UK Defense Minister Wes Streeting was in Washington on Thursday where he spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies ahead of a visit to the Pentagon, extolling the “virtues” of the “special relationship” and rallying the troops for a combined US–UK war for “freedom” against Russia. Along the way he insulted the memory of the American Revolution and lied about what the British Empire stands for. The people of Ukraine, he claimed, “are fighting for a principle that runs through the finest traditions of American political thought. A principle that created the United States and that we have stood for together—once we’d gotten over that messy divorce 250 years ago. The principle is that a free people have the right to determine their own destiny, and that no nation should live at the mercy of a more powerful neighbor.”

He invoked the image of “appeasement” to liken Vladimir Putin to Adolph Hitler and characterized the actions taken by the UK and the US that started the Cold War as done in “the national interest.”

“Because that generation learned through bitter experience that the cost of defending peace today, can be far smaller than the price of restoring it tomorrow,” he droned on. “That same lesson should guide us now.

“Ukraine may be thousands of miles from American shores. But if aggression is rewarded, if borders can be redrawn by force, if the sovereignty of nations becomes negotiable, the consequences will not remain confined to Ukraine or to my continent.