Cameron's foreign policy - a loss of influence?

[Thanas]

The Guardian

Coalition Britain: how has David Cameron affected the UK's reputation?

At the end of January 2013, David Cameron paid a surprise visit to Tripoli and was greeted as a liberating hero. British warplanes had been instrumental in bringing down Muammar Gaddafi, and the streets resounded to the startling mix of bagpipes and the chant “Allahu Akbar” – “God is greatest”.

It seemed at the time to be the high point of the coalition government’s foreign policy. In close partnership with France, the UK had led an intervention that most probably prevented a slaughter in the opposition stronghold of Benghazi and helped propel forward the Arab spring, ridding north Africa of one of its more enduring tyrants.

Just over two years on, Libya is engulfed by violent chaos, and in hindsight Cameron’s visit smacks more of hubris than triumph. “We will stand with you every step of the way,” he promised the Libyans, but Britain has been powerless to stop their descent into horror.

As the UK election looms, it is not just the Libyan adventure that is coming under scrutiny. The government’s entire foreign policy is being attacked from all sides, with accusations it has allowed Britain to drift towards irrelevance on the world stage.

Few independent foreign policy analysts dispute that the UK cuts a less influential figure in geopolitics these days, but there is debate about who is to blame. The world has become a bleaker and more complicated place with the degradation of the Arab spring into military dictatorship in Egypt and the spread of Islamic State barbarism and anarchy.

At the same time the Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea has brought a decisive end to any lingering hopes that the post-cold war thaw would last.

On the other hand, some of the damage to national clout has undoubtedly been self-inflicted, in the form of cuts to UK defence and diplomacy. The 2010 Strategic Defence Review cut 42,000 armed forces and Ministry of Defence jobs, and axed such famous British names as the Harrier jump jets, Nimrod surveillance planes and the Ark Royal aircraft carrier, leaving Britain carrier-less for another five years, and perhaps longer before it has its own planes to fly off it. The HMS Queen Elizabeth may even start its life at sea as a platform for US jets.

The critics say the erosion of status is more than financial. The coalition’s agonising ambivalence over EU membership and the promise to have a referendum on the issue in 2017 have cast a pall of uncertainty over the UK’s future. Combined with the still festering issue of Scottish independence, left unresolved by last year’s referendum, it amounts to a full-blown identity crisis, the sceptics argue.

Labour is making the claim of “foreign policy drift” an election issue.

“Sadly under David Cameron, we have witnessed the greatest loss of influence for the United Kingdom in European and international affairs in a generation,” said Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary. “Given the ever greater drift to Euroscepticism in the Conservative party, the country has lost influence not only in Brussels but also in Beijing, Moscow and Washington.”

However, Labour has to tread carefully when accusing the government of a lack of ambition, lest it sounds like wistfulness for the days of Tony Blair and revives memories of the Iraq war.

Conservatives say that under William Hague and then Philip Hammond as foreign secretaries, Britain has diversified the range of countries with which it engages. Under this government, they argue, the world’s emerging powers are treated seriously, the Gulf Arabs are no longer disdained and Latin America is no longer ignored. They point to last week’s state visit by the Mexican president as evidence of engagement, even if it generated controversy over his human rights record.

“We are still held in pretty high regard globally. People come around the world to lobby us,” said Sir Richard Ottaway, the Tory chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee. “If you go to the United Nations, the British representative is one of the most sought-after people there. I don’t see ambassadors walking away from us.”

Analysts point out that the government has also made friends in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world by defying many expectations and sticking to the UK’s pledge to give 0.7 % of GDP in foreign aid. Furthermore, Hague made the protection of human rights, and in particular the fight against sexual violence against women in conflict, a defining part of the UK’s global role.

“Our foreign policy should always have consistent support for human rights and poverty reduction at its irreducible core, and we should always strive to act with moral authority, recognising that once that is damaged it is hard to restore,” he said in his major policy speech, in July 2010.

It was in part a backhanded allusion to the Iraq debacle. Yet at the same time, Hague and Cameron insisted they would not be content with a reduced role for Britain post-Iraq, as just another north-west European country striving to do good works in the world. Under their watch, it would remain a major world power with a distinct role befitting one of the five permanent members of the UN security council.

The Libyan campaign was supposed to demonstrate that the UK was ready and able to take decisive military action for humanitarian goals. And it could do so, not as a very junior partner to the US, but as a joint leader with France.

However, the realities of war quickly exposed the fact that the UK’s means did not match its government’s ambitions. Ivo Daalder, the US ambassador to Nato at the time, recalled: “Although the UK acted in Libya as a major player, it clearly found it difficult. It was short of command and control capacity, ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] capacity, targeting and refuelling. It needed Nato, in effect the United States, to launch the campaign.”

Critics of the intervention also accuse Cameron of failing to keep his word to “stand with” the Libyans after Gaddafi’s fall. A Labour peer and former special adviser to the UN secretary general on the Middle East, Michael Williams, said: “It was clear they had not given five minutes thought to what would come after [the air campaign]. At least they could have helped plan a peacekeeping mission, but they simply walked away.”

The next attempt to wield British hard power abroad, just a few months later, failed even to launch after the government lost a Commons vote to support air strikes against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus, despite Cameron’s assurances to Barack Obama that Britain would participate alongside the US. As a result, Obama put off taking military action.

The experience had a lasting impact on American perceptions of Britain as an ally, according to Daalder.

“With the fiasco over Syria, things went south,” said Daalder, now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Cameron made the calculation that he had the support, and it was a disaster. Obama had counted on his support and it caused trouble for him in Washington.”

When the Russian intervention in Ukraine revived the east-west divide in Europe, there were many procedural reasons why Cameron was not at the negotiating table in Minsk, seeking a diplomatic solution with Putin alongside François Hollande and Angela Merkel.

Britain had not been part of the original Normandy process in which Germany and France had become mediators with Russia, and British diplomats argued that it was an efficient division of labour for the UK to help Washington push for sanctions on Moscow.

“Britain has to be intelligent and selective,” said Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. “The fact that Britain is not taking a lead on Russia is not a bad thing. A German lead makes the European response as powerful as it can be.”

However, what the government’s critics on both sides of the Atlantic saw in Minsk was an empty chair where the UK should have been. They depict it as yet another symptom of the government’s alienation from the heart of Europe.

“The general conclusion is that when Washington comes to thinking of who do we need to deal with in Europe, it looks to Berlin, not to London,” Daalder said.

“Of the P5 [permanent five] members, we look more and more the weakest,” Williams said. “We look the one who is least sure of our position, the least sure of who we are.”

[Dartzap]

Bugger his reputation abroad, his one at home isnt worth much either, and thats what will be important come the election. Everyone thinks we're a laughing stock as it is, might as well act the part. eh?