AS I WAS SAYING
Foreign affairs in the age of Jane Bull, and the raw veg. of new Britain
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
Encouragingly early in my journalistic life — about 1954 — I was invited to write for the prestigious American journal For- eign Affairs. The subject was anti-Ameri- canism, the hottest issue of that period, and I pulled out all the stops. Some months later, in the reading room of the London Library, I found myself sitting in an arm- chair alongside an elderly gentleman who was actually turning the pages of the num- ber of Foreign Affairs which contained my piece. Imagine my thrill when he reached it, stopped turning the pages and started to read. Pride surged. At first he seemed to be reading very slowly, giving himself time to take in every word. Only slowly did the awful truth dawn. He wasn't reading but falling asleep.
If he had frowned, snorted with disgust, thrown the journal across the room, any of these hostile reactions would have been satisfactory. But for my first effort at classy journalism to elicit only snores and snuffles was unbearably humiliating. In those days, as I say, anti-Americanism was at the top of the political agenda, as were foreign affairs generally. So how had that old gentleman dared to fall asleep when reading my arti- cle? His wits, I concluded, must have been' dulled by drink after lunching too well at the Garrick.
This memory came back to me last week when I too fell asleep while reading Foreign Affairs — the 75th anniversary number as it happened — in the reading room of the London Library, after having lunched too well at the Garrick, in the very same arm- chair as that old gentleman had done near- ly 50 years earlier. On waking there was also a young man looking at me rather crossly in the next armchair, but it would be too much of a coincidence to suppose that it was his article that had put me to sleep. In any case, even if it had been his article, he would have had no excuse to be disap- pointed because nowadays, unlike when the Cold War was at its height, articles about foreign affairs are boring.
Why have foreign affairs come to seem so dull? It is because with the Cold War over the outside world has suddenly begun to seem unthreatening. Never before has the United Kingdom had cause to feel so safe. Ever since the 16th century there has always been an enemy in sight. First it was Spain, then France, then Germany and finally the Soviet Union. In so far as the existence of the United Kingdom is threat- ened today, however, it is more from inside our borders than from without.
Today's Euro-sceptics, of course, like to pretend that the threat of European feder- alism is also a matter of life and death and it is true M. Delors did, for a time, become a household demon on a par with Ribben- trop and Ciano. But anybody whose memo- ry goes back to the days of Ciano and Ribbentrop, or even Molotov and Gromyko, will know that Delors is the exception which proves my rule. For whereas the ear- lier bogeymen sent shudders up the British spine, Monsieur Delors merely rubs us up the wrong way. Nor are the other contem- porary so-called 'threats' — China and Islam —worth taking any more seriously. Columnists in search of something new to write about sometimes try to scaremOnger about them, on the principle that if no dan- gers exist it is best to invent some, but it is uphill work. For the truth is that whereas once upon a time the problem for the West was to find the power to meet all its com- mitments, today it is rather to find the com- mitments to match all its power.
So let us be thankful, not, in this case, for small mercies, but for a most monumental mercy: that for the foreseeable future the United States is going to be the only hege- monic power, spending more on defence than all the other leading powers com- bined, and that she happens to be benign — particularly so far as this country is con- cerned. Therein lies the difference from the past. According to precedent, with the col- lapse of the Soviet Union and the emer- gence of the United States as the only hegemonic power, the Foreign Office would have spent the post-Cold War years furiously seeking to correct that imbalance of power, fashioning for that purpose a coalition, with, say, Russia and China. As it is, however, any anti-American coalition in present conditions is quite simply a non- starter since even countries which abuse America most have closer links with Wash- ington than they do with each other. In short, the room for diplomatic manoeuvre, at any rate on a grand scale, is unprece- dently restricted.
Hence, of course, our new Foreign Sec- retary's attempt to turn diplomatists into moral missionaries, which is at least a more interesting role for them to play than that of salesman or trade promoters, which in recent years is what they have been reduced to being. Whether human rights will be served by being placed at the heart of British foreign policy remains to be seen. Early attempts, for example, to stop the exports of weapons which might be used by nasty governments to suppress internal dis- sent — such as water cannon — were made to look rather silly, as it was precisely water cannon which the Indonesian government so desperately needed recently to prevent the people choking to death. Indeed with the benefit of hindsight one can only wish that the Chinese government had been allowed to import water cannon before the events in Tiananmen Square, since jets of water, however powerful, are much less lethal than bullets. A few water cannon in Tiananmen Square and the whole course of history might have been changed, very much for the better. Nor do developments in Saudi Arabia about the fate of those two nurses suggest that getting on a moral high horse necessarily serves a humane purpose. In fact Mr Cook's moralistic rhetoric at the start proved positively counter-productive and in the event filthy lucre and Mr Jonathan Aitken's contacts — arising out of arms deals — are proving far more effec- tive.
In fact, of course, Mr Cook's moralistic foreign policy is not really a foreign policy at all. Its primary purpose is for domestic consumption — to make the British people feel good, and in contemporary Britain, at any rate for the time being, people do seem to thirst more for righteousness than for glory. Given such a national mood, it is inevitable that foreign policy should be leminised' along with politics generally. In a radio discussion last weekend, I heard Robin Cook, in the course of explaining his moralistic foreign policy, say that Britain should model herself on Switzerland with its great work for the Red Cross, and Nor- way for its part in brokering the Oslo Agreement. Hold on, I thought, that's not the kind of red meat which John Bull likes to get his teeth into. But then, I thought, it isn't John Bull anymore; it's Jane Bull, who is quite certainly a vegetarian. And just as vegetarian recipes are dull to read, so are articles about vegetarian foreign affairs.
It is no wonder, therefore, that I fell asleep.
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