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Britain is unwilling to resolutely stand up for its interests and those of our allies – and the West’s enemies know it
I stick by the old journalistic rule that “Half an hour spent with Who’s Who is never wasted”. It is a tremendous compendium of information about well-known people. Its entrants are allowed, within reason, to write their own entries. So the reader learns how they wish to present themselves.
For many years, Jeremy Corbyn’s Who’s Who entry has recorded his support for issues related to the Chagos Islands. It is one of a list of similar foreign causes which appeal to Mr Corbyn under his overarching principle that in any international dispute, the interests of Britain and America must always be opposed.
So it is surprising that one of Sir Keir Starmer’s early foreign policy acts is to announce that the islands no longer belong to Britain, but to Mauritius, and that, to further this, Britain will now give Mauritius “an indexed annual payment” and endow it with a trust fund. (Despite this, by the way, it is reported that many Chagossians themselves are displeased by Britain’s decision, since they see themselves as Chagossians, not Mauritians.)
The surprise comes because we thought Sir Keir had firmly set his face against the obsessions of Corbynism. A year ago next week, after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, he came out fast to back Israel’s right to self-defence, justifiably keen to squash Islamist/hard-Left libels about Israeli “genocide”.
At his party’s conference this year, he countered a heckler shouting about Gaza by saying, “This guy’s obviously got a pass to the 2019 conference” – the last one in which Mr Corbyn was Labour leader. Sir Keir is determined to put that time behind him.
So why, given that Britain has only so many foreign-policy shots to fire, do he and the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, don a Corbynista bandana and have a go at a tiny vestige of the British Empire? Isn’t this the sort of “performative ” stuff of which Sir Keir often complains?
After all, there is no shortage of serious foreign policy issues to address.
As in the 1930s, or the early days of the Cold War, we are living at a time when the state of the world should trouble us at home. The problem is the emergence of an axis of powers – call it an “axis of evil”, if you want; I would – who see their interests as directly in conflict with those of the West. China, Russia and Iran (not forgetting dear little North Korea) cooperate over weapons, missiles, cyber-security, propaganda, policy in international institutions such as the UN, much more. Mostly, they cooperate against us.
As well as cooperation, there is connectivity. Earlier this week, I interviewed the former US Secretary of State (and Director of the CIA), Mike Pompeo, at the think-tank Policy Exchange. Illustrating the Chinese threat, he asserted that “All of you sitting here have a Taiwanese component on your person.” If China invades Taiwan, he said, “In four weeks, the shelves in your shops will be empty.”
In the United States and Britain, Mr Pompeo added, China is running “the deepest influence operation in the history of civilisation”, vastly magnified from anything in the past by technology. It includes talking to our children (through Tik-Tok), seeking to affect election results, spying on US state governments, penetration of universities, stealing of intellectual property, spying on and policing Chinese students in the West and inserting surveillance into electric vehicles.
Given that these phenomena are now all about us, it is remarkable how little attention we still pay. When I first met Mr Pompeo, early in 2020, he was here to persuade Boris Johnson’s government to strip Huawei out of its supposedly secure systems. At the time, Boris insouciantly refused, but after a few weeks of Covid (with millions of deaths spread worldwide from China), changed his mind. Four years on, though, we are still half-asleep.
One Labour motive in giving up the Chagos Islands will be post-colonial guilt. Sir Keir and his ministers may see tiny far-flung British possessions as both shameful and pointless. But it is worth reflecting that the far-flung quality was always part of the intention: great empires depend on sea-lanes and on deep ports, on the right channels from one sea to another and on encircling the world.
As Britain has forgotten this, China has learnt it. When seeking to present its history as peaceful, China likes to emphasise how it never had a sea-borne empire. It certainly does now. Its Belt and Road Initiative is a global attempt at one. Britain may think it has little use for Mauritius and the Chagos Islands, but China well understands the point of outposts right across the oceans.
Besides, in this resource-hungry world (no nation hungrier than China), faraway places turn out to be important. Think of the Falkland Islands – another colony Britain tried to give away – now seeking to explore, against London’s crazed net zero wishes, their considerable oil-fields.
Inside the confusions of Western foreign policy lies a strange reluctance to focus. This is not a problem for our adversaries. It is, in some ultimate sense, mad for Putin to try to conquer Ukraine, for Iran to destroy Israel or for China to try to run the world; but in the shorter term, these aims are clear and lend purpose to everything else.
We in the West, despite our greater prosperity, technology and potential arsenals, seem weirdly reluctant to measure the realities of power. What good is it if our diplomats, rather than advancing British interests, seek to persuade an African country to improve LGBT rights or move faster to net zero? What, after all, are we offering them?
Why did we ever think that Iran would, in good faith, accept and implement a policy designed to contain its development of a nuclear weapon? Why do we support Israel or Ukraine, but then wring our hands when they, both fighting existential battles, want to do what they need to win?
Our hesitation rarely stops the violence. The reason there is currently a war in Europe on a scale not seen since 1945 is not because we waded in, but because we held back until Putin drew the wrong conclusions about our intentions.
The protracted and consequently bloodier fighting in Gaza has happened, in part, because the Americans, let alone Britain and the EU, keep quibbling and fussing about ceasefires. Our obsession is “proportionality”, but since Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have repeatedly sworn that the destruction of Israel is their purpose, how could half-measures against them be proportionate?
They must be rendered incapable of achieving what they most desire. The logical and deserved fate of a nation whose mission is to obliterate another one is to crush its capacity do so.
There are some indications that, behind the scenes, this is what the West, or at least the United States, now recognises. In the past three weeks, Israel has won, by its own feats, a freedom of action which its allies had been trying to deny it. What America says, especially in an election year, is not always the whole of what it means.
After Iran ineffectively fired almost 200 ballistic missiles on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu said it would pay. He did not say how, of course, but the fact that the US carrier strike group Harry S Truman is nearing position off the coast suggests that the thought is slowly dawning that Israel should be helped to finish the job. It would be nice if Sir Keir could do Britain’s little bit.