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polls show Britons are cooling to Brexit and are coming to realize that the ultimate irony of the slogan Johnson and other Leavers deployed during the Brexit campaign—“Take Back Control”—is that Britain has relinquished even more control to Brussels. 

Just as Trump pretended he was giving the American people a better NAFTA deal (which now has little chance of congressional passage) and pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—which had been the single most effective means of forcing China to behave better on trade and intellectual property rights—to show that he could do it better alone (he hasn’t), Johnson will take his nation through a similar charade. Egged on by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party—which will threaten him with more Tory defections if he doesn’t keep his word—Johnson will continue to pretend to the British people that they can get better trade deals on their own, when most of the evidence is that instead he will bequeath to them international isolation, ever-rising prices, and permanent economic eclipse. And perhaps the eclipse of the Conservative Party as well.

“Trump will use his relationship to try to get the U.K. to change its views on the Iran nuclear deal,” said Heather Conley of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Until now, the U.K. has stood with France and Germany in seeking to rescue the 2015 nuclear pact that Trump rejected last year; if it sides with the United States now, that in turn could create more fissures in the trans-Atlantic alliance. 

Trump is plainly eager to have Johnson as an ally in his great task of unmaking the international system

we will all be witnessing a bizarre backward version of the so-called special relationship, one premised on undoing a great deal of what the U.K. and the United States accomplished together after World War II, when both nations oversaw the creation of postwar institutions such as the United Nations and Bretton Woods; British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin took the lead in creating NATO (even as an exhausted U.K. bequeathed to the United States the role of stabilizer of the West); and the United States and Britain were the primary progenitors of the global free-trading system

It is true that the rise of both Johnson and Trump was a response to a real need for redress in the U.S. and U.K.-conceived international system. Go-it-alone nationalism did not come out of nowhere; both countries staked everything on globalization and free trade—particularly in the financial sector—and the middle class in both the United States and Britain had suffered from it. Indeed, Britain did even worse than the United States after the 2008 crash, and the Brussels bureaucracy had grown irritatingly intrusive. It’s probably surprising that it took this long for a backlash like Brexit to occur. But pointing out serious flaws in the system is not an argument for junking it altogether. And that’s where the new special relationship may be headed for trouble.

The Observer last year revealed the IRD’s major campaign in Indonesia in 1965 that helped encourage anti-communist massacres which left hundreds of thousands dead. There, the IRD prepared pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact were created by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.

“The UK did not simply invent material, as the Soviets systematically did, but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across.”

“reports” sent to warn other governments, selected journalists and thinktanks about “Soviet subversion” or similar threats.The reports comprised carefully selected facts and analysis often gleaned from intelligence provided by Britain’s security services, but appeared to come from ostensibly independent analysts and institutions that were in reality set up and run by the IRD. One of the first of these, set up in 1964, was the International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations.

In early 1963, the IRD forged a statement from the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Soviet front organisation, which denounced Africans as uncivilised, “primitive” and morally weak. The forgery received press coverage across the continent, with many newspapers reacting intemperately.

The IRD also forged literature purporting to come from the Muslim Brotherhood, a mass Islamist organisation that had a significant following across the Middle East. One pamphlet accused Moscow of encouraging the 1967 war, criticised the quality of Soviet military equipment, and called the Soviets “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as little more than “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.AdvertisementThe IRD also created an entirely fictive radical Islamist organisation called the League of Believers, which attacked the Russians as non-believers and blamed Arab defeats on a lack of religious faith, a standard trope among religious conservatives at the time.

The IRD’s leaflets echoed other claims made by radical Islamists, arguing that military misdeeds should not be blamed on “the atheists or the imperialists or the Zionist Jews” but on “Egyptians who are supposed to be believers”.

Other material highlighted the poor view that Moscow took of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the limited aid offered by the Soviets to Palestinian armed nationalist groups. This was contrasted with the more supportive stance of the Chinese, in a bid to widen the split between the two communist powers.

One major initiative focused on undermining Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, the former colony that unilaterally declared its independence from the UK in 1965 in an attempt to maintain white minority rule.The IRD set up a fake group of white Rhodesians who opposed Smith. Its leaflets attacked him for lying, creating “chaos” and crippling the economy. “The whole world is against us … We must call a halt while we can still save our country,”

Between 1965 and 1972, the IRD forged at least 11 statements from Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency. One followed Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 six-day war against Israel and underlined Soviet anger at Egypt’s “waste” of so much of the arms and materiel Moscow had supplied to the country.

A similar forgery in 1966 underlined the “backwardness” and “political immaturity” of Africa. Another, a statement purportedly from Novosti, blamed poor academic results at an international university in Moscow on the quality of the black African students enrolled there. The IRD sent more than 1,000 copies to addresses across the developing world.

As with most such efforts, the impact of the IRD’s campaigns was often difficult to judge. On one occasion, IRD officials were able to report that a newspaper in Zanzibar printed one of their forgeries about Soviet racism, and that the publication prompted an angry response. This was seen as a major achievement. Officials were also pleased when Kenyan press used fake material about the 1967 six-day war, and when newspapers across much of the Islamic world printed a fake Novosti bulletin on the conflict. Occasionally, western newspapers unwittingly used IRD materials, too.

Though the IRD was shut down in 1977, researchers are now finding evidence that similar efforts continued for almost another decade.“The [new documents] are particularly significant as a precursor to more modern efforts of putting intelligence into the public domain.“Liz Truss has a ’government information cell’, and defence intelligence sends out daily tweets to ‘pre-but’ Russian plots and gain the upper hand in the information war, but for much of the cold war the UK used far more devious means,” Cormac said.