Salisbury and Syria. The wider implications of recent events on foreign policy

The House of Commons returned this week in an acrimonious mood. The Conservatives have made the most of Jeremy Corbyn’s reluctance to pin the blame for the Novichok nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury on Moscow. Labour has sought to paper over internal divisions on that saga by protesting that Theresa May should have both consulted Parliament and allowed more time for an international investigation in to the apparent chemical weapons attack on Douma before assenting to participate in US-led air strikes on Syria. With large elements of domestic politics off-limits, due to “purdah” rules in advance of the local elections on May 3, and with a lull in the Brexit negotiations as each side prepares to start a serious discussion about the basic principles of the “end state” in their relationship, the chances are that Salisbury and Syria will continue to be a major part of the political dialogue in the UK for some weeks to come. Its tone is unlikely to improve.
What, though, are the wider implications of these different but inter-linked questions? UK-Russian relations are plainly in the deep freeze, with echoes of the Cold War, and it is hard to envisage what might lead to a recovery for some time to come. The UK (and indeed France) continue to wrestle with how best to deal with an Administration in Washington that is extremely unpredictable. The US is also about to have a new team in charge of international affairs when Mike Pompeo, the Director of the CIA, is confirmed as the Secretary of State alongside John Bolton, the freshly installed National Security Adviser to the President (a post that does not require endorsement by the Senate). Added to which, crucial decisions are about to taken about policy towards Iran and North Korea.
What are the wider implications of all this for the character and the conduct of UK foreign policy?
The row over Russia (and Syria) are a foretaste of a post-Brexit dispute over foreign policy
Recent disputes have a “shape of things to come” quality to them. While much of the argument over Brexit concerns the impact it will have on economic policy, if the past is any indicator then it is the effect of Brexit on how the UK and its elite actors see themselves and the UK’s place in the world which will actually prove to be more contentious and controversial over time. This will prove divisive not merely between the major political parties but also within them. The vast majority of serious splits in British parties over the past 200 years have actually been about these kind of themes (the Corn Laws, Irish Home Rule, tariff reform, appeasement, membership of the EEC/EC/EU), not mainstream domestic matters. This is almost certain to be the case in the decade or so after Brexit.
This is for the following reason. The essence of UK foreign policy since 1945 has been that the nation would “punch above its weight” through three key attributes namely: permanent membership of the UN Security Council; possession of nuclear weapons and the unique Special Relationship it has with the United States which affords a level of co-operation on security issues that no other state enjoys.
This remained true in 1973 when the UK became part of the then EEC because that organisation was comparatively small in membership and had only a marginal collective role in foreign policy and all but none in security collaboration. In the past two to three decades, however, as the EU evolved, it has served – despite the tensions between the “globalist” ambitions of UK foreign policy and the “regionalist” nature of the EU – as a helpful further argument as to why the UK should continue to be at the international top table. The UK has presented its P5 Security Council place as “European” as well as British, its nuclear status as being of value to Europe as well as itself and its intimate links with Washington as of utility to the EU-27 as well as to London alone. Thus while the UK might have been thought of as an “underperforming” senior EU member in that it was neither a member of the Eurozone nor the Schengen Agreement, it could legitimately insist that it was an “overperforming” senior member in the diplomatic and security arena and this should be deemed to be compensating.
The post-Brexit challenge for UK diplomatic and security policy
Brexit removes the aforementioned “bolt-on” case for the UK’s somewhat gilded international status (for a country that boasts only 0.9% of the world’s population). The challenge for those who want to retain that standing (which in essence the entirety of the “Establishment” does) is how best to do so after March, 2019. Is the thesis to be that the pre-1973 arguments for the UK’s world status still hold (in which case do we also need to return to the relative levels of defence spending of that era)? Or is it that (as the Prime Minister has hinted) the UK intends to continue playing a form of protectorate role for the European continent even if it is outside of the EU as a political institution? Or is there a new paradigm that can be offered as to why the UK should continue to hold the part it has today, for example that it is a much larger and leading, player in international development spending than France and Germany? This will be a debate held largely on the centre and centre-right of UK politics.
For the centre-left (mostly), Brexit opens the door to a serious intellectual attack upon UK foreign policy orthodoxy. It allows the basic tenets of that outlook (P5 membership, nuclear weapons and the Anglo-American accord) to be dismissed. For some on the Left, the argument will be a form of benign isolationism with the notion being that the UK should withdraw from post-Imperial illusions of grandeur and concentrate instead on becoming a very different economy and society that might serve as a post-capitalist example to others. Others on the Left would pursue the same strategy but as part of an “alternative internationalism” in which the UN is fundamentally reformed and authority within it redistributed to developing nations and a “post-nationalist” or “post-militarist” approach to global politics is adopted with the UK recasting itself to be a force for moral leadership to that end.
There is also, theoretically at least, post-Brexit, the space for an ultra-nationalist foreign policy in the spirit of Enoch Powell in which the UK pursues its own interests without the diplomatic constraints and obligations that P5 membership involves and shorn of a subordinate standing with Washington.
What will the UK public want from foreign policy after Brexit?
The honest (if perhaps too candid) answer is that it almost certainly does not know and will probably only be consulted in a very limited fashion. Foreign policy has historically been more in the control of elites than domestic policy has been. This is why, until the arrival of Mr Corbyn on the scene, there has tended to be (with the conspicuous exception of the UK’s ties to the EU) far more consensus and consistency in practice between Conservative and Labour Prime Ministers and Governments toward foreign policy than has been witnessed in domestic policy. The most “deviant” Prime Minister of the past fifty years in this sense was not Harold Wilson, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown but Edward Heath. He alone was willing to choose, if he had been forced to, a euro-centric over a global foreign policy.
Whether the voters can continue to be “shut out” of UK foreign policy thinking is one of the known unknowns of post-Brexit politics. The electorate might not be entirely consistent if questioned. The broad reaction to the Salisbury incident appears to have been to rally around the Prime Minister’s response with old doubts about the Leader of the Opposition reasserting themselves (as outlined in BVCA Insight last week). On the Syrian air strikes, by contrast, one suspects that the public will be more wary, partly because of uncertainty about any direction recommended by Donald Trump, but also out of fear of going back into the quicksand that Iraq and Afghanistan are seen to have been. There is, in short, enough for both centre-right and centre-left to mobilise around in foreign policy. In the aftermath of Brexit, this will be a dispute within and between them of an immense intensity.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA