Rebuilding Fortress Scotland
For the first time since the 1990s, the US has reestablished a direct military presence in Scotland. As Washington builds up its new Cold War, Scotland’s political class is its willing servant.
Royal Marines take part in a NATO joint military exercise on April 27, 2018, in Dalbeattie, Scotland. (Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images)
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.
First Cold War
After World War II, as successive British governments latched themselves to America’s bloody drive for global hegemony, Atlanticism was woven into Scotland’s story. In 1964, Alexander MacIntyre of Strone designed a “Polaris military” tartan for the US naval officers stationed on the Firth of Clyde. Polaris, the British state’s first nuclear weapons program, was obtained from the Kennedy administration in 1963 and stored at Faslane on Scotland’s west coast — though it remained almost entirely under NATO command.
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