Times Online : Comment : One friend Britain must stand by

Friday, September 08, 2006

One friend Britain must stand by

First task for the next prime minister: make sure foreign policy is right behind America

Comment | by Gerard Baker | September 8, 2006

TO A NON-PARTISAN there are few things more absorbing and less edifying in life than the now familiar spectacle of a British prime minister’s political death throes.

The once mighty, but downed, leader is suddenly, implausibly, vulnerable: carrion, not just for the big beasts of the Cabinet, but even for the odd assortment of pygmies and jackals otherwise known as under-secretaries of state and parliamentary private secretaries whose ambitions far exceed their scruples or capabilities.

Seen from the US, the final agonies of Tony Blair represent another of those mystifying but slightly thrilling features of British politics. A man at the peak of his personal powers, who has bestridden the global stage as no other non-American these past ten years, a man re-elected just 16 months ago to an unprecedented third term, is now teetering helplessly, like that statue of Saddam in Baghdad, waiting for some party apparatchik they’ve never heard of over here to deliver the coup de grĂ¢ce.

The root of the Westminster frenzy is no longer an issue of timing or personality but, oddly for once, real substance. What sort of Labour Party, and by extension, at least for a few more years, what sort of Britain will emerge from what we are still supposed to think of as a stable and orderly transition?

Much of this debate will focus on the doubtless critical and fascinating questions of the reform of public services, the role of unions, how Britain meets its energy needs. But the much larger question at stake concerns not the future of city academies, but the very orientation of the nation itself.

The country seems to be in a mood to seize the moment of Mr Blair’s impending departure to choose a radical new turn: end the ruinous special relationship with America and construct a new foreign policy that pragmatically chooses ad hoc between go-it-alone bulldog independence and alignment with our European “partners”. There’s a hope that Gordon Brown, heaven help us, will have a Love Actually moment, seizing the opportunity to declare his independence from the US yoke. A poll in The Times this week suggests that would be popular: a majority now favour much looser ties with the US.

That is no doubt why David Cameron, the Conservative leader, moistened finger lifted permanently into the winds of public opinion, will, we are told, use the anniversary of September 11 to declare that he will not be the American President’s poodle.

This adolescent chatter about Hugh Grant characters and pliant pooches underscores the lack of seriousness with which this most grave of policy challenges is invested in Britain. It is long past time to fill that fluffy void with some real thought, some genuine initiative and some serious resolve.

The Blair critics certainly have one thing right. Mr Blair’s agonising farewell offers a chance to recast British foreign policy in a less personality-driven light, an opportunity to assess where British interests really lie and to sort the tangents of foreign policy controversy these past few years from the central issues at stake.

If the next prime minister is a real leader, and not a mere implementer of the latest public opinion trends, he will take a firm stand against the seductive anti-Americanism that has Britain and much of Europe in its grip.

He should state, categorically, that whatever our reservations, whatever our irritations, Britain will stand with America. Not because Britain is a weaker power that has little choice, or in the hope of some quid pro quo, but because it is the right thing to do.

There is no need for this to sound craven or submissive. It can be a balanced and candid assessment of the world and its problems in the five years since 9/11. It should acknowledge the disquiet and alarm in Britain at what has gone wrong. It should offer a reasoned critique of the way the war in Iraq has been handled, of the overreach by the US in its handling of matters such as detention of suspected terrorists. It can distance Britain from all those hints of religiosity and that slightly cloying idealism that Americans of all political persuasions go in for.

But it should be sure to put these in their place: to insert into the fevered debate of foreign policy in Britain a sense of proportion and history. It should say that, whatever we think about the Iraq war, we are in no doubt where right lies in that struggle now. The insurgency in Iraq is not some heroic struggle by the oppressed against neocolonialism but murderous terrorism by competing groups of thugs. Over Afghanistan too, despite our tragic losses there in the last few weeks, it should recommit Britain to resisting the attempts of a small minority of Afghans and their foreign friends to turn that country back to the medievalist nightmare from which it has only recently escaped.

This new statement of our foreign policy interests should say that, while Britain will reserve the right to criticise Israel’s policies, it will have no truck with the spreading assumption that Israel is the principal author of the Middle East’s problems, and that that nation’s security against terrorists and states who would destroy it is an essential objective of British policy. It is time, in other words, to identify the enemy and stop identifying with him.

The post-Blair foreign policy should above all seek to elevate the British public’s vision above the trials and errors of the past five years. It should remind the people that America represents still, as it has for the past 60 years, the last best hope of freedom.