United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, for promoting this Motion and debate. I do not disagree with some of his concerns; in fact, I agree with some but certainly not all of them. I disagree particularly with the weight that he places on 20th-century blocs and alliances in this completely different age. That is charmingly out of date and old-fashioned but I understand it.

Whenever we discuss the special relationship and relations with the United States, we tend to hear two mantras constantly repeated. The first is that America remains the superpower leader of the free world, and the second is that the US President, Donald Trump, is the most powerful man in the world. I question both those statements in modern conditions. I dispute the first proposition because, although America is a great nation, a good friend and ally and the world’s most powerful economy by far, it has painfully discovered that it can no longer get its way in the reordering of the world. Indeed, that is confirmed by the recent studies by the Pentagon authorities, who fully recognise that America’s role has changed and that it is in a new era of what the authors call America’s “post-primacy”. In a world of networks, the whole concept of a superpower dominating the world has to be radically revised. I doubt the second proposition about Donald Trump because, as we now clearly see, his powers are limited both by internal US constitutional restraints and by forces larger than the USA itself, or, indeed, any one country, and much more complex. America clearly no longer gets its way merely by virtue of its colossal defence spending, and in these conditions there is no decisive victory to be secured, no real army to be defeated—the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, is right about that—and no definite end to a conflict. The battle ceases to be primarily on the battlefield; it becomes a matter of narrative and persuasion, of winning the story as well as of outright military operations.

That raises two issues. First, technology has greatly empowered the Davids against the Goliaths. Lethal weaponry can now be procured with ease and at low cost, which can put power into the hands of the smallest and often most invisible group or operating military cell or tribe. American foreign policy experts have just not fully understood that size no longer wins in the network world. Secondly, it needs to be the right kind of defence spending that actually wins friends and defends, by securing peace and stability rather than just by making enemies. What the Army calls non-kinetic means of winning become the most vital aspects of national defences. The basic point is that sheer overwhelming force is no longer the decisive factor, as vividly demonstrated, as we all know, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and possibly over North Korea. America can no more “win” on its own, despite its colossal arsenal, than we can.

As for Donald Trump, while I make no excuses for his very uncouth undiplomatic language, there are two reasons not to write off his presidency so soon. His bark is plainly much worse than his bite. The first reason is that within the American domestic context he is finding it very hard to get his way. On issue after issue he has been defeated. But secondly, and more important from our position in the UK, it is obvious that on the international stage his scope and space are highly limited, partly for the reasons already mentioned and partly because there are now global forces at work which are much larger and much more powerful than even the great USA itself. By “larger forces” I mean the rising power of Asia—China in particular, but not just China—which now produces the bulk of the world’s GNP outside the OECD. I mean the remorseless growth of new networks cutting across the old rules of sovereign states and severely limiting, indeed cancelling out, the role of the superpowers of the last century, whether we are referring to China or the United States, ensuring that the rhetoric of “America first” simply does not work in practice. It is not quite a post-western or a post-Atlantic world, but it is one in which power is shared with the Indian Ocean and the Pacific arenas.

These dramatically changed circumstances colour our relationship with the United States in entirely new ways. It is still special, in that we share many common values and have obvious affinities based on history and culture, but it is quite different from the relationships of the past. America is our partner in the new age, but not our boss. We do not need to be—in fact, must not become—its obedient poodle, let alone its gun dog. The phrase “solid not slavish” was used by my noble friend Lord Hague when he summed it up a while ago, and it remains an entirely apposite and concise description of what the relationship should be. The network is a great equaliser of nations and people, and it is healthy to escape from our overdependency on America. To put the matter colloquially, in the age of hyperconnectivity and soft power, we have other fish to fry.