Last November, Scottish investigative outlet the Ferret revealed that the United States had established its first new military presence in Scotland since the turn of the century. After a £350 million refurbishment, the Royal Air Force (RAF) base at Lossiemouth in the country’s northeast now plays host to a US Navy detachment of anti-submarine warplanes. This revelation was the latest in a string of stories that highlight how Scottish sovereignty has been bypassed to aid Washington’s foreign policy objectives in the North Atlantic. In 2022, the Scottish government-owned Glasgow Prestwick Airport, previously used as a stopover for CIA rendition flights at the height of the “war on terror,” carried out almost a thousand refueling operations for US military flights.
Months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, one RAF vice-marshal observed that “Scotland is very much the forward base in the UK for maritime operations as we perceive them, with NATO’s forward strategy of prosecuting any war which might occur in the Norwegian Sea.” Indeed, Scotland’s place on NATO’s northern flank saw a total of more than forty thousand US military personnel — and ten nuclear submarines — dispatched to the country throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Today, as Washington’s new Cold War looks to preserve the power of its waning empire, Scotland’s resurgent military-industrial complex — and supplicant domestic political class — once again stands ready to serve.
After World War II, as successive British governments latched…
Auteur: Coll McCail
