Political commentary
This other Eden
Ferdinand Mount
You wish to know what the world needs now? You have come to the right depart ment. What the world needs now is stability.
Take Africa. Large continent, dark in places. Stability absolutely essential. The Foreign Secretary has made this perfectly clear. 'The first priority now is political and economic stability.' Some may say 'we ought to have done more to try to stabilise the situation in Zaire.' On the other hand, 'we have stabilised the law-and-order situ ation.' The Prime Minister too has spotted the need for stability and he came back from the NATO conference in Washington con vinced of the 'unacceptability of continued Soviet and Cuban exploitation of particular factors of instability in Africa.' There you have it. Stability acceptable, instability unacceptable. Destabilisation, as practised in Chile by the CIA very unacceptable.
Wait a minute, though. Didn't Mr Andrew Young, President Carter's UN envoy, say that the Cubans were 'a stabilising factor' in Angola? And if you think about it, isn't there something in that? Too frequent change is 'massively unstabling', as Mr Peter Emery, Tory MP for Honiton, said, or rather spluttered, of the latest Healey package last week. After all, if you shoot people, as it were, dead, they stay dead. A burnt village is a stabilised village. Judged by strictly objective criteria, the Cuban forces in Africa do seem to have achieved a measure of stability. The grave's a fine and stable place. The only good injun's a stabilised injun. No use shutting the stable door after the horse of détente has bolted, in the words of the old Soviet proverb.
But these are complex matters requiring careful thought, as Dr Owen reminds us. And it is good to hear that we have 'contributed to a rethink of the Cuban position' and that we have let them know that 'their actions have not been the actions of a concerned non-aligned country.' Those may seem harsh words. But when one dispatches 20,000 troops to charge around other people's continents, one may be thought to be fractionally less non-aligned than if one had not done so. Unfair perhaps, but then the world is an unfair place. So, Fidel — you don't mind if I call you Fidel, do you? — Andy said you were an informal sort of guy, would you mind having a bit of a rethink about this Africa thing?
The language of British diplomacy under Dr Owen oscillates awkwardly between the slangy and the pompous. It is a strange mixture of blow-by-blow ringside summaries of the state of negotiations and sudden flights into the marmoreal manner of Lord Cur zon. In his frequent and copious Commons answers and airport interviews, Dr Owen seems to tell us more about what is going on than previous Foreign Secretaries have told us. But because he speaks in this elusive flickering style, in fact the reality is, if anything, harder to pin down.
Dr Owen himself is reasonably popular inside the Foreign Office, more popular perhaps among his senior advisers than among those nearer his age who cannot shake off the pangs of envy. He seems to be regarded as hard-working, quick to pick up points and in general to be on the right side. His youth, his notorious good looks and his lack of oratorical punch are inescapably reminiscent of Anthony Eden. And, in a small way, I think this parallel is helpful. Eden was 'right about Hitler', but his rightness was somehow rendered ineffective by his preoccupation with the machinery of diplomacy. I do not mean that Eden was under any delusions that this or that treaty undertaking was any stronger than the will to observe it; nor is Dr Owen. But a Foreign Secretary's job is not only to negotiate but also to make concrete, to body forth the will of the government that he represents. Heaven knows that will is mouselike enough; but it is not quite as mouselike as the impression Dr Owen gives out. 'The Soviet Union understands our position.' All too well, I fear.
. The lack of proportion in the language adds to the general feeling of an absence of scale and confidence. Dr Owen says that 'we have the opportunity to create a strong Zaire.' We don't. We have the opportunity to support an incompetent, brutal and cor rupt regime in the hope of preventing another civil war and keeping out an even more incompetent, brutal and corrupt regime. If stability is to be purchased, we should at least understand how much it is costing.
It is self-deception to imagine that aid to Zaire can be tied to political reform. The place may fall apart before the ballot boxes are delivered. Equally, it is cant to pretend to elevate to a principle the belief that 'Afri can problems are far best dealt with by Afri can nations.' If that were a usable principle, then African nations would not be so easily subverted or popular movements so easily suppressed by small dollops of foreign money or small detachments of foreign troops. To see the question as a problem of the correct application of power is not the same as saying that NATO should send expeditionary forces and that the wishes of African regimes should be ignored; this is a false antithesis. All it entails is doing what you can when you can to keep the Russians
out. The case for using NATO as the look out post and headquarters for the respous( by the West to African crises is not that anybody wants to extend regular NATO operations any further towards the South;i1; is because NATO exists and could get the fastest with the mostest help if help vi° called for.
The fault is not so much the GO' ernment's lack of action as a misleadilli pride in its overall stance of noir intervention. There was a peculiarly cold and fishlike smell about Mr Callaghaul sneer at 'the new Christopher Columbus° setting out from the United States to clis' cover Africa.' There is nobody like our owe dear Prime Minister for setting up a strag man and then kicking it to death. Nobody ever said that all Africa's problems were the fault of the Soviet Union; nor have rbe Americans, under this President or his Pre' decessors, shown the slightest desire le intervene in Africa beyond responding le, unmistakable requests for help. The oul effect of Mr Callaghan's patronising p0,1.1 down is to add to the air of passive hid", ference which seems to prevail through& most of the Western alliance. Presideet Carter's speech at Annapolis is d!' encouraging attempt to shake off the lethargy and to make Western intentiosl, more clearly understood. Mr John Davies, for the Tories, eolO mented on how reminiscent it is of r° 1930s to argue that revelation of the Or gers surrounding us is itself a provocati0,11A Why is Mr Davies widely regarded as an o'" bumbler who would be replaced io Thatcher government? The two speecbee„ have heard him make this year are far to°1; coherent than those made by any 4305 front-bencher; they contain a beginning, middle and an end and a clear and CO vincing thrust of argument. I fear the trod' ble is that he looks like an old bumbler.; Anyway, it is only by comparison with b''t leader that Mr. Davies appears mild. Afled a somewhat sticky patch, Mrs Thatcher is very resolute form just now, not because she believes that the collapse of lw Healey's economic strategy is at last be8i1:1; ning to show through. On Zaire, she solo, rather like a mixture of Brigadier RitellI; Hook and Worrals of the WRAF. Therem. no nonsense about non-involvement fro", her. Mrs Thatcher believes that weak„ only encourages bullies. She admires 61'51 card's panache and insists that Britain . demonstrate the capacity to mount sioli',ec operations. She takes the disbanding of l':11 Parachute Brigade as an almost pers0111 insult and speaks of our boys with e0e radely pride.
Indeed, you begin to feel that, if
joined up, the chances are that, just as yuto were adjusting your harness in readinessle drop over M'bongoville, your eye woul° to caught by the paratrooper crouching lo°,$„tot you. Is there not something familiar ao"o the slim figure under the combat fatigues l'oe the golden curls peeping out from under red beret?
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