The Foreign Secretary

Simon McDonald, the former Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service, to give him his full title, has made a downbeat assessment of the UK's place in the world and its geopolitical prospects in the New Statesman. Given that venue, he was happy to personalise the narrative of decline and pronounce on the calibre of Conservative politicians: "When I started [in 1981], your typical minister had served quite a long apprenticeship, coming into cabinet with a lot of miles on the clock. ... Now you can be foreign secretary within a few years of entering parliament. Boris Johnson’s first job in government was foreign secretary." And just to emphasise the point, "Liz Truss spent a massive amount of time on her image. Her social media feeds were something that she curated all the time. She was nurturing the audience that eventually voted her to the leadership of the Conservative Party." There were 15 years between Johnson first being elected an MP and his becoming Foreign Secretary, which included a stint out of Parliament as Mayor of London, while Truss held 6 ministerial roles in the 11 years she spent in Parliament before gettting the same job.

According to the interviewer, Harry Lambert, "The UK’s fading position in the world has deeper causes than its recent foreign secretaries", but while true this is to confuse cause and effect. The decline in the standing of the role, and the consequent use of it to park the troublesome or provide a launchpad for a domestic leadership bid, is a reflection of the UK's dwindling importance in foreign relations and thus the maginalisation of this once great office of state. Consider that the current Foreign Secretary is James Cleverly and his shadow David Lammy, neither of whom would be considered among the brightest and best of their generation. The point at which the importance of the role, and the calibre of incumbents, started to decline probably can't be fixed precisely but the handover from Robin Cook to Jack Straw in 2001 is a pretty good candidate. While the former would prove his credentials as an independent thinker and devastating speaker in his opposition to the Iraq War, the latter would prove himself an energetic factotum for the security state.

But in no sense can the UK's relative decline in standing be attributed to a lack of virtue on the part of successive foreign secretaries. The unimpressive roster between Straw and Cleverly - Margart Beckett, David Miliband, William Hague, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Dominc Raab and Liz Truss -  is certainly a testament to the paucity of talent in the senior reaches of the two main parties, but it also reflects the way the role has come to be seen as a stepping stone, either on the way out of frontline politics or towards a bid for Number 10. And yet virtue remains the dominant motif in political debate, even if it is employed in a wholly partisan fashion, hence the continuing free-pass afforded Keir Starmer for his duplicity in outlets such as the Observer and New Statesman and their continuing appetite for stories of Tory viciousness. When vice must be excused, as in the case of the Labour leadership, pragmatism is the order of the day: "circumstances have changed", "we can't afford it" etc. 

In foreign relations, the desire for virtue continues to lead liberal commentators to fulminate against the evils of the world even as they cannot help themselves from succumbing to a more realist, even materialist, analysis. For example, Simon Tisdall in the Observer bemoans the UK's decline - "post-imperial Britain, reduced to has-been hanger-on" - but his patronising review of the Middle East centres on anxiety over the position of the United States, not the United Kingdom, which suggests a degree of projection in his language. The rapprochement between Iran and Saudia Arabia is couched in terms of America's "sidelining", which seems questionable given its continuing, dominant military presence in the region and unquestionable geopolitical clout. More plausibly, he notes that neither Tehran nor Riyadh trust Washington these days, though you'd have to ask when either really did, at least since the 1970s. Just as with Israel, US policy towards Saudi Arabia has been to maintain the status quo, with the periodic deploring of acts that offend international opinion designed for domestic consumption, but there has been little genuine enthusiasm in either direction. It is a marriage of convenience in which trust plays little part.

Last week in the Guardian Patrick Wintour explained the cooling of relations between the US and Saudi Arabia as the result of the fracking boom: "Once US dependence on Saudi oil ended, the former’s role as provider of the latter’s security was inevitably questioned and their paths slowly diverged". This materialist explanation ignores that America was never itself dependent on Saudi oil, but that many US clients - notably Japan and South Korea - were. In other words, the US supported Saudi Arabia in order to maintain the global economic order: a more strategic self-interest than low prices at Midwest gas stations. What this highlights is that America's foreign policy has always been imperial, in the sense of maintaining a planet-wide regime, and consequently its practical application has always been instrumental rather than a series of responses to disparate moral outrages, as liberal commentators have preferred to frame the challenges to the hegemon. This instrumentality in turn explains why America frequently disappoints those commentators.

For example, major military interventions by the US since 1945 have rarely produced a clear victory, if you exclude small-scale policing operations such as Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. Korea was a score-draw, Vietnam a heavy loss and Iraq saw the match abandoned and the pitch ripped up. But the purpose of such interventions was not to effect regime change, in the sense of replacing autocracy with democracy, and nor was it, other than incidentally, to halt the march of communism (the so-called Domino Theory). The purpose was to create US client states in strategically important areas of the globe. In Vietnam, the US wasn't defending the French colonial regime but seeking to replace it with a nationalist one on the South Korean model - then a military dictatorship. In these terms, Korea was a great success, Vietnam was initially frustrating but has been veering towards the US since the 1979-91 border war with China, while Iraq has been written-off and neutralised as a buffer - one reason why Saudi Arabia and Iran are now seeking a modus vivendi in the Middle East.

Though they are loath to admit it, most liberal commentators recognise that the UK has been a US client state since the Polaris Agreement of 1963, coincidentally the year of its first formal request for accession to the EEC. For many, the great (if unspoken) tragedy of Brexit was not the decoupling of the UK from the European Union but the loss of its role as America's reliable proxy within the European Council of Ministers. One explanation for the Labour Party's reluctance to "reopen" the Brexit debate is that it remains far more of an Atlanticist party than a Europhile one, its conversion to the latter being in no small part a pragmatic response to its electoral failures in the 1980s and an opportunistic hope that Jacques Delor's "social Europe" was more than just rhetoric. Likewise the attempt by Alastair Campbell to recast the history of the People's Vote campaign as a talented young team undermined by its conservative chair and betrayed by the selfishness of the Liberal Democrats and SNP ignores that his legacy will be as the flack for a Labour Prime Minister who took the country into an illegal war simply to please the Americans.

There are two lessons to take from this. The first (and very obvious one) is that the US will not intervene in Ukraine and will not tolerate any escalation by its allies there. It has been scrupulous in avoiding direct conflict with either the USSR/Russia or China since 1945, just as they have been equally avoidant in return, and it clearly sees more geopolitical advantage in allowing Russia to bleed itself out. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is clearly offering the country as a client to both the US (via NATO) and the EU, though with limited success so far. America can afford to wait, as its strategic patience towards Vietnam shows. The second lesson is that British politics under a Starmer government is likely to shift even further into the US's orbit, even though the utility of the UK as a client will continue to diminish. Britain's role will be to act as a promoter of American interests in global forums, rather than providing logistical support (though a lone aircraft carrier will no doubt pootle about the South China Sea), which ironically means the role of Foreign Secretary will once more assume an importance in American eyes it hasn't had since the heady days of David Miliband, a man who was elevated to the job only six years after being elected as an MP.