Dr Lee Rotherham is a former adviser on international affairs to the Conservative Party and was Director of Special Projects at Vote Leave.
David Willetts is famously said to have two brains. This may be why, in his piece for ConservativeHome reflecting on Western intervention, he seems to have been trying to both have his Christmas cake and to eat it.
His starting premise runs as follows. Our intervention in Libya under David Cameron caught the national zeitgeist and was a good thing; the blocking of our other planned intervention in Syria meanwhile was a bad thing.
Willetts then flips the argument; had the West not intervened in Libya, the world would still have been left with the same old despot though with a settled international order; but Western airstrikes in Syria would have kept the Russians quiescent and could have toppled the regime. As things turned out he suggests, both countries were left in a maelstrom, leading to massive migration flows, which then led to the rise of the Populist Right in Europe and (drum roll) … the lost Brexit vote.
The logic train at the end I’m afraid is showing the same level of strain as my car engine the other night on the motorway just before it packed in. Let’s start at the top.
There was once a time when a pope could give you a consecrated banner and your war was legitimate. The West came to embrace a more complex definition of the bellum iustum or just war from the time of Grotius in the sixteenth century. But the deep issues behind the morality of international power have been vexing people for a lot longer.
For Thucidydes in the fifth century BC, it was epitomised in the brutal frankness of the Melian Dialogue which preceded Athens making a ruthless example of their conquest. The Roman historians that followed Polybius and his golden age of ‘enlightened imperialism’ in Greece noted plummeting morality in the late Republican Senate. I would suggest in our day we have been hampered by a lack of consistency, and Willetts does well to prompt us to reflect on what foreign policy is actually for because we still haven’t squared this away.
Take the Pergau Dam affair. That was a cross-subsidy that linked development aid with a trade deal. It was cynical and self-interested and no different than many Chinese deals today. But it was linked to military exports, so in response, Robin Cook created the “Ethical Foreign Policy”.
But that turned out to include a muddle over intervention in Sierra Leone, and the impounding of a mysterious consignment of second-hand T54s passing through Egypt. That policy ran out of steam with the Dodgy Dossier and the resignation of its champion. Then came the NeoCons trying to reshape the world, and that was followed by Interventionism Lite.
Amidst all these twists and turns you had John Major’s straitjacketed UN engagement in Bosnia, a full-blown invasion as its sequel in Kosovo, and zero intervention in a genocide in Rwanda. In recent years, the Venn diagram of morality, national self-interest, and level of public support has been as permissive as it has been cruel.
Under the NeoCons the US and the wider West had deployed 130,000 personnel at its peak into Afghanistan; there were perhaps getting on for 200,000 in Iraq. For Libya, there was no political appetite for any such deployment, especially as it became clear that US input – while much more extensive than today remembered – had its limits.
The West delivered results at arm’s length – through air power, naval projection, and influence ops. To work, the model depended on finding someone whom external support could deliver an effect, rather than just dropping a random bucket of slop over the regime. The model is also how the West initially supported the anti-Taliban opposition in Afghanistan, and arguably ought to have levelled off at. But in Libya’s case circumstances and the mood of the time defined the upper limit.
Willetts’ interpretation of the might-have-beens suffers from the inescapable hazards of writing quantum history. I’m not convinced Assad would have fallen with the scale of intervention that was being discussed in Parliament at the time, focused on a proportionate response to deter the use of chemical weapons.
I am also far from convinced that Russia, at that stage unentangled and with serious strategic basing interests in the country, would have been as supine as is suggested – certainly Iran (egged on by Hizbollah) would not. Nor for that matter is it clear that rebel factionalism would not still have emerged, for instance, given Turkish national interests in play, or that Islamic State would not have been able to exploit existing weaknesses in neighbouring provinces in Iraq.
The key lesson should not be that intervention is risky, it’s that regime change by invasion needs a process of managed transition, while a policy of providing proxy support to local rebels requires you to have a credible ally whose politics and end ambitions you really should know something about.
These are not new and revelatory light bulb points: British diplomats came a cropper in 2011 trying to make contact with rebel leaders in Libya to find out more about them. But politicians should at least be more aware of them.
Yet it’s with the cause-and-effects in the article that I take issue. Did these conflicts cause Brexit? The refugee crisis around Libya involved the inability of a broken state to interdict illegal migrants traversing the country, but that’s a long chain in which Libya is only one link. As far as Syrian refugees are concerned, Angela Merkel’s decision to take on 850,000 became a hot topic because of her uncompromising approach – “Wir schaffen das”, ‘we’ll deal with this’ – a snap decision that also led to taking in an equal number of claimants from other countries.
That brought predictable consequences.
If immigration had a wider impact on British Euroscepticism and Brexit, it’s similarly because of the wider arrogance of the institutional elite: guesstimates were taken as guaranteed facts (‘only 5,000-13,000 new immigrants will come from the EU accession countries’); known concerns were wilfully ignored or suppressed (Jo Moore’s “today is a good day to bury bad news”); while those raising legitimate questions were treated as reprobates (as when Gordon Brown’s hot mike caught him calling a supporter a “bigoted woman”).
So the root causes for the public falling out of love with their politicians are badly misattributed. This really should not need to be said by now: legal migration is a political choice. I would have been quite happy had we seen the Australian points system Willetts mentioned put in play, though I argued for the Canadian model. But that’s not what we got.
Too many Conservative ministers failed to push back against papers put in their red box that collectively surged the approved numbers. They needed to be robust with visas and tie it in with expanded apprenticeships, reskilling UK nationals, post-Covid workforce reengagement, and massive benefits reforms. They needed to make the points system work. That didn’t happen. Whose fault is that?
Meanwhile, the key problem with illegal immigration – and do we still need to keep pointing this out too? – is the ECHR. The 1998 Human Rights Act just spreads it like cholesterol. We also tend to forget that quitting the ECHR is a wider-reaching opportunity. But that’s a lengthy article in its own right, covering everything from deporting Turkish drug barons to keeping women’s changing rooms for women, via a dozen other policies and their ambulance-chasing lawyers (quite apart from a £2 billion compliance bill).
The EU problem was just the Strasbourg problem writ large because Brexit was always far bigger than migration. “Taking Back Control” was the legacy of hundreds of bad rules that couldn’t be fixed, of poor Luxembourg court rulings that couldn’t be overturned, and where British politicians were silent and thus complicit because they were impotent.
The regulatory burdens side of the ledger and the lack of democratic accountability always get brushed over, I suspect because too few parliamentarians ever actually knew or were even interested in where and how EU laws actually get drafted. As we debate the prospect of closer ties, almost all still don’t.
Where I do agree with the author is on the issue of cost.
Iraq and Afghanistan drained the US Treasury catastrophically, and ours got sapped too. This dynamic is critical because there is a shock strategic readjustment belatedly entering play in Washington. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are now talking of rolling back on expeditionary wars. For all the risk of American isolationism, this could be a massive gamechanger in the long haul. The US last managed to balance the books under Bill Clinton, and then only briefly.
Who owns the US debt and how long it’s sustainable is the single biggest Damoclean blade of the modern era.
Forget the twisting history of recent interventionism and the ground rules of the whens, whys, and whethers: it’s the prospect of a US economy that’s freed of a deficit time bomb that could be the greatest geopolitical shift for the century ahead.
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