Blair's "Ethical" Policy - Tony Blair

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair and his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, were all the quicker to congratulate George W. Bush on confirmation of his election because they knew that they had a good deal of ground to make up. For months Labour Parry figures had scarcely concealed their scorn for the Republican presidential candidate. Blair's eminence grise, Peter Mandelson, then Northern Ireland secretary, was even indiscrete enough to tell journalists his opinions of Bush and his policies at a drinks party before Christmas, and then had to issue a public retraction.

If the problem were simply the result of New Labour nostalgia for the cozy relationship built up with the Clinton administration, it would have little long-term significance. But its roots go much deeper than that and lie not in personalities but in policies, indeed in conceptions of the very purpose of Western foreign and security policy. Even on the occasion of Messrs. Blair's and Cook's formal felicitations, their words, consciously or not, contained more than a hint of trouble to come. "President-elect Bush", said Blair, "is a man who shares our values [and] wants Europe and America to stand side by side." Still more significant, Cook looked forward to working with the new President and to "keeping Britain as that unique bridge between America and Europe" [emphasis added].

Policymakers in Washington ought to study and reflect on these apparently anodyne phrases and the attitudes that lie behind them. They need to ask themselves whether America really wants Europe to stand at its side rather than to stand behind its leadership. And they should consider and then articulate whether they expect Britain to be a "bridge" ("unique" or otherwise), or whether they prefer the traditional British role of highly effective and strongly committed ally. These questions, which the Clinton administration was happy to fudge, and the Blair government even more so, will sooner rather than later have to be resolved.

Pivots and Policies

TONY BLAIR has a sense of the historic, if not exactly of history. He wants, as his friend Bill Clinton ever more desperately wanted, to be seen by posterity as having shaped events and bestrode them. In a November 1999 speech at the Lord Mayor of London's banquet, the traditional annual occasion for a British prime minister to review foreign policy, Blair thus expansively reflected upon the legacy of empire. Successive generations of British politicians from Churchill to Thatcher had, he said, tried and failed to find for Britain a satisfactory post-imperial role. He continued:

However, I believe that search can now end. We have got over our Imperial past, and the withdrawal symptoms. No longer do we want to be taken seriously just for our history, but for what we are and what we will become. We have a new role.... It is to use the strengths of our history to build our future not as a superpower but as a pivotal power, as a power that is at the crux of the alliances and international politics which shape the world and its future.

This was vintage Blair. The passage has a self-confident, even visionary assertiveness that smacks of Margaret Thatcher. At the same time, it reassures the liberal media with its appeal to modernity and internationalism. And, equally typical, it contains at its core an embarrassing intellectual vacuum.

"Pivots" are, of course, in fashion. Paul Kennedy, for example, has argued that a "pivotal states strategy" should be at the heart of a realistic American approach to foreign and security policy. [1] But Kennedy's category of pivotal states was not one within which any British prime minister would greatly wish to see his country slotted. Such states are "pivotal" precisely because--like Mexico, Algeria or Egypt--they face a precarious future, and because that future matters to the West as a whole. Clearly, Blair was not talking about that kind of pivot.

In truth, it is difficult to envisage why any state or any individual would voluntarily act as a pivot. Pivots have no life of their own. They are necessarily rigid and static. Their value is simply as a means of permitting movement by others.

This objection is not just pedantry. Such metaphors drawn from engineering for use in political discourse--like engines, power houses, gear changes--always belie a confusion of ends with means. Blair sees that Britain is a nuclear-armed state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, that it has close relations with America, that it is a leading power in Europe, that it has links with Africa and Asia through the Commonwealth, and that it enjoys the advantage of English being the language of international business. But he confuses the possession of these undoubted geopolitical strengths with possession of a policy to apply them. Does Britain, in fact, currently have such a policy?

Out of Africa

ODDLY enough, the beginnings of the answer may be found in a downtrodden, poverty-stricken, blood-drenched corner of West Africa. Blair may pride himself on exorcising the demons of empire, but his government's approach to Sierra Leone strongly suggests the opposite.

Take up the White Man's burden--

The savage wars of peace--

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hope to nought.

Kipling's lament is particularly appropriate to Sierra Leone. The settlement of Freetown was created by the British in 1787 for slaves repatriated from Britain and the United States, and for others liberated from the slave ships. It grew over time into a small, prosperous and well-educated colony. But since independence in 1961 it has slipped from dictatorship to kleptocracy and from kleptocracy to anarchy. It is as pointless to apply Western-style labels to the individuals and factions concerned as it was to those in the old Soviet Union--which, however, has not prevented the British Foreign Office from doing so.

In truth, the one common factor in the tangled events of Sierra Leone's recent history is that British politicians and diplomats have managed to be wrong at every stage. The political struggles in Sierra Leone and in neighboring Liberia are mainly about control of the diamond business. Belatedly realizing this, Britain has persuaded the UN to take measures to outlaw "conflict diamonds." But, of course, the mere act of outlawing something, without any prospect of enforcement, will not work in Sierra Leone any more than it has in Angola, where civil strife rages unabated. Greed always finds a way.

And the story of Sierra Leone is one of greed on an epic scale. In 1991 Foday Sankoh, a former army corporal, teamed up with Charles Taylor, then a militia leader and now Liberia's president, to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone and seize the diamond mines. But before they could finish the job, a military coup brought a baby-faced young captain, Valentine Strasser, to power. Strasser was initially much feted by the West as a "reformer"--until he damaged his international reputation by having twenty-six of his opponents taken out to the beach at Freetown and summarily executed. Britain suspended aid, but later provided Strasser with a refuge when he was ousted in 1996: he is now drawing social security benefits and living in a modest house in north London.

Amid much international rejoicing, democracy was re-introduced. Elections brought to power President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. But it was South African mercenaries who kept him there. Unfortunately, white mercenaries--the traditional prop for black African governments--are frowned upon in the global village. So the mercenaries were sent home and the government promptly fell, overturned in another military coup.

At this point, the Labour government took office in Britain and Robin Cook entered the imposing portals of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Cook resolved to flex his muscles. He decided that "democracy" must be "restored" in Sierra Leone. But how? The foreign secretary's first error was to will the ends without being realistic about the means. While pretending that Britain was adhering to an internationally agreed arms embargo, the Foreign Office secretly supported a mercenary effort to overthrow the military regime. That regime was indeed ousted in February 1998. Nigerian troops were sent in, but Freetown was extensively looted in the fighting.

The leader of the rebels, Sankoh, was now captured by the Nigerians. He had one of the worst reputations for human rights abuses in Africa. His forces' specialty was mutilation, as the piteous photographs of limbless women and children begging in Freetown testify. Sankoh was sentenced to death in absentia by a Sierra Leonean court. But the foreign secretary now intervened. Cook, not known for his tolerance of crimes when allegedly committed by white-skinned former Chilean heads of state, pressed President Kabbah to pardon Sankoh and to grant him immunity. The foreign secretary also persuaded Kabbah to appoint Sankoh as his vice president and minister for natural resources--which afforded the latter's men control over the diamonds for which the whole struggle had taken place. This was Cook's second, and egregious, error. Naturally enough, Sankoh and his men exploited the new opportunity to the maximum, and ignored all previous undertakings of good behavior.

Cook's third mistake was his decision to commit substantial numbers of British troops to support the Sierra Leonean government against Sankoh's now fully reactivated forces, without hard-headed assessment of the mission's purpose. The stated objectives were initially the sensible, limited ones of liberating kidnapped UN soldiers and affording protection to British nationals. But there was no doubting that the mission had a much wider and more ambitious long-term goal--the establishment of democratic order. The triumphalism with which the operation was announced confirmed as much: "Britain will not abandon its commitment to Sierra Leone", proclaimed Cook.

The immediate outcome was encouraging. Given the professionalism and firepower of the force committed, that was hardly surprising. The UN soldiers were released. Sankoh was captured--again. But Cook seriously misjudged British public opinion, which was now alarmed about the risk of British troops becoming sucked into an unwinnable war in an impossible country for inexplicable ends. Accordingly, the 800 paratroopers were withdrawn and a much more modest force of Marines took over with a mandate to train and arm the Sierra Leonean army.

This, though, compounded the mistake. Too small a force had been sent to perform too large a mission. The factions involved in the Sierra Leonean civil war were actually already quite well trained, both in killing each other and civilians. They were also well armed. In any case, Britain could exercise little control over the weapons sent. Some, to Cook's embarrassment, were used by child soldiers fighting for the Sierra Leonean government. Others fell into the hands of the rebels. Indeed, it was increasingly hard to decide who the "rebels" were, given the chaotic shifting of allegiances. The "West Side Boys" who captured eleven British soldiers and held them hostage had actually started out on the side of the government. The subsequent rescue by British troops of their comrades in a prolonged and bloody battle was a difficult mission well accomplished. But where did it all leave Sierra Leone?

As an exercise in futility, the whole operation increasingly resembled the disastrous U.S./UN mission in Somalia in 1993. The conclusion should have been the same. Again, Kipling:

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,

We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

But will it? Almost certainly not. As the UN force in Sierra Leone crumbles--amid mutual recriminations and withdrawals--Britain continues to increase its commitment. A British officer is now chief of staff; major amphibious exercises are planned; a naval task force has been sent. In the eyes of the British government, if in no one else's, the business is not just deadly but deadly serious. And, indeed, once you take away the braggadocio and misjudgments, you are left with something resembling a doctrine to which both Blair and Cook are committed.

Ethics and Interests

THIS, it should be said, is not a doctrine specifically relating to Africa. It is not, for example, at all equivalent to the traditional French approach to the francophone countries of that continent. French strategy consists of a more or less unashamed pursuit of national interest, aimed principally at resisting and undermining American and British influence. Ever since the revelations about France's role in the Hutu genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, Paris has trodden more lightly; but its footprints are still apparent, and their direction is clear.

By contrast, Britain's attitude is naive rather than self-serving. Until the late January re-shuffle caused by Mandelson's resignation, the Foreign Office minister with responsibility for Africa was Peter Hain. Hain still entertains the same romantic illusions about the black man's liberation struggle as he did when he was a young activist agitating against South African rugby tours. It is just that, as with other members of that political generation, hi-tech globalist rhetoric has been larded into the old prejudices. Thus Hain could recently be heard forecasting a bright future for Africa because of exciting new technologies. Somali pastoralists using mobile phones to price the cost of goats in Jeddah, allowing them to operate in the wider world outside the confines of inefficient state-owned fixed line systems, is a graphic illustration of the possibilities. [2]

It is difficult to imagine Hain's French equivalent preoccupied with the sale of Saudi goats. There is, indeed, more than a trace of farce about British foreign policy today. Some of this is simply a reflection of Robin Cook himself, not least his bombast. In opposition, Cook's rhetorical flourishes across the dispatch box of the House of Commons were admired. But in office, when a measure of authoritative sobriety is expected, his grandiloquence threatens to turn him into a buffoon. Who else in British politics could say the following:

Since I took office in 1997, Madeleine [Albright] and I have worked closely together on tackling some of the biggest foreign policy problems of our age. [3]

I come to America as the President of a European Union going through immense and exciting change. [4]

Britain will not turn its back on Sierra Leone. Today I will go there. [5]

There is no greater national duty than the defence of our shoreline. But the most immediate threat to it today is the encroaching sea. [6]

Yet, for all that, Cook is the spokesman for a serious--if also seriously flawed-- doctrine of liberal internationalism. The Foreign Office "mission statement" still claims that it exists to serve the national interest. But it then goes on to elaborate that interest in terms so nebulous that the expression is drained of meaning. Nor is this at all surprising, for, according to Cook, "the global interest is becoming the national interest." Thus in one trite slogan some four centuries of debating, calculating and executing policies designed to maintain Britain's standing and promote Britain's interests in the world are abandoned. The Victorians generally assumed that what was in Britain's interest must also be in the world's interest. The Labour government now assumes the precise opposite, that what is in the global interest must be in Britain's. Each proposition is as unthinking as the other, though at least the Victorians had no illusion that their view commanded universal assent. Today the high priests of g lobalism have simply decreed that distinctions, priorities and choices in foreign and security policy are outdated relics of old thinking. And all that therefore remains is to resolve the Manichaean conflict between (in Blair's words) "the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism."

In this make-believe world, where the forces of progress are always identifiable and by definition correct, there is no room for moral ambiguity. We know what is right--the international community tells us so--and there is no excuse for shirking. And so it was, in Cook's words, that the "ethical foreign policy" was born. [7] The pursuit of this approach has, however, provided the government with so many headaches, and its critics with so much ammunition, that the phrase has now been banned. The Labour Party's draft manifesto will, it is reported, omit it entirely. It is easy to understand why.

The government has behaved, as governments will, according to double standards, and it has frequently been caught out. The British Left has always railed against the arms trade, refusing to accept that it is not the possession of arms but the intentions of the possessors that matter. So Cook declared it an ethical aim to "curb the supply of weapons that fuel conflict." The policy was soon exposed. Hawk military aircraft were supplied to Indonesia right up to the time of the first large-scale atrocities in East Timor. Still worse, Cook found himself pressured by Downing Street into allowing the export of spare parts for Hawks supplied to Zimbabwe, which is deeply engaged in the bloody civil war in the Congo.

Similarly, Cook began by promising to "put human rights at the heart of our policy." But weak, vulnerable countries proved a good deal more likely to experience Cook's condemnation than great powers--just as was the case with Jimmy Carter's reign. Here China was the test case. The foreign secretary reversed the previous British position adopted in the UN Human Rights Commission by refusing to back a resolution condemning China's abuses. When Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited Britain in 1999, protestors with the temerity to remind him of Chinese brutalities in Tibet were kept out of sight and their banners confiscated. When the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng sought a meeting with Cook, it was first refused and then, when it did occur, the foreign secretary's office ensured that the two were not photographed together, for fear of Beijing's reaction. When Lee Teng-hui, the former president of Taiwan, sought a visa in order to visit his granddaughter, it was only granted on condition that he say nothing emba rrassing during his stay. All of these positions were adopted in response to Chinese pressure. Under Messrs. Blair and Cook, Britain has become a virtuoso of the kowtow.

Do such double standards matter? Arguably not. Contrary to Cook's confident assertions, global relationships are still governed by interplays of power. The arms business has to go on if its employees are to be paid. And great powers with unpleasant regimes must sometimes be shown respect or they will take umbrage and may retaliate. The problem with hypocrisy on the scale practiced by the British Foreign Office today, however, is that it makes Britain a laughing stock. And on any definition of the national interest that should matter.

Doctrinaire Interventionism

IT CERTAINLY matters to Tony Blair, whose preoccupations, if not his policies, are somewhat different from those of Cook. Both Blair and Cook were once men of the Left. For example, they supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the body that pressed for unilateral Western abandonment of the nuclear deterrent throughout the crucial stages of the Cold War. (Hain, who has been representing Britain in nuclear non-proliferation talks, is still a CND member.) Yet Blair could never have been heard telling a Labour Party Conference, as Cook did in 1982, "I come to this rostrum to beg Conference, to ask Conference, to plead with Conference to vote for unilateral nuclear disarmament." As a young politician Blair was always too pragmatic and ambitious to get into such scrapes. Now as prime minister both his pragmatism and his ambition--and increasingly his pride--incline him toward a more robust posture than could ever be welcome to the sinuous officialdom of the Foreign Office. Hence Britain's role in the Kosovo operation.

Both the Bush (Senior) administration in America and the Major government in Britain seriously mishandled the crises that followed the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The resolve shown in dealing with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War was noticeably lacking in dealing with Slobodan Milosevic in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. For the European Left, however, the lessons went well beyond arguments about wider or narrower views of national interest and about the expeditious use of overwhelming force. Balkan genocide was, rather, according to its analysis, a manifestation of the failure of the international community to defend a liberal, multicultural model against the forces of nationalism. Kosovo thus provided at once an opportunity to impose the values of a new liberal order and a prominent occasion to demonstrate international clout. The combination was hard for Blair to resist.

Accordingly, Britain was at the forefront of the Kosovo campaign at both its inception and its conclusion, when British troops raced the Russians to Pristina. The campaign itself was botched, though this was largely the result of rules of engagement dictated by Washington. Partly because of these constraints, the Serbs were given the opportunity to drive out much of the Albanian population. Since then, in retaliation, the Albanians on their return have ethnically cleansed the Serbs, over half of whom have now departed. According to Madeleine Albright, "We all want a multi-ethnic Kosovo." But evidently "we" excludes the majority of Kosovars--and nothing that the new government in Belgrade does is going to change that one whit. Kosovo thus hangs in a kind of limbo, between independence and rejoining the rump Yugoslavia; a poor, corrupt, misgoverned colony administered by reluctant imperialists.

It is difficult to imagine that the experience of Western involvement in Kosovo would have provided much inspiration for New Labour's global interventionists. But it has. Blair's hubristic belief in his ability to rework the patterns of the past and impose modern liberal shapes and sizes now knows no bounds. Speaking in Zagreb last November, for example, he offered "the chance of a new history for the [Balkan] region."

Above all, the Kosovo affair prompted Blair to make a speech in Chicago that encapsulates the ambitions of his government's foreign policy. Arguing that the Kosovo campaign was "a just war ... based on values", the Prime Minister put forward what he called "a new doctrine of international community." This was required, he said, because "we are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not." Most important, "we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure."

Of course, a moment's reflection reveals this to be nonsense. In most cases, human rights abuses in other counties have no practical impact on us whatsoever. Perhaps it is true that "no man is an island", but states are at best morally peninsular. Yet with Blair's pronouncements it is not intellectual substance, or the lack of it, that counts, but rather what his aides refer to as "the signals." In this case, Blair was signaling that Britain is now wholeheartedly committed to a program of ubiquitous international interventionism.

What is less clear is precisely how this bold, vast, novel project is to be accomplished. After all, Britain cannot undertake it alone; it cannot lead it; and there are even doubts about how much it can contribute to it, at least in direct security terms. British defenses have been run down since the Cold War, like those of most other Western countries, largely to pay higher welfare bills. The British Army has been cut by about a third. The chief of the defence staff has recently warned that it will not be fully manned for another five years, because of reduced career prospects and upheavals resulting from constantly changing deployments. And Britain's forces are already suffering from a serious case of overstretch. There are over 20,000 servicemen in Germany, about 3,000 in Bosnia, over 5,000 in Kosovo, more than 3,000 in Cyprus, and a growing number in Sierra Leone. Moreover, it is far from clear that the United Kingdom's number one domestic trouble spot, Ulster--where almost 14,000 are currently deployed-- will remain conveniently untroubled while Britain minds other peoples' business.

Equally important, Britain simply no longer has the military technology to act effectively as a world policeman. Compared with America, it is no more than special constable at best. This was embarrassingly demonstrated in the Kosovo campaign, when none of the European air forces could operate effectively without U.S. support, and not very effectively even then. The trend will inevitably accelerate with advances in the use of networked information and precision weaponry--the "revolution in military affairs."

One solution to this problem would be to leave the real business of military interventions to the Americans, with the British and others confining themselves to subordinate tasks. But that runs up against U.S. reluctance--a reluctance that will certainly be more evident as Secretary of State Colin Powell makes his mark. In any case, that kind of U.S.-led globalism would look rather too similar to Western imperialism to be acceptable to the New Left in Europe. Realizing this, Tony Blair's Britain has instead become a vociferous champion of the proposals contained in the recent report to the UN secretary-general for a much larger direct military role for the UN. That was the message that Blair brought to the UN Millennium Summit, when he called for implementation of the report "within a twelve month timescale." Britain has also offered to act as host country for a permanent staff college for peacekeepers.

Just possibly, something may come of this. But it is in the realm of institutions rather than military operations that the consequences of Blair's "doctrine of international community" are most likely to manifest themselves. Here, too, the Balkans provide the peg.

The war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, set up in 1993 and 1994 respectively, were responses to Western apathy, impotence and (in the case of Rwanda) collusion in genocide. Neither has worked as intended. It was only when the perpetrators began to lose that the prospects for their apprehension and punishment increased--confirming that the only possible international justice always turns out to be victor's justice. In fact, now that prosecutions are belatedly gathering pace, the most likely effect, especially in the Balkans, will be to make a return to order and reconciliation more difficult.

Undaunted, Britain has become one of the leading advocates of the creation of an all-embracing International Criminal Court (ICC) that would intrude far more comprehensively into the affairs of sovereign states. During the ICC negotiations, the British delegation consistently argued for the most radical options--for example, insisting that the definition of war crimes should include crimes committed in internal conflicts. As a sign of its commitment, Britain has also offered to imprison those convicted of crimes against humanity. Again, there is globalist theory at work here, and in its most extreme form. As Cook expressed it: "It is no longer sufficient for states to claim that they have the sovereign right to decide what is going to be legal and what is going to be illegal. The international community can both determine and enforce that" [emphasis added]. [8]

The objections in principle to such an approach to international justice have been trenchantly and persuasively put by others. [9] But the main objection in practice, which weighed heavily with the United States under Clinton and will weigh more heavily still under President Bush, is the prospect of American politicians, high officials and military personnel being made internationally answerable for overseas interventions. This cuts no ice at all with Britain's Foreign Office. Yet on any common-sense view it should. Britain is not as feared as the United States, so its personnel are that much more vulnerable. At the same time, Britain is uniquely closely associated with America in operations that are anathema to many members of the international community. What the Argentineans would already like to do to Margaret Thatcher others will probably want to do to Tony Blair, and perhaps even Robin Cook.

The issue of the ICC has also exposed another fundamental weakness in the Blairite "doctrine of international community." This is that the latter's most important members sometimes sharply disagree. That does not so much bother Cook, who still appears to enjoy nothing more than the opportunity to cock a snook at the United States. But if America maintains its objections, it may yet come to bother Blair.

This is because the Prime Minister entered office deeply and rightly conscious of the importance of the Anglo-American relationship as the basis for his and his country's international standing. And in that he was greatly influenced by the career of his predecessor-but-one.

In Her Footsteps?

INDEED, Tony Blair has spent the last four years beset with something bordering on an obsession with Margaret Thatcher's premiership . He correctly judges that the influence that Britain wielded with the two superpowers and their leaders--Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev--in the 1980s allowed Thatcher to impose her views and values both at home and abroad. He wants to do the same.

Hence Blair's extraordinary and even undignified efforts to establish a friendship with Bill Clinton, a man whose moral standards and personal behavior must surely jar with his own almost too good to be true uprightness of character. Hence also the still more bizarre campaign to ingratiate himself with Vladimir Putin. It was Clinton who described the Russian leader as "a man we can do business with", echoing Thatcher's often quoted comment about Gorbachev. But it was Blair who took the risk of flying off to endorse Putin even before his election victory, and at the same time indirectly endorsing the latter's brutal, indeed genocidal, campaign in Chechnya by describing it as a fight against "terrorism."

Blair was lucky with Clinton, whose survival of the impeachment process vindicated the British Prime Minister's support. By contrast, his luck appears to have run out with Putin, who ever since the initial plaudits and flattery has consistently lived down to all that should be expected of a not very talented KGB apparatchik. Blair has made repeated efforts to woo Russia. He has backed Moscow in its vociferous campaign against major revision or abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty--another issue on which he will find himself sharply at odds with the new U.S. administration. He has turned a blind eye to the continued heavy-handed suppression of Russian media freedoms. He even tried to persuade the block-headed chiefs of the rusting Russian navy to accept his offer of help in rescuing their submariners, dying on the floor of the Barents Sea. But all to no avail. The prospects of Blair's friendship with "Vladimir" enhancing Britain's international standing sank with the Kursk.

The one crucial failure of British foreign policy in the Thatcher years was, Blair believes, in dealings with Europe. On taking office he therefore pledged to "end the isolation of the last twenty years and be a leading partner in Europe." One should not exaggerate the originality of this aspiration. It was shared by the Conservative government in 1979. It was still more deeply shared by John Major, who pledged in 1991 to put Britain at the "very heart of Europe." But with Tony Blair the project has become a veritable passion.

In its pursuit, he has continued to state his support for the principle of abolishing sterling in favor of the European single currency--even though the euro still looks sick and the British public remains deeply hostile. He has undergone humiliation within the ranks of the European Left, as his ideas of a "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism have been cold-shouldered by the other members of the club. Most significant of all, he has reversed Britain's previously hostile attitude toward the integration of the country's armed forces with those of the other European Union members outside the framework of NATO.

Whether Blair understood how the United States would see this radical about-turn in British security policy is perhaps doubtful. Certainly, a large measure of the blame must go to the Clinton administration, which failed properly to articulate the Pentagon's amply justified misgivings. But it was the Prime Minister's conviction that alternately massaging and intimidating the British media would prevent difficult questions being asked that finally misled him.

Blair's objective was quite simple, if also extremely cynical. He sought at one and the same time to magnify the importance of Britain's European defense commitment, thus pleasing his opposite numbers in France and Germany, while downplaying that same commitment in order to reassure opinion in Britain and America. Unfortunately, this stratagem was repeatedly derailed by unwelcome home truths blurted out by the Europeans. Thus European Commission President Romano Prodi confirmed that the planned European rapid reaction force was indeed a European army. As he told the Independent newspaper: "When I was talking about the European army I was not joking. If you don't want to call it a European army, don't call it a European army. You can call it 'Margaret', you can call it 'Mary-Ann', you can find any name." [10] The French, whose anti-Americanism has provided the driving force for the project, have also repeatedly emphasized that the rapid reaction force is to be the core of a European army and is intended to op erate independently from NATO.

But what most preoccupies Blair is the effect that adverse reactions in Washington might have upon otherwise somnolent British public opinion. So in the run-up to the December 2000 European summit in Nice, at which the plans for the new force were due to be agreed upon, he took pre-emptive action. Ten Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence launched a fierce campaign to deny that any American worries existed about the Euro-army and to portray British Euroskeptic newspapers as driven by blind prejudice in reporting the contrary. This campaign boomeranged spectacularly. It prompted a final and public break with Margaret Thatcher, the politician whose views on security matters were most likely to be taken seriously on the other side of the Atlantic; she denounced Blair's support for the European army as "an act of monumental folly" taken "to satisfy political vanity." It also prompted the outgoing U.S. defense secretary to issue what amounted to a correction and a rebuke. And it prompted U.S. opponents of the planned European force to speak out more clearly than ever before.

Blair's real problems do not, however, lie mainly with his domestic or even his foreign critics, but rather with the contradictions in the policy itself. He cannot indefinitely appear to adopt both Eurocentric and Atlanticist approaches. He has to choose.

One year after he had described his "pivotal" foreign policy at the Lord Mayor's banquet, the British Prime Minister returned to the same broad theme before the same distinguished audience. This time he called for, in terms that would be familiar to an American audience, "engagement, not isolation." Yet isolation from Britain's oldest and most important ally, the only global superpower, is precisely where Blair's foreign policy doctrine is ultimately bound to lead if it continues to be pursued. And this, of course, will only be the latest, if by far the most serious, in a by now lengthy list of foreign policy failures that have flowed from that same doctrine.

An Alternative Course

GOVERNMENTS must often, it is true, encounter failure in the pursuit of foreign policy. Failure does not necessarily mean that the policy itself was misconceived. Unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances may simply have overtaken it. What is really dangerous for a nation, however, is when a government does not even know how to measure failure, for then failure risks becoming cumulative.

Blair's government continues to reinforce failure in Europe, as it does in its dealings with Africa, the Balkans and Russia. And unless there is a swift change of course, failure will characterize Britain's transatlantic relations, too. The British government re-inforces its failures for the same reason that it pursues an "ethical" foreign policy, enmeshed in unresolvable contradictions, and welcomes initiatives, like the International Criminal Court, that jeopardize British interests. It behaves in this fashion not merely because of Cook's incompetence or Blair's delusions, but because it has abandoned the concept of national interest as the lodestar by which to plot its course.

Establishing just what that national interest requires at any time is intellectually demanding. Putting the conclusions into effect may be difficult, painful and sometimes dangerous. And beyond that, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott says of politics in general is surely truer still of foreign policymaking in particular, that it is an activity in which

men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion. [11]

But does New Labour, or the New Left anywhere, really have the stomach for that?

Robin Harris was director of the Conservative Research Department and a member of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street Policy Unit. He is now a freelance writer.

(1.) Kennnedy et al., "Pivotal States and U.S. Strategy", Foreign Affairs (January/February 1996).

(2.) Speech by Hain at the Challenges for Governance in Africa Conference, Wilton Park, July 24, 2000.

(3.) Speech by Cook to the American Bar Association, London, July 19, 2000.

(4.) Speech by Cook to the European Institute, Washington, DC, January 15, 1998.

(5.) Cook, The Scotsman, July 7, 2000.

(6.) Speech by Cook to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, January 28, 2000.

(7.) In fact, Cook only spoke originally of an "ethical dimension", but there was no attempt to limit its significance until the embarrassments began to surface. Speech by Cook at the launch of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office mission statement, London, May 12, 1997.

(8.) Speech by Cook at a Center for Global Governance seminar, January 13, 2000.

(9.) See, for example, John R. Bolton, "Courting Danger: What's Wrong With the International Criminal Court", The National Interest (Winter 1998/99); and David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey, "The Rocky Shoals of International Law", The National Interest (Winter 2000/01).

(10.) Stephen Castle and Andrew Grice, The Independent (London), February 4, 2000.

(11.) Oakeshott, "Political Education", in Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 127.

Let's Hope He's Right

The First World War is a mystery to two thirds of secondary schoolchildren and some think Adolf Hitler was Britain's prime minister in the Second World War.

Widespread confusion reigns over Henry VIII's wives, with more than a third of children thinking that he had eight instead of six, and nearly one in 10 children believed Victoria was on the throne during the Armada.

About a fifth believed that Oliver Cromwell was at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and six per cent think that he was around at the Battle of Britain in 1940. One per cent linked him to the Falklands war.

The level of ignorance was exposed by a survey published today of children between 11 and 18 taught history to at least the age of 14 under the national curriculum.

Daily Telegraph (London), January 18, 2001

There is an intelligent, sceptical England surviving under all the rubbish we see on television.

From Auberon Waugh's last column in the same newspaper

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