United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the chance to speak in this debate, in which I have the unusual pleasure of agreeing with every word said by the noble Lord, Lord Lamont of Lerwick.

I will make two quick points. First, this is a brilliantly timed debate, one year after the inauguration. I am less worried than I was then about the threat to NATO. The investigations into possible collusion and certain Russian involvement in the election campaign in America have neutralised what I saw as the biggest risk to NATO: candidate Trump’s openly avowed admiration for President Putin. If that is still in his head he cannot act on it, given the investigations taking place on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington, so I am slightly less worried about that.

One point that perhaps was not brought out in the debate, and about which I am more worried about than I was a year ago, is the threat to the rules-based trade system. The open insistence that the United States will no longer be bound by WTO rulings, and the attempt to subvert the WTO system from within by refusing to make appointments to panels—refusing to appoint judges in the WTO’s dispute settlement procedures—is an existential threat to a central element of a rules-based system that originated here in London. We invented the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The WTO was run for a very long time on British expertise. When we joined the European Union we imported the old Board of Trade expertise into it and we saw great commissioners such as Leon Brittan and Peter Sutherland. We should pay tribute to Peter Sutherland for all his work, not just in Brussels but also in Geneva, in all our interests.

It is very important if we are to leave the European Union that we remain in very close touch with it in support of the WTO system. To my mind, a sweetheart trade deal with the United States is a mirage. It clearly has an “America first” policy. We remember the inaugural speech. We must not let pursuit of close contacts with America, which are very important, blind us to the fact that the rules-based system is particularly important to an open trading country such as the United Kingdom.