I spent much of the weekend of 19th-20th August 1995 standing at various points along the Mall in London. It was the weekend of the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of VJ Day and the end of the second world war. I am not usually an enthusiast for patriotic jamborees. I think we British dwell too much on the war, and have yet to free ourselves of some of its characteristic attitudes, notably a mistrust of the Germans. But these celebrations had a special purpose: to honour the veterans of the Pacific war, who led a parade down the Mall. In this they succeeded magnificently.
The events of the weekend enveloped the nation in a wave of nostalgia to which I, born in 1944, was by no means immune. Of course I do not regret the passing of the war itself, nor the austerity which succeeded it, nor the fragments of imperial grandeur which survived well into the 1950s. But what I do regret is the passing of Britain as an outward looking, influential nation, capable of using its powers for the good. Here the gap between the past and the present was wide and painful; it was symbolised at the celebrations by the presence of John Major and his ministers, walking awkwardly to the reviewing stand. But was this shrinking of Britain inexorable, like the ageing of trees, or had it been exacerbated by the judgements of generations of British politicians-including the judgements of the men walking down the Mall? I thought about this that day, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
For a period of ten years following the end of the war, it looked as though Britain might be able to hold on to the role it played during the war itself. The onset of the cold war perpetuated the pattern of diplomacy established during the war: Britain remained the chief European partner of the US, although this pre-eminence was now as much a reflection of French (and German) weakness as it was of British strength. Britain still also ruled a network of colonies, and those "east of Suez" were linked to the mother country in a chain of military bases.
But as the 1950s wore on, a series of landmark events marked the gradual fading of these assets, so that the diplomatic air du temps at the end of the decade was very different from what it had been at the beginning. These events included: Churchill's retirement in 1955; the Suez disaster in 1956; the rise of Konrad Adenauer and General de Gaulle; and, with the independence of Malaya and Ghana in 1957, the onset of the final wave of decolonisation. By the time of Alec Douglas Home's interregnum in 1963-64, Britain's postwar legacy was pretty well exhausted. The "modern era" really began with Harold Wilson in October 1964.
A successful diplomacy can be defined as one in which a nation identifies what its interests are, pursues those interests successfully over a period of decades, thereby adding to its power and influence in the world. That would not be a bad description of the role which the alliance with Germany has played in the diplomacy of France for the past 45 years; and helps explain why, despite such follies as the nuclear tests in the Pacific, and the maintenance of the impoverished francophone empire in west Africa, French diplomacy has served the nation well. The same cannot be said for Britain during the past 30 years.
When I was active in Social Democratic party politics in the early 1980s, David Owen, recently foreign secretary in the Callaghan government, used to regale us with stories of his dealings with figures such as Cyrus Vance, secretary of state in the Carter administration. Owen managed to invest these activities with a Himalayan grandeur, but today his stories have long faded from memory, as indeed has the diplomatic record of the Labour government of 1974-79. This was the period when the foreign policy of Britain came closest to resembling that of Italy; when the distraction of domestic weakness was so great that we simply reacted to the pressure of events.
The foreign policy of the Labour government of 1964-70 shared many of the same characteristics. The pressure of domestic events may have been less acute, but Wilson's opportunism was particularly ill-suited to the world of diplomacy. What we remember is a succession of culs-de-sac: the inconclusive negotiations on Rhodesia; our subordination to the Americans on Vietnam; our half-hearted attempt to join the EEC in 1967.
Interspersed with these periods of Labour drift have been two periods of Conservative rule during which our diplomacy has lurched heavily but inconclusively in the direction first of Europe, then the US-the two great centres of power which define our diplomatic universe. It is often forgotten that, for a brief period in the early 1970s, the Heath government began to transform the Franco-German European axis into a Franco-German-British triangle, pledging to work for full economic and monetary union within a decade. Then, in the 1980s, our diplomacy switched. Inspired by the Churchillian precedent and encouraged by her personal ties with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher believed that she could restore a postwar lustre to our "special relationship" with the US. But the europhile policies of the Heath government were quickly reversed by Wilson in 1974, and Thatcher's Atlantic dream has been quietly dropped by Major.
Europe now dominates our diplomacy to a much greater extent than it did in the 1960s or 1970s, so that Major's indecision on Europe, rooted in domestic politics, has come to dominate our entire diplomacy. The EU beef war revealed the desperation of someone trying to escape this record of indecision. To get the EU's beef embargo lifted, Major hit upon the diplomacy of the empty chair first practised by de Gaulle in the 1960s. But this is a weapon of last resort which can be used only once in a generation. John Major has now wasted this most powerful weapon on a secondary target, and to little effect.
so what can we learn from the past 30 years? In this period Thatcher's diplomacy undoubtedly provides the best model-a powerful British leader, relatively unburdened by domestic events, confident in her vision of Britain's interests, concentrating her formidable energy towards their attainment-and, apparently at least, achieving some success. Like Churchill, Thatcher placed the Anglo-American relationship at the apex of our diplomacy and of the western alliance. As she tells us in her memoirs, Thatcher appointed herself Reagan's privileged partner. One of her responsibilities was to keep the lesser Europeans in line, much as Ernest Bevin did in the 1940s; "it was vital to maintain western unity behind US leadership. Britain among European countries, and I among European leaders, were uniquely well qualified to do that."
The fact that Thatcher's "Atlantic" diplomacy has not survived into the Major era is no proof of its failure. Indeed it can be argued that Major has lacked the personality, imagination and will to establish with Bill Clinton the close relationship which Thatcher undoubtedly enjoyed with Reagan. Nor is it all that obvious that Thatcher's diplomacy did in fact fail. The cold war ended much as Reagan and Thatcher wanted it to, and among American conservatives Thatcher is still regarded as an icon. So are there lessons to be learnt from the Thatcher period?
Here Thatcher's memoirs are unwittingly revealing. When George Bush replaced Reagan in January 1989, she feared that he might "turn his back on the special position I enjoyed in the Reagan administration's counsels." But the reader who has just got through her account of the Reagan years is left with a rather different impression. In the description of her transactions, it becomes clear that the Reagan administration never accorded Thatcher the status she so desired, and in fact treated us not much differently from the other Europeans. US treatment of Britain during the 1980s conformed to the pattern of high-handed unilateralism which had been the norm in US-European relations since the Kennedy period. Indeed, this unilateralism reached an all time high during the Reagan years.
Throughout her narrative of the Reagan years, the discrepancy between how Thatcher expected to be treated by the administration, and how she and Britain actually were treated, is a constant theme. The Falklands war came perhaps too soon in the history of the Reagan-Thatcher relationship to be a fair test of its strength. None the less, even in those early days, the causes of much subsequent British frustration and disappointment were present.
From Thatcher's detailed account of Falklands diplomacy, it becomes clear that what really helped us in the spring of 1982 was not so much the unstinting support of the Reagan administration as the foolishness of the Argentine junta in turning down US proposals for an interim solution to the conflict which, had they been accepted, would have made our recapture of the islands impossible. The author of a whole series of such proposals was secretary of state Alexander Haig-a constant thorn in Thatcher's side. Reagan himself was a remote presence in all this; he was, in Thatcher's view, much too ready to listen to the president of Brazil or his own in-house anglophobe, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, US ambassador to the UN.
But this was not the first disappointment. As early as December 1981, at the time of the supression of Solidarity in Poland, she tells us that the Reagan administration "without reference to us" announced that "it would be imposing sanctions against the Soviet Union that afternoon." Then in June 1982, again "out of the blue," the US imposed a ban on the export of oil and gas technology by British (and European) companies contracted by the Russians to build a gas pipeline to Siberia.
The Grenada affair in the autumn of 1983 maintained this pattern of US unilateralism. Shortly before invading Grenada on 25th October 1983, Reagan sent Thatcher a message, telling her that he was "giving serious consideration" to invading, and asking for her "thoughts and advice." This was how Thatcher wanted to be treated. But then, a couple of hours later, before she could gather her thoughts, she was called out of a party given by Princess Alexandra to be told that a second message had arrived from Washington; Reagan had "decided to respond positively to the request for military action."
It was the same story in April 1986, when Reagan wanted to bomb the Libyans. On 8th April, following a terrorist bombing in Berlin which killed two people, he sent Thatcher a message asking for permission to use British bases to carry out air strikes against Libya, demanding an answer by noon the next day. After being given a 24-hour extension of her deadline, Thatcher gave her permission. In the aftermath of the Libya bombings Thatcher basked in American approval. The Wall Street Journal called her "magnificent" and senators wrote to thank her for her loyalty. Her special status was at last to be recognised-and on the central issue of arms control, no less. But Reagan's conduct of arms control negotiations was to be the cause of still further disappointment.
From 1983 onwards Reagan's approach to arms control was dominated by the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), his utopian project to supersede nuclear deterrence by erecting a system of missile defence covering the US territory, with the Soviet Union to follow suit. Reagan's announcement in March 1983 of his ambition to "build" SDI was the most spectacular example of American unilateralism of the Reagan years, and indeed perhaps of the entire cold war era. The project had profound implications for the security of Europe. Yet Reagan did not consult Thatcher (or Helmut Kohl or Fran?ois Mitterrand). This did not stop Thatcher from appointing herself Reagan's number one cheerleader on SDI.
The difficulty was, however, that Reagan's view of deterrence was quite different from Thatcher's, and she does not seem to have realised this. For her, the ballistic missile was still the critical element of deterrence. With its ability to cruise through space at high speeds and to reach its target intact, the ballistic missile was the weapon which had "kept the peace for 40 years." But Reagan wanted to get rid of ballistic missiles as soon as possible; he was not prepared to wait for the distant day when the erection of an SDI "umbrella" would render ballistic missiles obsolete. So when the US delegation arrived for the nuclear summit at Reykjavik in October 1986, it was already the agreed US position that all ballistic missiles, on land or sea, were up for negotiation.
But all this was news to Thatcher who was horrified when, on the second day of the summit, Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev of his readiness to get rid of the missiles. Thatcher felt as if "there had been an earthquake under my feet." Had it gone through, Reagan's proposal would also have "killed off the Trident missile," and with it Britain's nuclear plans.
thatcher's attempt to revive the Anglo-American alliance of the postwar period thus met with constant rebuff. It was a project doomed from the start because it defied 40 years of diplomatic history in the course of which an ever widening gap had opened up between the power and influence of the two nations. At the level of Hollywood theatrics, Reagan was quite ready to speak of Thatcher as Churchill's successor. But granting her even a fraction of the influence enjoyed by Churchill or Bevin was something neither he nor his advisers were prepared to do.
Yet Thatcher's US policy was a failure only if judged alongside the grandiose goals she set herself. Judged according to criteria more appropriate to Britain's position in the world, her policy was by no means a failure. She got the US to sell us Trident missiles on favourable terms. Following the Libya bombings she persuaded the US government to push harder for the treaty which made it easier for us to extradite IRA terrorists from American soil. On SDI she was a useful ally for secretary of state George Shultz in his efforts to prevent Reagan from advocating a too hasty abandonment of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty. But this solid record does not begin to satisfy either Thatcher's hubris, or the ambitions of those who think that our relationship with the US can justify our continuing refusal to make Europe the focus of our diplomacy.
Since Thatcher's departure our relations with the US have ceased to be the commanding axis of our diplomacy. This was apparent at a conference held at the beginning of last year to mark the 75th anniversary of our leading foreign policy think-tank, Chatham House. To mark this occasion, John Major and Douglas Hurd, then foreign secretary, were invited to give a fresh view of Britain's role in the world. In his discussion of the special relationship, Major simply noted that we had a "vast range of shared interests with the US," and Hurd went on to list some of them: "we share defence and intelligence assets," and we also trade with the US, which links the "lives and prosperity of millions of Britons and millions of Americans." By the standards of the Thatcher years, this was a minimalist view of the special relationship.
But neither Major nor Hurd was prepared to contemplate a substantial pooling of Britain's diplomatic assets with those of our European partners. So, at the Chatham House conference, they desperately tried to fill the vacuum opened up by their downplaying of both Europe and the US. They did so by listing as many artefacts of British prestige as they could possibly think of. These ranged from the plausible (permanent membership of the UN security council), to the ridiculous ("we delight in the success of Classic FM, which is now broadcast in Finland with the BBC World Service.") There was an incoherence about their contributions which suggested that the perennial problem of Britain's role in the world was as far from a solution as ever.
But there was one participant who did put forward a coherent view of Britain's role in the world. This was David Howell, Tory chairman of the House of Commons select committee on foreign affairs. During the past few years, Howell has written a series of pieces on British foreign policy for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. Like Major, Howell opposes any closer entanglement with the EU; and he does not share Thatcher's nostalgia for the special relationship. He seems to have jettisoned virtually all the habits of thought left over from the imperial era. He also has a clear idea about what this new, freelance Britain might accomplish on its own. Our foreign policy must be shaped by our interests as a "business first, trading nation" and these interests will lie "increasingly outside the EU." Diplomacy must follow the trail of trade and investment, not vice versa; the "really golden commercial advantages" will be provided by the "network of English-speaking nations that emerged out of the old Commonwealth"-especially in Asia. In putting commercial interests first we would be returning to "our ancient roots"-to the age of the East India Company rather than the British Raj.
Even if we accept Howell's view that the chief purpose of our diplomats ought to be to pave the way for our entrepreneurs, the pattern of Britain's external economic relations does not seem to be pushing us in the direction he wants. On the investment side, the important development of the past 25 years has been the willingness of US, Japanese and now Korean multinationals to locate here. But these multinationals came here to attack the single market, not to strengthen Britain's trading links with the rest of the world. The key institution in their lives is the despised European commission in Brussels.
Nor does Howell's vision seem to fit in with the trading patterns of those sectors of British-owned industry which are most competitive within the global economy. Foremost among these are the chemical and pharmaceutical industries where a number of firms, wholly or partially British owned, are among the world leaders: Glaxo Wellcome, SmithKline Beecham, ICI. For example, Glaxo is now the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. It has laboratories in the US, France, Italy, Singapore and Japan, as well as in the UK. It must deal with governments all over the world, to have its latest drugs licensed for use.
But there is another segment of British industry which has also survived the years of decline, and whose structure fits the Howell model much better. A number of large British engineering companies managed to escape the fate of Alfred Herbert&Co and the British Motor Corporation; they are now among our leading exporters. This group includes British Aerospace, GEC, Rolls Royce, and Vickers. For some of them, it has been the reliable flow of orders placed by the defence ministry over the past 30 years which has saved them from the fate of Herbert&Co.
If pharmaceuticals are among the most international of industries, defence is among the least (despite some trend towards European co-operation). The British government still subsidises the research of the defence companies, buys their products and helps them with their exports. So at last we find ourselves in Howell's buccaneering world where the government helps the "British enterprise community... punch its way into new markets." But we also find ourselves in that twilight world excavated with such care by Lord Justice Richard Scott. In fact, the connection between the two worlds is inescapable. The defence industries fit the Howell model like a glove, and their dominance is a peculiarly British phenomenon. In Germany and Japan, where the civilian side of engineering predominates over the military (only 2 per cent of Siemens' total sales are connected with defence), the big ticket, overseas engineering project is more likely to involve the construction of ports and railways, than the sale of arms. Even the US, with its big defence industries, has a strong civilian engineering side (Bechtel, Tenneco, GE). But in Britain, where so much of civilian engineering disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, the armaments industry is of much greater relative importance.
So Howell's reversal of the traditional relationship between diplomacy and commerce is less buccaneering and Elizabethan than he would have us believe. In their reaction to the Scott report the press focused most of their attention on the report's domestic aspects: did William Waldegrave lie to the House about the guidelines; did the government allow the Matrix Churchill defendants to stand trial knowing they were innocent? But in fulfilling his brief, Scott has also given us a compelling portrait of a British diplomacy in transition, torn between its lust for new markets (even the Iraqi arms market) and a certain fastidiousness about the character and motives of some of our new business partners. The markets win out every time, as Howell would have them do, but our diplomats, from Geoffrey Howe downwards, were not entirely free of old world scruple. They knew their decisions could not be defended in public, so they kept quiet about them.
Similarly, in the interests of earning a quick buck, they chose to overlook the consequences of their actions for the security of the Gulf region. Britain was the protecting power in the Gulf until 1971, so our government was well placed to know what these consequences might be. When Britain decided to sell arms to the Iraqis, Iran and Iraq had just fought a bloody war and their hatred of each other was undiminished. The two regimes were among the world's leading sponsors of terrorism. Their territory dominates a region of great strategic importance to the west. To encourage a resumption of the arms race between the former belligerents in these circumstances was an act of unbelievable folly. But then the markets must come first...
the best speech at the Chatham House conference was made by Henry Kissinger. He reminded his audience that "he grew up intellectually with the special relationship," but his purpose in evoking this past was not to flatter Britain, still less to encourage Hurd and Major in their fantasies about Britain as global freelance. Both 50 years ago and today, he said, the US and its allies were having to deal with a new diplomatic world, one defined by the beginning of the cold war, the other by its end. In both periods the US, as leader of the alliance, was uncertain about what to do and needed the advice and support of its partners. But Kissinger did not then follow Thatcher in acknowledging that the old ties with Britain were the only basis for US policy. Nor did he endorse the "new British globalism" which Major had outlined. It was Europe, not Britain, which had to be the privileged interlocutor of the US. The qualities that had made the special relationship work in the 1940s were as important as ever, but they had to be "broadened now to a European-US relationship." Kissinger is one of a growing list of prominent Americans-Democrat and Republican-to tell the Europeans, including the British, to get their act together.
Yet the government's views about a common European diplomacy remain negative and defensive. Last September, foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind said that "a single foreign policy shared with all our neighbours and partners [in Europe]... may evolve one day but we have not got it yet nor are we likely to in the foreseeable future." Like John Major and Douglas Hurd before him, Malcolm Rifkind cited as an obstacle "Britain's residual colonial obligations." But which ones, now that Hong Kong is reverting to China-the Falklands, Montserrat, St Helena, Pitcairn, Tristan de Cunha?
In the meantime, a common European diplomacy is an ?
