Blair's "Ethical" Policy.

• Author: Harris, Robin
• Position: Tony Blair

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair and his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, were all the quicker to congratulate George W. Bush on confirmation of his election because they knew that they had a good deal of ground to make up. For months Labour Parry figures had scarcely concealed their scorn for the Republican presidential candidate. Blair's eminence grise, Peter Mandelson, then Northern Ireland secretary, was even indiscrete enough to tell journalists his opinions of Bush and his policies at a drinks party before Christmas, and then had to issue a public retraction.

If the problem were simply the result of New Labour nostalgia for the cozy relationship built up with the Clinton administration, it would have little long-term significance. But its roots go much deeper than that and lie not in personalities but in policies, indeed in conceptions of the very purpose of Western foreign and security policy. Even on the occasion of Messrs. Blair's and Cook's formal felicitations, their words, consciously or not, contained more than a hint of trouble to come. "President-elect Bush", said Blair, "is a man who shares our values [and] wants Europe and America to stand side by side." Still more significant, Cook looked forward to working with the new President and to "keeping Britain as that unique bridge between America and Europe" [emphasis added].

Policymakers in Washington ought to study and reflect on these apparently anodyne phrases and the attitudes that lie behind them. They need to ask themselves whether America really wants Europe to stand at its side rather than to stand behind its leadership. And they should consider and then articulate whether they expect Britain to be a "bridge" ("unique" or otherwise), or whether they prefer the traditional British role of highly effective and strongly committed ally. These questions, which the Clinton administration was happy to fudge, and the Blair government even more so, will sooner rather than later have to be resolved.

Pivots and Policies

TONY BLAIR has a sense of the historic, if not exactly of history. He wants, as his friend Bill Clinton ever more desperately wanted, to be seen by posterity as having shaped events and bestrode them. In a November 1999 speech at the Lord Mayor of London's banquet, the traditional annual occasion for a British prime minister to review foreign policy, Blair thus expansively reflected upon the legacy of empire. Successive generations of British politicians from Churchill to Thatcher had, he said, tried and failed to find for Britain a satisfactory post-imperial role. He continued:

However, I believe that search can now end. We have got over our Imperial past, and the withdrawal symptoms. No longer do we want to be taken seriously just for our history, but for what we are and what we will become. We have a new role.... It is to use the strengths of our history to build our future not as a superpower but as a pivotal power, as a power that is at the crux of the alliances and international politics which shape the world and its future.

This was vintage Blair. The passage has a self-confident, even visionary assertiveness that smacks of Margaret Thatcher. At the same time, it reassures the liberal media with its appeal to modernity and internationalism. And, equally typical, it contains at its core an embarrassing intellectual vacuum.

"Pivots" are, of course, in fashion. Paul Kennedy, for example, has argued that a "pivotal states strategy" should be at the heart of a realistic American approach to foreign and security policy. [1] But Kennedy's category of pivotal states was not one within which any British prime minister would greatly wish to see his country slotted. Such states are "pivotal" precisely because--like Mexico, Algeria or Egypt--they face a precarious future, and because that future matters to the West as a whole. Clearly, Blair was not talking about that kind of pivot.

In truth, it is difficult to envisage why any state or any individual would voluntarily act as a pivot. Pivots have no life of their own. They are necessarily rigid and static. Their value is simply as a means of permitting movement by others.

This objection is not just pedantry. Such metaphors drawn from engineering for use in political discourse--like engines, power houses, gear changes--always belie a confusion of ends with means. Blair sees that Britain is a nuclear-armed state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, that it has close relations with America, that it is a leading power in Europe, that it has links with Africa and Asia through the Commonwealth, and that it enjoys the advantage of English being the language of international business. But he confuses the possession of these undoubted geopolitical strengths with possession of a policy to apply them. Does Britain, in fact, currently have such a policy?

Out of Africa

ODDLY enough, the beginnings of the answer may be found in a downtrodden, poverty-stricken, blood-drenched corner of West Africa. Blair may pride himself on exorcising the demons of empire, but his government's approach to Sierra Leone strongly suggests the opposite.

Take up the White Man's burden--

The savage wars of peace--

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hope to nought.

Kipling's lament is particularly appropriate to Sierra Leone. The settlement of Freetown was created by the British in 1787 for slaves repatriated from Britain and the United States, and for others liberated from the slave ships. It grew over time into a small, prosperous and well-educated colony. But since independence in 1961 it has slipped from dictatorship to kleptocracy and from kleptocracy to anarchy. It is as pointless to apply Western-style labels to the individuals and factions concerned as it was to those in the old Soviet Union--which, however, has not prevented the British Foreign Office from doing so.

In truth, the one common factor in the tangled events of Sierra Leone's recent history is that British politicians and diplomats have managed to be wrong at every stage. The political struggles in Sierra Leone and in neighboring Liberia are mainly about control of the diamond business. Belatedly realizing this, Britain has persuaded the UN to take measures to outlaw "conflict diamonds." But, of course, the mere act of outlawing something, without any prospect of enforcement, will not work in Sierra Leone any more than it has in Angola, where civil strife rages unabated. Greed always finds a way.

And the story of Sierra Leone is one of greed on an epic scale. In 1991 Foday Sankoh, a former army corporal, teamed up with Charles Taylor, then a militia leader and now Liberia's president, to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone and seize the diamond mines. But before they could finish the job, a military coup brought a baby-faced young captain, Valentine Strasser, to power. Strasser was initially much feted by the West as a "reformer"--until he damaged his international reputation by having twenty-six of his opponents taken out to the beach at Freetown and summarily executed. Britain suspended aid, but later provided Strasser with a refuge when he was ousted in 1996: he is now drawing social security benefits and living in a modest house in north London.

Amid much international rejoicing, democracy was re-introduced. Elections brought to power President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. But it was South African mercenaries who kept him there. Unfortunately, white mercenaries--the traditional prop for black African governments--are frowned upon in the global village. So the mercenaries were sent home and the government promptly fell, overturned in another military coup.

At this point, the Labour government took office in Britain and Robin Cook entered the imposing portals of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Cook resolved to flex his muscles. He decided that "democracy" must be "restored" in Sierra Leone. But how? The foreign secretary's first error was to will the ends without being realistic about the means. While pretending that Britain was adhering to an internationally agreed arms embargo, the Foreign Office secretly supported a mercenary effort to overthrow the military regime. That regime was indeed ousted in February 1998. Nigerian troops were sent in, but Freetown was extensively looted in the fighting.

The leader of the rebels, Sankoh, was now captured by the Nigerians. He had one of the worst...