Amid the past week’s political sound and fury, one subject slid unnoticed
under the platform. Britain is at war. Its soldiers are fighting and dying
in two distant lands. Foreign policy, once the stuff of national debate, is
consigned to cliché and platitude.
With casualties mounting in Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians dare not mention
it, let alone disagree. The prime minister declared to his party conference
in Bournemouth that “the message should go out to anyone facing persecution
anywhere from Burma to Zimbabwe . . . we will not rest”. Britain will defend
the oppressed anywhere in the world. Unfortunately Britain is doing nothing
in Burma or Zimbabwe, while the message from Iraq and Afghanistan is that
Britain chooses bad wars at America’s behest in which it gets beaten.
All the airbrushing in the world will not remove the greatest legacy that Tony
Blair left his successors, that of “liberal interventionism”. Never
articulated except in a confused speech in Chicago in 1999, it asserted
Britain’s right to meddle in any country to which it took offence, under the
rubric of “humanitarian just war”.
Nothing that Brown and his foreign secretary, David Miliband, said at their
party conference indicated a change of direction. Nor did they say anything
to which David Cameron and his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague,
could risk taking exception. Blair’s wars, unprovoked by any threat to
Britain, passed uncontested at the conferences, though the polls say they
are highly unpopular.
In Brown’s case, Iraq has heavily qualified his core support within the Labour
party. He went to Washington on taking office and received firm instructions
not to quit Basra. Last week, in choosing to stay at the airbase (while
pretending to “withdraw” troops), he disagreed with his generals and obeyed
the White House. Brown has to engineer a retreat from Iraq to the beat of an
American drum.
In Afghanistan British policy has detached itself from reality. Brown wants to
“defeat the Taliban” and eradicate the poppy crop. He cannot do either.
Indeed his supposed ally in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, is negotiating with the
Taliban and has a government stuffed with drug lords.
For his part Cameron has been trapped into avoiding the government’s most
vulnerable flank, its subservience to Washington. Only Brown’s opportunism
in visiting Baghdad during the Tory conference brought the war into
political focus. It remains unclear if the Tories wanted more or fewer
troops in Basra. As for Afghanistan, Cameron said his “number one priority”
was to “erase Taliban power”. This is the talk of a seaside drawing room.
None of Blair’s interventionist wars – Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and
Afghanistan – has left a stable peace. Calm in the first two theatres still
requires international military occupation. All have exposed equipment and
manpower shortages in the army that Whitehall seems unable to meet.
Blair’s expansionism has only encouraged the distortion in British weapons
procurement towards the air force and navy. Eurofighters are bought rather
than army helicopters, aircraft carriers and Trident missiles rather than
properly armoured vehicles. The price of these grandiose toys is paid not
just by the taxpayer but by an underequipped army in battle.
Until 9/11 Blair could say with some justice that he was not dancing to the
White House tune. His mentor in joining Operation Desert Fox (the 1998
bombing of Baghdad) and in Kosovo was his heroine, Margaret Thatcher. It was
Blair who persuaded President Clinton to commit ground troops to Kosovo in
1999 and Blair who resumed the “white man’s burden” in recolonising Sierra
Leone in 2000. When the proclaimed isolationist George Bush took office in
2001 Blair told his aides: “We’ve got to turn these people into
internationalists.”
Only after 9/11 was Britain’s bluff called. Blair found himself dragged
swirling in the slipstream not of America’s internationalism but its
“retaliationism”. Blair’s humanitarian justification for war came to seem
merely the baggage train of America’s ideological belligerence. As the
political philosopher, John Gray, puts it in his book, Black Mass, the
post-cold-war surge of interventionism appeared no more than “a combination
of postimperial nostalgia with crackpot geopolitics”.
When even the Washington establishment began to distance itself from Iraq over
the course of 2006, Blair remained adamant to the faith. Iraq failed to pass
the tests of his Chicago speech: that war should be “prudent and
achievable”, should see “the national interest truly engaged” and should
have a nation “prepared for the long term”. The baffled head of the Foreign
Office, Sir John Kerr, rightly asked: “Where does it end?”
A new tract, Just War, by Lord Guthrie, former chief of the defence staff, and
Sir Michael Quinlan, former head of the defence ministry, repeats the
question. Proportionality and the chances of a benign outcome are as vital
to just wars as legality and good cause. Blair’s wars were justified only by
his declaring them so.
The truth is that Britain can play the great power only when allied to
America. There is no point in Brown boasting his determination to rescue a
woman raped in Darfur or a monk tortured in Burma when he will not commit
troops to either. Conditions in Zimbabwe or the Congo or Lebanon may be
“unacceptable to Her Majesty’s Government”, but that phrase no longer makes
dictators quake.
Blair’s doctrine of “hugging close” any and every incumbent of the White House
has given British policy a dusting of glamour. But the next US
administration is more likely to revert to George Bush in 2000, to never
wanting “the 82nd Airborne walking the world’s kids to school”. Where then
would be Cameron’s bombastic “security guarantees” to southern Iraq or his
pledge to “erase” the Taliban? As Cameron admitted in an interview with my
colleague Martin Ivens and then repeated in his conference speech: “You
can’t drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000ft.”
At least Brown has a sort of fallback position, his support for the new
European constitution and its foreign policy apparatus. This supposedly
offers the nations of Europe an alternative to dependence on America should
they want, for whatever reason, to stop Serbs and Kosovans from clashing or
to intervene in an African civil war or to police the ever-unstable
Caucasus.
The miserable performance, both military and diplomatic, of the European Union
over the past quarter century suggests that such a realignment of British
foreign policy barely merits the name. But Cameron has not even the European
option. Last week Hague derided the concept of an EU foreign policy shortly
before demanding that “the EU systematically turn the screw” on Zimbabwe,
whatever that means. This is not policy but attitude.
A Britain sailing the high seas with a couple of aircraft carriers, a lurking
Trident and a squadron of overpriced Typhoons does not make a world power.
It might conquer Sierra Leone but it could not contain any of the imaginable
threats to Britain’s security, an aggressive Iran or a totalitarian Russia
or even an African civil war.
Global influence can be exerted only by a global military power, and that
today means America. What Washington wants must condition any foreign
initiative, whether by individual states or by the European Union or by the
United Nations. Britain has neither bases nor colonies. Big toys do not make
small countries bigger.
If, as seems likely, America pulls in its horns over the next generation and
Europe remains militarily inert, Blair’s Chicago speech is mere posturing.
The same goes for liberal interventionism and rolling global regime change.
Brown’s new foreign minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, says: “Let’s not
rely solely on America.” He talks of “doing exciting things with Sarkozy and
Merkel”, yet does not specify those things. Under Blair the British
government expended its hard-won capital of soft power – commercial,
cultural and legal diplomacy – in favour of practising swordplay in the
shadow of the Pentagon. This has led to bloodshed and disaster. But were
that shadow to be withdrawn and were British soldiers still facing defeat in
the deserts of Helmand, who then is to hold their hand, what lodestar is to
guide them? Last week answer came there none.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
