Britain’s foreign policy is increasingly feeble

For those of us who grew up during the Cold War, it’s heartbreaking to watch the western countries fail to defend the interests of liberal democracy. The free world is being challenged on three fronts, by Russia, Iran and China, all of whom threaten the international order established so painstakingly after the second world war. The West should be standing up for its values, yet even Britain, the great bastion of democracy, the country that heroically held out alone in 1940-41, seems to have lost the will to fight.

The fact that the government has transferred sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is symptomatic of a country that no longer has geopolitical perspective. Britain is obsessed with its own shame over its imperial history – and has been for quite some time. During Gordon Brown’s premiership I held the position of UN special adviser on Cyprus. In that role I called on a senior aide to Brown to discuss the progress we were making in negotiations between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots to reunite the island. One of the issues was the 99 square miles of British sovereign bases there. Much to my astonishment, the official at No. 10 told me that the PM would be happy to give up those bases as part of a settlement.

The official conceded that there would be huge resistance from the intelligence and defence establishments to such a surrender. It would clearly limit any UK capacity to contribute to peace in the Middle East: not only because those bases act as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the RAF (as demonstrated by their role in shooting down the Iranian missiles heading for Israel recently), but also because to give them up would deny the western alliance access to intelligence.