Another Trump official insults Britain

After JD Vance’s insults against Europe in general and the armies of Britain and France in particular, military intelligence wonks from the US, UK and Europe were hoping for a more diplomatic approach when they gathered in London last week for the Phoenix Challenge, a UK and US department of defence-sponsored gathering aimed at combating disinformation from hostile forces.

So who better to open the conference than Sebastian Gorka, the British-Hungarian-American MAGA attack dog who has been appointed “deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council” in the new Trump Imperial regime?

Delegates who may have been hoping for a White House insider view of the war on disinformation and propaganda may have been disappointed. According to one attendee, Gorka instead used his speech to berate the unstated unacceptance of Trump by the room, insisting four times in the space of a half-hour slot that they needed to respect the president’s authority as he had won the popular vote (a topic that was not on the agenda).

In between invectives, Gorka, whose PhD in political violence has been criticised as flimsy by specialists in the field, told the assembled experts that they needed to study thinking from those obscure academics and experts in cyberwarfare, er, Carl Von Clausewitz (died 1831) and Sun Tzu (died c 496 BC).

Gorka rounded up his speech with scathing criticism of the next scheduled speaker, Britain’s armed forces minister Luke Pollard, dragging up Pollard’s historically expressed dislike of Trump. Opening his speech, Pollard, like his prime minister and so many government MPs these days, was left in the awkward position of reassuring the audience that the special relationship remained solid, even with Gorka’s hectoring still ringing in their ears.