United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, it is very difficult to say something positive about President Donald Trump. I am going to stretch the patience and maybe the credulity of the House and try to do so. As he has rampaged across the world, he has done something valuable, even if he has done it unconsciously. With his attacks on the American press, he has alerted all of us to the value and importance in our society of a free and vibrant media. With his partisan attacks on “so-called” judges, he has underlined across the world that free societies are based on the rule of law. When he equates neo-Nazis with anti-Nazi demonstrators, he has highlighted to the rest of us that racialism and anti-Semitism are a cancer in a civilised society. When he attacks allies for being dependencies and questions the value of NATO, he stirs the memory of how NATO saved our continent from Stalin and ended the violence in the Balkans. When he sneers about fake news, he reminds decent people that there is only the truth and not what he calls “alternative facts”. And when he attacks diplomacy, internationalism and co-operation between nations, and he slashes the budget and personnel of America’s Foreign Service and the UN, we in contrast can see that this complex, dangerous and interdependent world needs diplomacy.

He may not realise it and he may never have intended it, but Donald Trump may yet have revived and reinforced among thinking people globally that there is a better alternative to the shouty, incoherent ravings of a very temporary American President. In doing so, he will have done us all a service.

Beyond President Trump, in this country we need to face up to a very uncertain future. The Defence Secretary on Monday in the Commons outlined the grave threats that we face, when he said there were “four principal threats” to our country and the fourth one is,

“the erosion of the rules-based international order”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/1/18; col. 611.]

I believe what he said; I agree with him. You might normally expect me to now advocate an increase in our defence budget, and I do, but I also want to make the case for diplomacy and an end to the vandalism of our national interest that is represented by the degrading of the Foreign Office and its budget. Our military is after all the last line of our nation’s defence, not the first. The military is there to reinforce and stiffen diplomacy and then robustly to act when diplomacy fails, but hard power without soft power is a recipe for constant conflict not enduring peace.

Consider this. The whole budget for the Foreign Office in 2017-18 will be £1.2 billion. Strip out cross-Whitehall funds and non-discretionary funding like subscriptions to the UN and NATO, and it is down to £900 million a year. That whole year’s budget is less than the United States is spending on its new London embassy alone. That is £900 million to run the whole diplomatic effort—in 168 countries and territories and nine multinational organisations. In contrast to that, the National Health Service spends £2,000 million a week in this country. The global staff of the Foreign Office has been reduced by 20% in the last decade. In contrast, the staff of the United States of America in the UK alone represents one-third of the total global staffing of the Foreign Office.

In a world with multiple threats to our safety and security and with the complexity of Brexit determining our long-term future prosperity, this savage amputation of our international diplomatic capacity is frighteningly short-sighted and self-harming. In our Diplomatic Service we invest in the protection and the projection of our national interest. We in this country have other powerful instruments of soft power too: the BBC World Service, the British Council, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy and even—I declare an interest as vice-chairman—the internationally acclaimed Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. It is time we abandoned the wrecking-ball approach of the Trumpian world and reinforced, not slashed, that diplomatic first line of defence.