United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting and constructive debate with remarkable consensus across the House. Almost everyone agrees with what the noble Lords, Lord Lamont and Lord Robertson, said about Iran, for example. I hope it does not embarrass the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, that we are very much of one view on that.

There are three interconnected themes: first, the changes in the United States and the impact of President Trump; secondly, how we maintain the threatened liberal international order; and thirdly, the implications for British foreign policy. On the United States, I think most of us agree that the changes to which we have to adjust are longer term than President Trump and that Trump highlights and, we hope, exaggerates some of the underlying trends.

When I first went to the United States in 1962, I began to learn that the Atlantic community was between the east coast of the United States and Britain and western Europe. In those days Texas was not so important; Massachusetts and Pennsylvania mattered much more. Now, California, Texas and Florida are fundamental to American foreign policy and Asian-Americans and Latin-Americans are as important as the old, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were. The discontented white Anglo-Saxon Protestants form part of Trump’s core vote.

The special relationship is a great deal less special than it was. I remember in 1967 taking my then-girlfriend, now wife, around Washington with her list of people who had worked with her parents in the war. They all turned out to be senior people either in intelligence agencies or the State Department. For that American generation, that was part of their formation. They had spent four years in European war. That has gone. People in the United States are much more likely now to have travelled somewhere else. They do not instinctively look to Europe. Our consensus, however, is that in spite of President Trump and all these trends, the United States remains the indispensable power for a liberal international order and we need to maintain our governmental and political exchanges with the United States in spite of the blizzard of dreadful Twitter messages.

On a liberal international order, I congratulate the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, on his maiden speech and the number of very insightful things that he said such as,

“stability and a rule-based global order do not occur naturally”.

We have to fight for them. We have to keep them going. We have to have an active foreign policy with others to maintain it against all the efforts of authoritarian states to undermine it. He also said that a liberal international order has to be a more inclusive world community.

When I hear US Republicans talking about the importance of Winston Churchill, I remember that the Atlantic charter, the basis for a liberal international order, was mainly written by Roosevelt and his assistants and signed by Churchill. US Republicans have scrubbed Roosevelt completely out of the picture. They like Churchill as a great world leader but want to shunt Roosevelt off because he believed that welfare and freedom from want—other dimensions of democracy—were equally important.

It is important that we remember that because globalisation, as we have discovered in the past 30 years, spreads inequality into our countries and therefore fuels populism. I remember reading an excellent book by the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, in which he says that globalisation may not be compatible in the long run with democracy and, if we have to choose, we have to choose democracy.

That is a matter for another debate but it raises some very awkward questions for those such as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, who are quite fond of a network world. When many of those who use the network come from corrupt and authoritarian regimes and launder their money through London and elsewhere, it is not easy for us to maintain our liberal values, let alone spread them further out.

Then we come to the implications for British foreign policy. I feel a degree of underlying uncertainty as to what British foreign policy is. In his best diplomatic way, the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, suggested that he was not entirely sure what “global Britain” means. That confusion is shared by all of us. It is rather like “deep and special” and “strong and stable”. It is a very convenient phrase to use when you do not want to explain what you mean, and that is part of the problem with British foreign policy today.

The underlying concern was expressed strongly by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. He mentioned the,

“savage amputation of our international diplomatic capacity”,

cutbacks in the Foreign Office, our embassies and the Diplomatic Service, and a loss of direction in our foreign policy as such.

Winston Churchill, after all, defined British foreign policy as being based on three circles—the transatlantic, the European and the Commonwealth. We are presently disengaging from the European circle, without yet any information from the Government as to how we will maintain that relationship after we leave the European Union. We operate our diplomacy through 40 working groups underneath European common foreign and security policy. I am told that during the Arab spring the Political and Security Committee, in which we take a major part in Brussels, met almost daily for several weeks and the number of Foreign Ministers’ Councils was sharply raised.

I am also told that the British and the Germans are the ones who most regularly send diplomatic messages round within the European Union. We will cut ourselves out of that unless we come to some other arrangement. The Government have so far said nothing on that, except that we had a position paper last September which in detail told us how much we had gained in foreign policy and defence co-operation over the last 30 years precisely from this co-operation with our European partners. On the importance of British-French defence co-operation, I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, that when I was in the coalition Government, I was well aware that Liam Fox was making active efforts to ensure that as few people as possible knew how important Franco-British defence co-operation was. That was not very helpful and part of the problem that we face. There is a gap between public understanding and the analysis of where we are.

For the past 40 years, we have worked through all that. The noble Lord, Lord Lamont, remarked on the importance of EU3 on Iran. It was extremely effective, together with the high representative—the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton—and it is not clear how we will maintain that either. We will not meet our opposite numbers as easily, regularly and naturally as before, so we will have to find some new arrangement that is so far undefined.

The day before yesterday, a number of noble Lords complained that they had not understood that Europe was a political project. Of course it was a political project. It came out of the last major war. It was a project to provide European security and—as Mrs Thatcher used to say, including in her Bruges speech—to extend democracy. We have extended it successfully across eastern Europe.

The uncertainties of British foreign policy should concern us all. I listened to Boris Johnson’s speech in Chatham House in December 2016 in which he announced that it was the first of a series of speeches that he would make on the redefinition of the strategy of British foreign policy. I have searched several times since then—I asked the Library to assist me—to discover which speeches he had since made on the strategy of British foreign policy. I regret to tell the Minister that I have been unable to discover them, and so has the Library. Perhaps he could help me and even provide a list of those speeches for other noble Lords who have contributed to these debates.

The consensus across the House about British foreign policy seems to be entirely clear. The United States remains important. France, Germany and other European actors are also vital. The Commonwealth is an asset, although we should not overplay what sort of an asset the Commonwealth is. But we do not quite know what the Government think on all this, least of all how they will maintain the European circle alongside the American circle after we leave the European Union.