Foreign Policy

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, one of the great strengths of your Lordships’ House is its capacity to look strategically at issues as well as point up particular matters. Today’s debate provides an opportunity to do that. As noble Lords have said, it is particularly timely in view of the development—perhaps even change of strategy—announced by the Foreign Secretary earlier today. I welcome a degree of change of strategy because there have been some very serious mistakes in our approach to foreign policy over the past 10 and more years.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, gave a very thoughtful description of what foreign policy should really be about. I suggest, more mischievously, that foreign affairs are about special relationships abroad. The special relationship with the United States has been mentioned. There is no reason why it should be the—I emphasise “the”—special relationship, but that does not mean it cannot be a special relationship. We have many important and special relationships that we need to work at and continue to cultivate. Our special relationship does not mean that we will always agree with the United States’s approach to foreign policy; some of our other special relationships can be helpful in that regard. My view was always that if we needed to engage in Afghanistan militarily we should go straight in, do something substantial, then get out and not try to create a democracy in a country which was never a democracy in the first place and will not be after we leave it. What we did not do was use the special relationship with India to inform the engagement with Afghanistan. There was no serious consultation with India on the part of ourselves or the United States before the invasion of Afghanistan. That was a very foolish mistake. We should now be using our special relationship with India to enable Britain and the United States to move towards getting ourselves out of a problem because it is not a question of victory in Afghanistan but of finding a way of withdrawing without it appearing to be a humiliating defeat. That is the reality of the position that we are in.

Our special relationship with the United States does not depend solely on our relationships within the European Union. Our history and experience in those areas and our other special relationships are important as well as our relationships within the European Union. However, we must also recognise that we may differ from our European colleagues. I give an example. It seems to me that the position we have taken vis-à-vis our relationship with Turkey is right and that Turkey should be able to move to be part of the European Union and should be a much more valued member of the international community. However, not all our colleagues in the European Union see it that way. I think that they are making a very serious strategic mistake from the point of view of Europe and, indeed, of the West.

I also emphasise the point that my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby made about the Turkish and Brazilian initiative on enrichment of nuclear material by Iran. It seems to me that this was a constructive approach and that it was extremely foolish of us to dismiss and disregard it, not just in terms of what that means for dealing with Iran but for our relationship with Turkey. We do not have to agree all the time with those with whom we have a special relationship, nor do we need to regard all our relationships within the European Union as being the same. Our special relationship with France goes back long before our special relationship with the United States, and so it should. We should continue to develop it, perhaps sometimes following the example of the French. They saw no reason to withdraw their interest in the Francophonie simply because they were involved in the European Union. I believe that it was a serious strategic mistake for the previous Government to downgrade their interest in the Commonwealth simply because they wanted to emphasise the importance of the relationship with the European Union. I hope that we will review the way we engage with India, Canada, Australia and, indeed, some African countries and Caribbean states—I take some encouragement in that regard from the Foreign Secretary’s statement—because those relationships are extremely important.

The relationship with France has been mentioned. We have important bilateral relationships on military and other matters that simply will not be possible with some other states in the European Union. As we approach this whole range of special relations I am conscious not just of the strength of your Lordships’ House in its consideration of these matters—the breadth of its purview, the length of its memory, the depth of its understanding—but of some of its weaknesses. One weakness is that many of your Lordships are looking back at their experience of how things were in a world that has to some extent changed. It has changed in terms of the reasons for the European Union and the history of our relationship with the United States. It is important that the term “agility” used by the Foreign Secretary is understood to mean fleet-footedness as the situation changes.

It has been said from time to time that much of our foreign policy in recent years has been about the management of decline. That is fine if you are of a generation that remembers when things were up for the United Kingdom; but for my generation that was ancient history by the time I came into this world. I want the possibility of this generation and the next being proud of a country which can actually achieve important and serious things. I should like to take as the slogan for our foreign policy not the management of decline, understandable as that would be for a previous generation, but the slogan that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, has given for the next generation, which is to be in the vanguard rather than the slipstream in our approach to foreign policy.