United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, for the opportunity to reflect on the geopolitical changes that are sweeping our world and what we will face as we emerge, blinking, from our 40-year membership of the European Union into that world. I agree that there are more simultaneous crises going on now than I can remember through my career. It is striking that the Syria crisis must be the first in the Middle East since the Second World War where neither the US nor the UK has been playing a key and shaping role.

The underlying trend, which I think has already begun to come out in your Lordships’ debate, is the erosion of the international security structure that Britain was so instrumental in putting together in the late 1940s. That is partly because of the US retreat from leadership of global crisis management. It started before President Trump and has many reasons—some of them lie in that grinding and difficult 10 years of international conflict that the US and UK went through in the first decade of this century. Clearly, President Trump’s dislike of multinational organisations and his preference for transactional bilateral deals is exacerbating that trend, but there are other factors too, most obviously economic ones. There is the move of economic power towards Asia and the rise of countries with nationalist leaders impatient with the constraints of the post-war institutions who want to dominate in their region—countries such as Russia, China, Turkey and perhaps Saudi Arabia as well.

In parts of the world, I think we are returning to a period of spheres of influence, which is a very uncomfortable world for many countries. The question for us is what should Britain do in that context, as we leave the EU. For me, it means putting much more energy into an active, engaged, initiative-taking foreign policy. As one of a number of former heads of the Foreign Office here today, noble Lords would expect me to support the eloquent appeal of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for a properly resourced Foreign Office. If global Britain is going to mean anything and if bilateral relationships with our friends and allies will have to take greater weight after Brexit, we clearly need a Foreign Office with the resources to do the job. The current balance between the money spent on international development, defence, intelligence and foreign policy seems to me to be way out of kilter.

I have two thoughts. First, we must make the most of the multilateral organisations of which we will still be a leading member. I particularly think of NATO. It is very welcome that British troops are now deployed in eastern Europe in support of our Article 5 commitment to NATO. Britain should naturally be looking to play a leading role in NATO.

But I also want to draw attention to our strategic relationship with France on the day that President Macron is here for an important summit meeting. It is an opportunity to remind ourselves that Britain and France are natural allies. We are the two European nuclear weapon powers. We have the largest defence budgets in Europe and we have Armed Forces who are trained, equipped and experienced to go out and undertake real combat in the real world. We have the two most significant defence industries in Europe. It is vital that we now put new energy back into the Lancaster House process that I played a small part in launching in 2010, both to use the capacity that we built for the two Armed Forces to work together and to drive forward defence industrial co-operation, including the potentially very important unmanned combat air system of the future. It is also time that we revisited our consultations with the French on nuclear deterrence. The factors affecting nuclear deterrence in the world, not least the emergence of a potentially nuclear-armed North Korea, make it important that the two European nuclear powers should be giving leadership in NATO on nuclear deterrence as well.

In the circumstances described by the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, let us double down on our strategic relationship with France and let us also remember that our relationship with the United States, whatever the difficulties with the current President, remains absolutely essential in the fields of defence and intelligence, which I saw at first hand. They will continue. We need to show that we are relevant allies to the US, including in what is happening in Asia, but let us now invest seriously in our key strategic bilateral partnership.