Politics: In times such as these, a government needs a proper strategic foreign policy

5 February 2011

The coalition’s approach to foreign policy is not to have a foreign policy.

The coalition’s approach to foreign policy is not to have a foreign policy. There is no Cameron doctrine. As events unfold in Egypt, the government does not even know what it wants to happen. Alistair Burt, the Middle East minister, summed up this position rather brilliantly when he said ‘the tide is turning very strongly. It’s not for us to sit here in London and work out where that tide is going to go.’

History had reached a turning point but the coalition wasn’t sure which way it wanted it to turn.

It is strange to think that in 2005 David Cameron ran for the Tory leadership as the neoconservative candidate. In late August, with his campaign stuttering, Cameron delivered an unapologetically hawkish speech: jihadism was equivalent to Nazism and weakness was provocative. Whether he ever believed what he was saying is debatable. This sight of Michael Gove standing at the back of the auditorium mouthing the words rather suggested that these were not Cameron’s own thoughts.

Once elected, Cameron ploughed a different foreign furrow. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Cameron said that he was not a neoconservative. Since then, Tory foreign policy has been all about moving the country on from the ideological certainties of the Blair years. But in doing so, the Tories have left themselves without a way of understanding the world.

Some Conservatives are happy with this intellectual vacuum. For them, Hippocrates is a better guide to foreign policy than Thucydides. First do no harm they say, pointing to Iraq.

Those within the party machine plead mitigation. They claim that ‘Blair inherited a very different Britain’. The fiscal crisis and the public’s scepticism of foreign entanglements post-Afghanistan and Iraq, they say, makes an ambitious foreign policy impossible. ‘When your home base is shaky, you have to pick your fights more carefully,’ says one Tory.

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