The Alt Right does not have a coherent global strategy. But it does aim at power through dominance.
Trump's siren songs in China - including his insistence that it is the previous US leadership's failure that is 'to blame' for Chinese success in the balance of trade between the two countries rather than the craft of the Chinese Communist Party - is actually designed to build US dominance over China. The US already has the largest and most offensive 'cordon sanitaire' around China that the world has ever seen in any previous military disposition. At the same time Trump wants to oil his way into the Chinese market and train the Chinese CP to concern themselves with a 'deranged' North Korea. The Chinese know all this of course, but currently depend disproportionately on financing US debt in government bonds and have a significant holdings in their inflating stock exchange. Thus the new, epic, silk road to Europe and the vast Chinese investment in Africa.
And Priti Patel in all this? Small beer, but nevertheless part of a gathering international momentum emanating from the US in its own post-glory days. Every nation that sees itself as an 'international player' has its own 'alt right' version of external dominance and the divisive domestic politics required to animate a section of the alienated population and suppress the rest.
Priti Patel's political physiognomy stems from Thatcherite parents (her father was in UKIP.) She denounced foreign aid and called in 2013 for the Department for International Development that she was eventually to lead up to November 8, to be closed. She also opposed gay marriage, wanted the death penalty brought back and even when she had to change some of her more extreme views as a rising star of the Tory Party, she campaigned as a radical right-wing supporter of Brexit.
At first glance her 'secret' meetings with Israeli leaders while on a family holiday seems a simple political disaster for Ms Patel. The decline and fall of an ambitious politician whose hubris overcame their common sense is the flavour of the British media reports. But the traditional British media, with a very few honourable exceptions, is the least analytic in the Western world these days. In reality Priti Patel has already started on a road that has opened up with Trump's victory and the continuing threat from the new right in Austria and now Germany. The fact she is a Tory politician simply reflects the anachronistic political system and the party structure in Britain. In reality, like her fellow Cabinet member Dr Fox, she is carving out a new right wing political project for Britain.
There are some obvious indications of Ms Patel's intended trajectory. Being slung out of PM Teresa May's Cabinet is a bit like being ordered to leave the Titanic. Association with a crumbling, factional, ravaged set of failed has-beens is not the most obvious platform to start your heave towards the top. On the contrary, Ms Patel's 'independence of mind' and her 'willingness' to face May's rejection will (she hopes) soon become valuable currency in the messy struggle to come when this despised government collapses. She has decided that a General election is coming sooner rather than later and that Corbyn's Labour Party will probably win. Given her politics she expects Labour will fail under the weight of a massive Capital strike and she will be set fair for a run at the new Tory leadership, designed to 'save' the country.
It is also obvious that Ms Patel had no interest in the Department she led and saw it as a means to this particular end.
Most significant of all however is what Ms Patel actually did on her Israeli holiday.
The alt right aim to break down the remnants of the post WW2 consensus (led by the old 'Western world') on all remaining fronts. The United Nations is now (in the absence of the US government / state and the weakness of May, Macron and now Merkel) the leading institution in the world trying to uphold that fragmenting orthodoxy. One of the longest term assumptions bolstered by the UN is the (utterly failed) nominal support for both halves of the original Balfour declaration - which called for a Jewish state in Palestine but also argues that Arab political rights should be upheld. Finally interpreting this idea into the 'two state solution', for decades most Western nations have stuck to this gigantic failure of a policy.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump met at the Trump Tower in New York, September 25, 2016. The PM held up Trump as a true friend of Israel. Trump wanted to move the US embassy to divided Jerusalem. The alt right were breaking away from the failed UN cliches - but to the right! They supported Israeli settlements, their control of the Golam Heights and their proposed military hostility to Iran. Even the minimal 'concessions' of the Balfour declaration in respect of Arab rights were to be blown away.
The destruction of the West's traditional political 'common sense' - on the Middle East question, the traditional alliances (including the EU), the forty year effort to get a grip on climate change, on 'global development' and soon to come, on the ban on first-use nuclear weapons - are under assault, from the new right. Ms Patel on her holidays was adding her own shoulder to the new alt right dispensation and signalling to whomever might be watching. It is a part of her new trajectory; not to join an international conspiracy of the far right, but to become a leader of a British type model of politics that lives with the multi-nationals but carves out forms of national dominance over others, both inside the peoples of the country and in relation to other nations.
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