Little Britain

The foreign news pages read increasingly like some terrible satire on western military decline. Two years ago French and British forces, with the help of the US Navy, managed to help Libyan rebels topple Colonel Gaddafi. This year, the French needed British support to go to war against some tribesmen in Mali. It was a successful operation, but the ‘Timbuktu Freed’ headline rather summed up the extent of European military power today. The French have only two drone aircraft (the Americans have hundreds) and had to drop concrete bombs on Tripoli when they ran low on real ones.

As the foreign policy rhetoric of our media and political leadership grows, the contrast with the resources grows starker. The British government has almost no one with military experience (although George Osborne spent part of his gap year in the now-liberated Sahara). We remain quite good at making grandiose declarations of our willingness to confront evil and make the world a better place. But political leaders are increasingly unwilling to admit a straightforward fact: the most vital foreign challenges of our era are now beyond them. A few tiddlers may be within reach — handy to polish our self-image back home — but nothing of major strategic significance.

The job of stopping Islamist groups in rogue or failed states is a necessary security goal — just as preventing tyrants such as Col Gaddafi from turning their guns on their own populations is a worthwhile humanitarian one. David Cameron’s sentiments are admirable, and he is right to talk about a ‘generational struggle’ against political Islam. But if we think the game of low-level Whac-A-Mole is a way of winning this battle, we are kidding ourselves.