by Tom Fletcher
† Because he needs to play, even if he is an adult.
17
A Progressive Foreign Policy ‘To Do’ List
Pile problem after problem onto mankind’s shoulders, and it is easy to feel we are tottering towards the precipice of an outsized, world-shaped, earth wreck.
Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (2008)
The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.
B. F. Skinner, American psychologist
So we’re not finished as a globe or species yet. But we can’t take it for granted.
Diplomats normally break the world down by geography. Of course the big conflicts conjoined by a slash will remain critical – North Korea/South Korea, Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan and the many other scraps for territory or dignity that fill the foreign affairs pages of the media. As I write, we face overlapping crises – Russia’s aggression in Eastern Europe, continued upheaval in the Middle East, tensions in East Asia. None are overwhelming in their own right, but taken together, they present a significant collective threat, a transition from order to disorder.
There will be a temptation to try to pull up the drawbridge, focusing purely on domestic security. We are seeing this in the return of nationalist parties such as UKIP, the Tea Party and the National Front. Yet in facing down the twenty-first century’s challenges, we will need more than ever to remain engaged with the rest of the world. This is no longer the zero-sum game of great power politics. We all lose if we only pursue national interests. There is no global challenge today to which the answer is to build a bigger wall.
Whether it is convenient or practical, the major global challenges all require global solutions. There are three questions that require the most urgent attention. When and how do we go to war? How do we fix the international system? And how do we make as many people as possible less poor while conserving the planet?1
Firstly, when and how is it right to fight?
The debate on military interventionism versus disengagement tends to focus on America. With good reason – it is still by some way the world’s superpower, even if that lead is being challenged. The irony is that the list of foreign policy challenges is growing at a time when the US is less ready to lead.
That debate has been sharpened by the Bush and Obama administrations; 52% of Americans now think that the US should ‘mind its own business internationally’, the highest total since the Second World War.2 The public is drained by interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, costly in both blood and treasure. Critics point to two decades of US-led adventures that have seemed to make the situation worse. President Obama has tended to agree, projecting a more minimalist military ambition than his predecessors. This is not just about resources or the complexity of the world out there, but national identity. Like other countries that have shouldered most of the international burden since the Second World War, America is feeling less certain that it has an obligation to act outside its borders.
But by seeking to draw back many of the harder power instruments which were overused – some argue abused – by President George W. Bush, the US has faced charges of weakness and neglect. By deliberately stepping back, and ‘leading from behind’, Obama has been accused of creating the sense of a leaderless world. I hear this all the time in the Middle East, where commentators can rarely decide whether all their problems are because of too much or too little US interventionism. Most of those calling the US weak over Syria would squawk if Obama decided that it was really time to flex some muscle.
Meanwhile, public inquiries into the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts rumble on, corroding confidence in the state and military. The media and politicians want scapegoats, someone to blame. But the link between cause and effect is never straightforward, the world is complex, and not every ideological or sectarian conflict in the world was created by the West, however convenient an explanation that can be. There won’t ever be a neat answer to the question ‘was military action right or wrong?’ Having sat through hundreds of Cabinet committees, the answer to Iraq and Afghanistan is not more of them. And in my experience, foreign policy mistakes tend to occur when there are too few cosy chats between a prime minister and his Foreign Secretary, not when there are too many.
As well as corroding public trust, Iraq has scarred a generation of political and official foreign policymakers, creating a more risk-averse policy environment. It is right when weighing difficult foreign policy choices to draw lessons from recent experience. But we cannot allow all choices to be governed by the lessons of the last wars alone. We also have to learn from the historical experience of all the other wars – not least the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 that ended the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Muslims by the Milosevic regime in Serbia; and the military action in Sierra Leone in 2000 that prevented the overthrow of the democratic government and undoubtedly saved many lives.
We need a genuine public debate about when to use force. Part of the challenge for interventionists is to redefine for whom they are intervening. People are becoming less willing to send other people overseas to defend the nation state, let alone other nations, and they are better able to express that. We have been willing for several centuries to die for the nation state. But that entity is now in decline, and so identities are blurring.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions showed that it was not enough to simply remove a despotic regime. There needed to be a much more sustained, comprehensive strategy to rebuild the political and economic fabric of the countries concerned. Policymakers need to show sceptical publics that they can also win the peace that follows any military action. Diplomats will need to make a better case, in their own societies, for enlightened self-interest, explaining how the fate of our countries is connected to that of the world beyond our borders. Countries need to train up an army of para-diplomats, expert in post-conflict reconstruction and state-building – not commentators but fixers.
We must also find a better way to protect the most vulnerable. Middle Eastern newspapers tend to be much less squeamish than Western media. Every morning, as I worked through the Arabic newspapers over breakfast, I was bombarded by graphic images of dead children. Whether they are bombed in Gaza, Aleppo or Mosul, they look the same – small, broken, undefended. If this was happening in the town next door, we would never tolerate it. Yet in Syria, an hour’s flight from Europe, almost half the population is displaced, and the casualties mount up. Despite the best efforts of so many to halt the conflict, it is as if the world has decided that the best approach is to try to quarantine it. If displaced people had a country, it would be the twenty-fourth largest in the world.
The UN’s Responsibility to Protect (R2P) obligation was originally a response to Kofi Annan’s idea that if a state is unwilling or unable to avert serious suffering of its civilians, the international community should intervene.3 Supporters argue that we have a moral duty based on common identity; practical necessity; and the need to uphold international rules. The moral argument underpins the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, hammered out by the visionaries of 1948 as they surveyed a continent devastated by war. An individual’s basic rights should not be defined by where they are born. The practical argument often comes down to how we deal with those who threaten international security: ‘we need to fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here’. You can’t quarantine failed states. Not to enforce rights in every country undermines them in every country.
The opponents of R2P argue against the financial and human cost of intervention. Every military intervention takes longer and costs more than predicted. Can we afford the burden of policing the world? Any intervention has unforeseen and unwelcome consequences, for which the intervening power then takes the blame and responsibility. This underlies the mantra of some in the Obama White House – ‘don’t do stupid shit’, or the pre-watershed version, ‘do no harm’. Sir John Holmes, a former British ambassador to Paris, fears that ‘we have too
often in recent years intervened in haste and repented at leisure’.4
Anti-interventionists also argue that the international system rarely delivers a clear endorsement for action. The UN Security Council permanent members wield their vetoes to protect their clients. Russia and China de-fanged the commitment to protecting the most vulnerable. And the US has also wielded its Security Council veto to protect its allies, most frequently Israel, from international law.
Facing a century of nasty wars, we should revisit the idea of a global agreement on the principles of humanitarian intervention. We can no longer rely on the Security Council to act as a neutral arbiter in shaping our approach. To insist on Security Council unanimity before any humanitarian intervention leaves a veto in the hands of authoritarian governments. In the case of Syria, it subcontracted our conscience and our foreign policy to Russia. The emerging economies must also be part of this debate – they will need to share much more of the burden.
The experience of the last two decades points the way to some guiding principles around doctrine, decisions and delivery of interventions.
On doctrine, we have what Joseph Nye calls ‘Duties Beyond Borders’, just as we have duties beyond the end of our garden fence. We can’t intervene everywhere, all of the time. So when we do, we need to be able to show that we have picked the right fight, and that war is really the last resort. If unanimous Security Council agreement is impossible, we should act with coalitions of the willing such as the EU or NATO. Nothing gives us the right to defend a liberal world order beyond our confidence that the alternatives are worse.
On decisions, every intervention is different. We should not intervene in Iraq just because we intervened in Kosovo. We should not stay out of Syria just because we went into Iraq. So leaders should ask their experts, what is the worst-case scenario as a result of this intervention? How many civilians will die if we act, and how many if we do not act? What, to quote the much maligned Donald Rumsfeld, are the ‘known unknowns’, and what do we guess are the ‘unknown unknowns’? Interventions should be based upon the consent, and ideally participation, of the widest possible coalition of countries. But we cannot always go at the pace of the slowest. Sometimes we will need to uphold basic humanitarian principles without clear international consent.
On delivery, interventions are not only military. They have to include the full toolkit of conflict prevention, political and humanitarian measures. Any military intervention not accompanied by a major economic and political engagement is doomed to fail – not necessarily to fail to win militarily, but certainly to fail to make the situation better. As Kofi Annan wrote in September 1999, ‘When fighting stops, the international commitment to peace must be as strong as was the commitment to war.’5 This is hard to do when public, media and political attention moves on – capacity-building projects such as Civil Service reform are less photogenic than aircraft carriers.
Once committed to an intervention, we should do it properly. But we should also always ensure that the action is proportionate. An intervention is a failure if it kills more than the action it was designed to prevent. You have to resource it. You need a credible defence and foreign affairs budget, and willingness to make tough choices about what you drop in order to deliver it. You can’t be Palmerston if you don’t have the gunboats.
It will never be neat and tidy. No plan survives contact with the enemy. War is foggy. There are not always good guys and bad guys (though some sides are less bad than others). Even to consider intervention is to recognise that the options are all bad.
Amid the worst conflicts it is always possible to find the most inspirational responses. In Lebanon, I often spent time with Syrian and Palestinian refugees, and those who are hosting them with such generosity. One told me the story of a boy picking up shellfish on the beach, and carrying them back to the sea. An adult passes by and asks why he is doing it. How can it matter when there are so many millions of shellfish washed up? The boy replies that, to the shellfish in his hand, it matters.
We will still be shocked and horrified by photos of dead children. We will see more of them as digital cameras and connectivity spread. We are not always going to be able to protect all of them. But we can do much better.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is mankind’s greatest text, the most powerful and revolutionary document of all time. The problem is not that we don’t understand our duty to our fellow citizens, but that we don’t have the will to deliver it.
As well as when we can fight, we need a clearer sense of how we should fight.
Drones make warfare easier and cleaner, and reduce the public’s ability to constrain governments. They are popular at home while governments are using them against their enemies. They will be less popular when those enemies turn them on us. Psychologists have assessed that military personnel operating drones are as likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder as those firing conventional weapons from nearer their targets.
The rules for cyber warfare and the use of drones are dangerously opaque, creating a free-for-all. We have developed strong international systems on nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, cluster bombs and the arms trade, but as yet we have nothing to manage this new area of rapid growth. As in the past, this risks remaining the case while a few countries have the technological advantage, and therefore lack the incentive to agree restraints. But that will not be the reality for long. These new weapons won’t fit into existing international legal systems. They will have to redefine them.
The second great challenge for the global community is how do we build international institutions that are fit for purpose.
We have devised systems of national government that are dynamic and evolving. We must never assume a static international architecture. As Henry Kissinger puts it, ‘intellectuals analyse the operations of international systems; statesmen build them’.6
Yet the last serious attempt to agree rules for international governance was after the Second World War, with the creation of the United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions. Those bodies, now almost seventy years old, are full of hard-working, usually well-meaning professionals, but in an age requiring global solutions to global problems, they are no longer fit for purpose. Fixing them will take serious creativity, determination and patience. Austerity has a tendency to make countries look inward, yet historical precedent suggests that times of political and economic challenge are those when it is most important to look outward.
The UN is much maligned, though Chris Patten rightly asks how things would have been without it.7 It was set up as the answer to a different set of problems. And the reality is that there is no forcing moment where pressure for change or reform comes to a head, where the national politics are aligned in the right way. Most international institutions are going through cumbersome and slow reform processes, but none are likely to conclude that their time is up. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas, and bureaucracies do not volunteer for the axe.
As a result, cumbersome regional blocks such as the Arab League, African Union or European Union have spread like treacle over a keyboard, their bureaucratic inertia gumming up the management of international relations. Transnational challenges such as jihadism or epidemics such as Ebola are therefore harder to respond to. It is recklessly irresponsible of us to subcontract global problems on this scale to institutions that can’t manage them.
We may feel less able, culturally and politically, to remodel this architecture. We don’t have the patience or time to build systems, at a time when the fun is in breaking them up.
Any discussion of reform of the international architecture has to begin with a debate over where we need to pool sovereignty in order to respond more effectively to the threats facing us. Fighting infectious disease; migration; the health of the global economy; climate change; terrorism – these are all issues that cannot be tackled within national borders alone.
The effort towards reshaping the international architecture was shot in the paddock by the worl
d economic crisis of 2008–9 as many countries inevitably turned inwards. We now need to take up this challenge again. We will have to ensure that these institutions, or whatever replaces them, are more representative. They must involve a louder voice for the emerging powers. But we also need to escape from global governance as being the equivalent of an annual promotion or relegation battle from a sports league, where the strongest nations of the day try to lock in that position, as we did in 1815 and 1945. More importantly now, these institutions need to be representative of wider society, not nation states alone. We have to find ways to enfranchise more of the world’s population.
There also needs to be a much harder-headed debate on national responsibilities. Emerging economies can’t use an excuse for massive carbon emissions that it is ‘their turn’ to burn fossil fuel. China is going to need to have its own debate about when it is right to intervene militarily in other countries – it has not been shy of doing so economically. It is not in the long-term interest of rising powers to have killed off the early Doha trade rounds and the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations. Meanwhile, big weapons exporters such as the US have to accept that their role is not to deliver the right to bear arms on a global scale. At some point Russia has to rediscover its obligations as a permanent member of the Security Council, not the rebel at the back of the class. And both Russia and the US have to see that their UN veto is not just for protecting their client states.
An urgent task for governments and their diplomats, therefore, is to take a step back from the competing national agendas, shortening political and media attention spans and immediate day-to-day challenges, and to redesign, refocus and reboot the international system. In the absence of such a debate, and such leadership, we will find that the institutions we have created to deliver a measure of humanity’s collective governance cease to retain any influence or relevance, leaving a dangerous vacuum.