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Tuesday 7 October 2008

Brown has outsourced foreign policy

Brown has outsourced British foreign policy

The special relationship is between Washington and Brussels

What Brown has done is to outsource foreign policy to a variety of international organisations. ‘New frameworks’ will require ‘systematic use of earlier Security Council action’, which distinguishes Brown from Blair in a way that must appeal to his Left. International institutions — the G8, the IMF, the World Bank and the UN — are to be reformed to make them fit for purpose in the 21st century. How Brown will persuade the US to co-operate in restructuring the G8, the IMF and the World Bank, now that he has forfeited the right to be heard that Tony Blair won, is unclear. As for the UN, Malloch Brown, minister for Africa, Asia and (less often mentioned) the UN, will presumably be in charge of its reformation — never mind that he spent years as UN deputy-general fighting off every reform proposed to eliminate the corruption of the Iraq oil-for-food programme, nepotism, cronyism, and a host of organisational failings. One reform we know he favours is ceding Britain’s and France’s permanent seats on the Security Council to the new EU foreign minister (oops, High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy). Gordon Brown’s willingness to let him make policy on Bush, neocons, Palestinian terror organisations, Syria and other matters suggests that Britain’s UN representatives would do well to fasten their seat belts tightly indeed.

None of this is to criticise the Prime Minister. It is, after all, his obligation to recalibrate the foreign policy of the nation whose leadership he inherited from a man with whom he disagreed on many things. My guess is that his main foreign policy goal is to have less of it — spend less on it, so that funds are not diverted from growing the welfare state (so much less that Britain can now afford only a part-time Defence Minister); think less about it, so that intellectual energy is reserved for plans to meet the cherished domestic goal of redistributing income from the middle class to lower earners and the disadvantaged; and above all, give the Left no reason to accuse him of being the poodle of a President with whom he must work until a more agreeable partner is chosen by the American people just about a year from now.

The Prime Minister’s reshaping of British foreign policy carries a price — a weakening of the alliance that preserved Western values from assaults by fascism and international communism, and has been waging a new battle against radical Islam. A high price to pay for straining what Oxford University professor Vernon Bogdanor recently called in these pages ‘the profound bonds of amity and kinship which lie behind the modern Anglo-American relationship’.

More articles from: Irwin Stelzer | this section

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