Foreign Affairs

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, for some months now it has been evident that 2024 was going to be a nail-biting year for Governments worldwide and for foreign policy practitioners, not just because of the plethora of elections—some more properly democratic than others—but because so many of the fixed points of international relations are under siege. It is high time for this House to be debating the choices and the challenges, and a privilege to be doing so in the presence of the Foreign Secretary.

There are no prizes for starting with the recent statements and actions of the man who is, in near certainty, going to be contesting the US presidential election in November. Donald Trump’s incitement to Putin to attack NATO member states is not only a blow to NATO’s deterrent capacity but a breach of the UN charter, and it is damaging to America’s own interests. How much good did US isolationism in the 1930s do for its security? His torpedoing of a Bill in Congress that contained what he had been asking for on migration was shocking, reversing, as he has done, Louis XV’s dictum, “Après moi, le déluge”, which means “After me, the deluge”, into “Avant moi, le déluge”—“Ahead of me, the deluge”.

One conclusion can be drawn already: whether Biden or Trump is in the White House after November, we Europeans are going to need to do more in our own defence and to do more together, working in concert, than we have done hitherto, and we need to get started on that now, not later. We need too to tighten the noose of sanctions on Russia, working with the EU and the G7 to reduce third-country leakage.

Then there is the war in and around Gaza and more widely in parts of the Middle East. No one can have followed events since 7 October without feeling deep anguish—anguish for Israelis whose compatriots were killed in the terrorist attack and some of whom are still being held hostage, and anguish for the many thousands of Palestinian civilians who have subsequently lost their lives. But we really should stop tearing ourselves apart over whether we back an immediate or a sustainable ceasefire, neither of which we are in a position to deliver.

Instead, we should concentrate on how to prevent such appalling events happening again. In that context, I applaud the shift in policy over Palestinian statehood that was hinted at by the Foreign Secretary, and the move away from the long since bankrupt policy of offering statehood only at the end of a process over which Israel would have a veto at every stage. Would that be to offer Hamas victory? Certainly not, because Hamas does not even contemplate a two-state solution and because any such approach would necessarily involve all concerned—Israel’s Arab neighbours and Israel itself—recognising each other and committing themselves to respecting each other’s sovereignty.

The UN has taken some hard knocks in recent years, but now is not the moment for the UK, a founding member and a permanent member of its Security Council, to give up on it, to walk away washing its hands; nor would it be sensible to propose a process of fundamental reform in such unpropitious circumstances. It is better, surely, to focus on sectoral reforms and, in particular, ones that relate to the priority concerns of the countries of the global South, thus helping to bridge the gap that has opened up between them and the West. Such measures include: strengthening the World Health Organization, enabling it to deal more effectively and more equitably with the next pandemic when it comes along; bridging the gap between the warm words agreed at COP meetings and members’ actual performance on climate change, with additional resources for mitigating measures in heavily indebted developing countries; getting the sustainable development goals back on track; and restarting a dialogue on strategic stability between nuclear weapon states.

I conclude with a plea that we do not give in to counsels of despair or to siren songs to appease actions that we know are wrong and which we have all committed ourselves to resisting. Diplomats, to whose ranks I belonged, and democratic politicians are professional practitioners of the art of the possible. But that art has to be anchored in common interests and common values. So I would express the wish, and I will do so myself, that we dedicate our debate today to two outstanding men who gave their lives to making the world a better place: Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, who knew that Israel would never be secure or prosperous without a two-state solution, and Alexei Navalny, who championed a Russia with which we could have lived in peaceful coexistence, and whose parting advice to all of us was, “Do not give up”.