Do you ever wake up thinking that the world is daily becoming a more dangerous place and that international leadership seems to be increasingly inadequate to the task of managing multiple crises? So do I. Ukraine? The still-unravelling violence and oppression across the Middle East? The Greek austerity crisis? We start this week with all three in more volatile shape than a week ago.
But what remains of post-imperial British power projection is more marginal to any of these threatening events than at any time I can remember in my lifetime. Is that what voters want, a parochial, inward-focused country that deals with its own pressing problems and hopes that the rest of the world won’t get in its way too much or scarecommercial aircraft over the Channel and North Sea?
Polls are ambiguous, as they are about many things, but a sizeable chunk of voters are clearly fed up with abroad – from Europe and foreign aid to endless military entanglements which cost lives and money without seeming to solve much. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, by the time intervention posed some hard choices over Syria in August 2013 the Commons was widely praised for voting no. Now people – not all of them in military uniforms – fret that Britain’s contribution to containing Isis is less than a single air strike a day, plus a few expert boots on the ground.
So it was Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, and France’s president, François Hollande, who flew to see the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, (does he have a master plan, does he just improvise, is he ill?) in Moscow to broker another ceasefire in Ukraine at the weekend. On Monday, Merkel will be talking to President Obama in Washington, where disapproval of the European initiative is vocal. It won’t work, say those who want to arm Kiev to offset Russian military support for the eastern rebels. Merkel disagrees, it will make things worse.
Where was “bit player” (copyright, General Sir Richard Shirreff) David Cameron? As a Guardian editorial crisply noted, he was visiting an election marginal in bourgeois Leamington Spa. Shashank Joshi offers a level-headed counter-argument here that France and Germany have a more direct interest – Russian troops have occupied both their capitals – and Germany much more economic leverage over Moscow. The division of labour was agreed last summer.
Fair enough, if that was all. But Cameron didn’t attend Saturday’s security summit in Munich either, he left it to the foreign secretary, Philip “safe-but-dull” Hammond, who is not yet a household name in Paris or Berlin. Taken together with Cameron’s self-marginalisation within the EU (he started by leaving the Euro-Tory group, the EPP, in Strasbourg in 2010 for tactical domestic reasons) and the shrinking UK defence budget – below 2% of GDP this year? – and No 10 easily looks as parochial as Merkel is reported to regard it.
We are not doing much in the Middle East (less even than France!), not helping with the eurozone crisis, which threatens us all, not helping patrol the Mediterranean to control brutal people smuggling from north Africa, just demanding that they – ministers mean the Germans – pull out the stops to allow Cameron to proclaim a success for his EU renegotiations, 1975 Harold Wilson-style, and campaign in the 2017 referendum (2016 in some weekend reports) to stay in after all.
What’s in it for me, Merkel may well ask? After all, she has domestic problems too, familiar ones in the shape of Pegida, the anti-Islamist populist street movement (founded by an ex-burglar), and – already inside state parliaments and Strasbourg – the Alternative for Germany movement of Eurosceptics. François Hollande? Well, we know about his problems. Shame that the much more formidable Dominique Strauss-Khan didn’t become French president instead. Ah, no, he’s on trial in Lille for squalid offences.
It must be tempting for some to think about pulling up the drawbridge, fantasy though that is. EU officials complain that British diplomatic expertise and influence is shrinking – not only in Brussels but in far-off capitals where it once had clout. Things are never quite as bad – or as good – as gloomsters say. Here’s a more upbeat assessment on Britain’s policy goals in Europe from the yes campaign, itself a marginalised voice in Britain’s internal debate.
And that’s the weakness of the “bit player” escape route: we can’t and won’t escape from global complexities and inter-connectedness. And far too many of our problems, not least austerity, are linked. You may have cheered or flinched when you heard that Greece’s new PM, Alexis Tsipras, told his parliament he was putting the jobless before his creditors and demanding war reparations from Berlin.
But our own election-focused politicians are also promising to spend money they don’t have – and won’t get if Monday’s Guardian-shared exposé of tax-avoidance connivance by the Swiss arm of HSBC is any guide. The Sunday Times took a pop (paywall) at a tax-avoidance scheme used by Cameron’s solicitor general, Robert Buckland, but the oligarch press is not as excited about HSBC as it gets over Ed Miliband’s failings, real, imagined or made up.
Meanwhile, George Osborne has been accused (on the free market right) of using taxpayer money to subsidise generous interest rates (up to 4% for a three-year bond) for bonds which only pensioners can buy: cash for grey votes? Miliband is promising to increase paternity leave, also for laudable – but expensive – reasons. The Labour leader is in favour of Europe, which means an election “conundrum” for business, the tycoon Sir Martin Sorrell admits here. Tories, anti-Europe; Labour, anti-business. Europe apart, Miliband has struck an even more low-key note on foreign policy than Cameron, who has at least made some loud noises.
So whoever wins on 7 May, it seems likely that, lacking either the will or capacity to intervene, the “bit player” will remain in charge of foreign policy at No 10 – and mostly stay indoors.
