on too.
In Abu Dhabi this week, the latest round of US-brokered Russia-Ukraine peace talks, included within it the demand, from Russia, that any peace settlement must encompass a comprehensive restructuring of the defence and security architecture in Europe, a demand that President Trump seems willing to go along with,
“It’s going to be a big agreement and it’s going to involve more than Ukraine,” he said. Not for the first time, Trump appears to be working from the same speaking notes as President Putin; he is, for example, willing to accept Putin’s demands that the Europeans, who would be most affected, are not to be part of any negotiation.
“No one is going to invite them to the negotiating table”, Kremlin foreign affairs advisor, Yuri Ushakov, has declared and Trump has not demurred.
In the background, there is also the quiet withdrawal and redistribution of US forces in Europe: as at Apr 2025, there were some 80,000 US service personnel in Europe, down from the 105,000 immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Peter Hegseth, the Secretary for War, wishes to reduce this number further; tellingly, eight air-to-air refuelling tankers were slated for withdrawal in a plan outlined in July this year, along with a complete bombing group, and 50 of the 150 fighters currently based in Europe.
The official line from the US is that they are “rightsizing” the US contribution to Nato. But as has been made abundantly clear, the US has, with good reason, become tired of Europe’s apparent indifference to its own defence.
“I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s pathetic”, is how Pete Hegseth put it to a group of national security heads, in the summer of 2025, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.
The US, under Trump, has also made it clear that Nato’s Article V, hitherto regarded as the cornerstone of Nato’s collective defence is not a cast-iron guarantee: support for other countries is dependent on them being primarily responsible for their own defence and actively supporting the US when it decides to act in the world.
By this standard, many European countries, including Britain, fall short; forcing them to change is why the US are pushing so hard for the new ‘Nato 3.0 Framework’, the bottom line of which is that European countries are responsible for their own conventional defence.
This is where all these threads start to come together. While the intelligence is murky, some form of credible Iranian threat to US bases is probable and the US, prudently, withdrew some of its most valuable, and vulnerable, aircraft to put them beyond harm’s reach.
But this, an essentially tactical move, disguises a strategic shift of US support from Europe – which it deems capable of its own self-defence – towards the Western Hemisphere and Asia-Pacific region. Along the way, as a way of accelerating this process, Trump seeks a grand bargain with Putin, with the latter ‘guaranteeing’ peace in Europe, provided of course he gets his way: a, at best, etiolated and emasculated Ukraine; Nato withdrawal from Eastern Europe; and a recognition of Russia as, once again, a ‘Great Power’.
This, an essentially tactical move, disguises a strategic shift of US support from Europe
Withdrawing the US aircraft, with all the attendant, and not completely unfair, criticism it has attracted, allows the narrative of ‘unreliable allies’ to be reinforced; this, in turn feeds into the justification for the wider desire to unshackle the US from a commitment to Europe.
Trump came to power with strong messages of ‘America First’ and ’No More Forever Wars’: many commentators nodded wisely when these things were said and assumed it meant, despite the recent intervention in Iran, the Middle East. Actually, it is clear, he and his team also meant Europe. The Iranian attacks could not be more timely for the US: the Civil Service are wont to say, “Never waste a good crisis.”, and US are milking this one for all it is worth.
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