Foreign policy is the dog which has spectacularly failed to bark during this election campaign. Large parts of the world are being violently torn apart by totalitarian and revanchist political movements, yet you wouldn’t know it from listening to our political leaders. In Britain there appears to be an unspoken agreement among the parties that the electorate are just not that interested.
When foreign policy has been mentioned it has been cloaked in silly but clever-sounding triviality, as when Jeremy Paxman smugly predicted during the first television leaders’ debate that Russian leader Vladimir Putin would leave Ed Miliband “in pieces”. A similar but only slightly more sophisticated ‘argument’ was also made on Twitter soon after by business minister Nick Boles:
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