David Cameron’s wars: How the PM learned to love precision bombing

What is the one consolation for an MP who has beaten all their colleagues to the top job? It can hardly be the luxury of having your life, circle and income open to alternate snorts of envy and derision. Nor can it be the quagmire into which nearly all attempts to solve the nation’s domestic problems now fall.  Only one thing allows prime ministers of a country such as Britain to feel they have power. That is exercising it. And nothing exercises power more than deciding which wars to fight.

In opposition, David Cameron did not much like the idea of war, and derided his colleagues for their admiration of Tony Blair. Yet in office — as Syria is revealing — he is treading a very similar path. We are told that he is phoning the White House to discuss Syria and hoping to put steel into Barack Obama’s spine, just as Blair did with Bill Clinton over Bosnia. Cameron is doing so not because he emulates Blair, but rather because it is the path almost any leader would take at this point in our history.

The global axis of world power is turning. Obama’s America is retreating from international leadership. China and Russia are resurgent and happy to prove it. Despite our diminished resources and influence, the best shot at seriousness any British leader can have is still to bestride the world stage.  And they can do so at a knock-down price.  Blair was delighted to discover that the UK still ‘punched above its weight’ and that he could behave like a world leader even while slowly decimating our armed forces. Cameron is cutting the military still further, yet seems just as eager to deploy forces soon to be smaller than at any time since the pre-Napoleonic era.

In his leading of the charge in Libya and now in Syria, Cameron is demonstrating a recognisable desire to do something with his office: to say that Britain is a force for good — a nation that likes to shape the world rather than be shaped by it.