Everyone knows that new Labour foreign policy is supposed to have an ethical dimension, but ethical in pursuit of what? Slobodan Milosevic is bombed into submission; a few months later, the leader of the country that heads the global league for summary executions is received with the full pomp of a state visit. The government “deplores” mercenary activity. But it turned the blindest of eyes to Sandline in Sierra Leone. One of new Labour’s first acts in office was the ban on exporting landmines. The outbreak of scruples did not extend to the Hawk jets and military hardware showered on the generals of Indonesia with the aid of a generous loan.
For some time, the Prime Minister has been worried that new Labour has failed to outline a clear and reliable overall strategy in foreign affairs; that, faced with the complex and shifting state of the outside world, it has been in danger of losing the plot. But until now he has lacked a foreign policy guru who could match the advisers at his disposal in the other main areas of government activity.
Enter Robert Cooper at the Cabinet Office, as head of secretariat for foreign and defence affairs. Do not be fooled by the pompous title. Cooper is no Sir Humphrey, set to dispense silky “on the one hand, on the other” advice on faraway places. The former number two in the Bonn embassy and latterly head of the Asia-Pacific department at the Foreign Office is part of Tony Blair’s crusade to build the Cabinet Office into a de facto Prime Minister’s department. “He wants the standard of advice on strategy and implementation that the American president has at his fingertips in the White House,” says one insider. “He doesn’t feel that the existing structures supply it.”
For “existing structures” read the Foreign Office. Blair is too canny to engage in the kind of open warfare against this department that led Margaret Thatcher to refer to it as the Office for Foreigners, because she thought it too soft in defending British interests. That is not the PM’s style. He moves more stealthily and ruthlessly against groups of people within the government machine. They are not publicly attacked, just silently replaced. Cooper has shot straight to the heart of the charmed inner circle of prime ministerial advisers, replacing Michael Packenham, an old-school Foreign Office man.
Cooper, by contrast, is a diplomat with a twist: he has a faintly dishevelled air and a wardrobe that includes shocking-pink ties and outsize turquoise cuff links, a dramatic departure from the unwritten but strictly observed code of navy or grey suits. Educated in Nairobi, where his father was an engineer, he went on to read PPE at Worcester College, Oxford, and had a fast-track career at the Foreign Office. In Bonn he watched at close quarters as the new Germany began to come to terms with its post-unification role at the heart of Europe, and has written eloquently on the quest for a single set of European values. His tour of duty coincided with the Major government’s period of non-co-operation, an experience that sapped the faith of many younger diplomats in the Conservatives’ competence. Shortly after the election, he wrote a Demos pamphlet, The Post-Modern State and the World Order. This was a highly unusual step for a rising diplomat, given the parti pris nature of the project. The risk paid off. The pamphlet earned Cooper an invitation to Downing Street and Blair’s instant admiration.
His core argument is a modern reiteration of Gladstonian and Wilsonian (Woodrow, not Harold) doctrines of interventionism and moral responsibility. A passionate believer in European integration on all levels and something of a Nato-sceptic, he has, says one colleague, “a real gift for sketching the big picture without getting bogged down in detail”.
Blair has been hankering for such a figure. Alastair Campbell’s immoderate outburst against British diplomats as Eton-educated toffs reflected a deeper dissatisfaction in the Prime Minister’s circle. Earlier attempts to bolster the quality of advice involved doubling the numbers of officials: Packenham gained a deputy, so did John Sawyers, the respected resident private secretary in No 10 who, sensing Blair’s impatience with detail, has opted to concentrate on EU and Nato affairs, leaving his number two, Philip Barton, to mop up the rest of the world.
In times of crisis Blair has turned first to Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, who used to work at the Washington embassy (“your original Americanised leftie”, says one friend) and who now upholds the link with the Clinton White House. He played a major role in running the Kosovo engagement. But he has since been steeped in the Ulster peace process and recognised the need for another senior person to help Blair with that elusive big picture. Powell has worked with Cooper in the Foreign Office’s planning staff and their personal relations are good – both had Labour sympathies even in the darkest days. Cooper will provide the pro-European yin to Powell’s pro-American yang, a contest of ideas other insiders await with interest. Cooper could well emulate another Powell: Jonathan’s suave elder brother Charles, who became Margaret Thatcher’s supreme confidant, adviser and sounding board.
None of this can be particularly welcome news to Robin Cook, who has toiled so hard to reshape himself to exacting Blairite requirements. “If anyone has a reason to feel annoyed about Cooper’s job, it’s Robin,” one senior Foreign Office figure says. “What’s the point of being foreign secretary if someone else is giving the PM the lead on the major issues?” Indeed, Cook endeavoured early to appropriate the role of big-picture painter for himself. It was he who thrashed out, soon after the election, three guiding principles of new Labour foreign policy: the end to the Westphalian era of interstate relations (put less grandly, the principle of national sovereignty and freedom from external intervention); an enthusiastic, if vaguely defined, pro-Europeanism; and, equally vaguely, a “values-driven” diplomacy.
Blair has become less convinced that the Cook doctrine is a strong enough guideline in an unpredictable world. If intervention in Kosovo was worth the risk because it was a moral crusade, how come the same rules of conscience do not oblige us to send stealth bombers to Chechnya or whichever benighted territory is suffering oppression at any given time?
In his Chicago speech, delivered at the height of the Balkans intervention, Blair tried to provide an answer by arguing that in the new world order, the west has to be prepared to intervene, where it can, to prevent greater harm. But this formulation was not without ambiguities either. It gave ample ammunition to sceptics of new Labour’s interventionist urges, left and right. The readiness to intervene anywhere and everywhere was, they claimed, at best impractical, at worst a recipe for putting Britain on to a permanent war footing.
The least appealing outcome for Blair is being seen simply to tag along behind America, a popular charge against British foreign policy and one that finds its way into Simon Armitage’s millennial poem “Marking Time”:
A well-shod president walks to the camera to say why
we should put in the boot
And when that happens a well-dressed Prime Minister
usually follows suit.
Privately, Blair acknowledged that the Chicago presentation had flaws and that the logic of intervention needed to be tightened. While anxious to uphold the three principles, he had begun to worry that they were insufficiently defined. Kosovo had been an extremely isolating experience. He was deeply aware, as the conflict wore on, that the casualties and damage from the bombing were alienating opinion within the government’s inner circle. “At one point,” says a No 10 insider, “there was only Alastair Campbell who was really with him. Everyone else had terrible doubts. You could see people beginning to avoid his gaze.”
By this stage, Cooper was already contributing quietly to the Prime Minister’s pronouncements on Europe, itself a departure from the Foreign Office’s own Westphalian doctrine of non-intervention, namely that serving heads of a fiefdom – in his case Asia-Pacific – do not get involved in the affairs of other sections. He suggested that the shortcoming of the Chicago statement lay in its failure to link intervention strongly enough with a commitment to make post-cold-war Europe a community of liberal, humanitarian values.
By putting Europe at the heart of the argument about intervention, the government can counter accusations that its conscience is randomly motivated. This signifies an end to the legacy of the balance of power politics perfected by Bismarck and reinterpreted in the cold war by Henry Kissinger. Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham and a ministerial aide at the Foreign Office whose Europhile views are close to Cooper’s, summarises the shift in an essay on new Labour foreign policy for the Oxford International Review: “Lord Palmerston’s dictum that Britain has permanent interests but no permanent friends has been reversed. Britain’s interests evolve continuously and to accomplish them requires the building of a network of permanent allies.”
The weakness in this argument is its potential circularity: we classify as “Europe” those territories where we feel able to intervene without incurring too high a risk and we consign the others to outer darkness. Would the west come to the aid of Ukraine, Belarus or the Baltic States in the event of a threat from Russia? Bismarck might have been tempted to observe that a foreign policy which puts at its centre the right and duty to go to war in defence of values, but not against Russia, sounds pretty much like a recasting of the balance of power argument, not its refutation.
But the approach does have one substantial advantage for Blair: it provides a clear point of distinction with Conservative foreign policy since 1979. A continuing faith in balance-of-power politics has underpinned the right’s approaches to international relations and commitment to end Britain’s estrangement from the European mainstream. New Labour Europhiles maintain that 1997 represents a healing of a centuries-old breach. In fact, Britain’s relations with the European powers have followed a historic pattern of engagement and disengagement. The England and Scotland of Adam Smith and David Hume were an integral part of the Europe of the Enlightenment. Salisbury’s boast of Britain’s “splendid isolation” outside the triple alliance was short-lived. Whatever the dominant pattern of events on the European continent, Britain has been heavily involved in them. Contrary to the old joke, the Continent has only rarely and temporarily been cut off by fog.
Blair often emphasises the contrast between his own “constructive” approach to Europe and that of his Tory predecessors. But the wholeheartedly positive engagement in the EU that Cooper believes Britain should undertake makes it difficult to gain leverage. Those states that have done best out of the EU have often combined a generally positive outlook towards it with hard-headed negotiation in their national interest. The Spanish held out against enlargement until they secured a generous reduction in budget contributions. France, as the government has learnt to its humiliation in past weeks, tigerishly protects its own perceived national interest and independence while routinely demanding communautaire behaviour from others. Britain, meanwhile, invited a battle over the withholding tax by failing to make its solid opposition clear early on. The realities of our relations within the EU are likely to remain more erratic than Cooper’s smoothly integrationist vision allows.
Two outstanding and culpable oddities in Labour’s foreign policy should command the new guru’s attention. The handling of Jiang Zemin’s state visit – and its taking place at all – left an uneasy sense that new Labour policies lapse into the crudest realpolitik on contact with the Asian giant. The policy of engagement with China, based on hopes of future bounty for British business, has remained immune from a first principles debate. Indeed, it was this government that finally got round to recommending the reciprocal visit, the Conservatives having avoided hosting one for a decade. Cooper advised Blair that to delay any longer would be seen as a snub by the Chinese. In the old order of things that was a commanding logic. It sounds shabby and evasive from the lips of a new foreign policy elite claiming to put Britain’s international relations on a more morally responsive footing.
The other oddity is the government’s continuing commitment to the arms trade. We have some new rules on the sale of weaponry but, again, no commitment to review the whole ghastly business. If ever a royal commission were called for, this is the subject. As it is, we belatedly assist the East Timorese who have been intimidated by the very weaponry and aircraft sold to Jakarta with Whitehall’s approval. When it comes to the clash between the principles of liberal intervention and the UK’s role as a major arms trader, there is no Third Way. You can deal in death and terror, or you can plant your flag on the moral high ground. You cannot, in all conscience or credibility, do both.
The writer is associate editor of the “Independent”
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