Inaugural Lecture - Strategy and Fortune: British Security Policy in Transition

17:00, 25 Sep 2007
RUSI, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2ET

Link to map: multimap

Something significant is obviously happening in British security policy. There are symptoms of it everywhere; bafflement at how powerful nations are failing to make their policies stick, fear at how vulnerable the strong and wealthy are turning out to be, a search even for the most appropriate vocabulary with which to discuss security policy.

The Government is presently working to articulate, at least as an interim statement, a new National Security Strategy document. The Prime Minister is expected to make some significant statements on future security policy this autumn – with or without the stimulus of an election campaign. Independent initiatives to re-think security and international power are almost de rigour for self-respecting think-tanks: for example, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) has launched a new programme on British security policy; the Institute for Public Policy Research hosts the independent commission on National Security in the Twenty-First Century; and St Anthony’s College, Oxford, is completing a new overview study.

It is therefore a commonplace observation that we all now need to stop and think about security policy. What is it that actually needs to be secured? And what policies should be employed to do so? But if most people in the analysis world call for initiatives to stop and think, there must, nevertheless, be a realization that politicians have no scope at all for stopping and not that much scope for thinking. In the main, politicians have to fall back on informed instinct; more or less well informed, more or less well refined. That is why their strategies hinge as much on luck as on judgement. And that balance is not necessarily illegitimate. A poor or inappropriate strategy may be completely sunk by a run of bad luck; a good, robust strategy will normally be able to ride it and then make the most of what good fortune comes its way.

When looking at British security policy over the last decade, an increasingly self-conscious attempt can been seen on the part of the Government to re-make its external security policy in the areas of defence, foreign affairs, aid, trade, environment etc. These constitute a broadening concept of ‘national security’ – though even after a decade, one still wonders what intellectual mainsprings this recasting of the national security equation was based upon. Certainly, a great deal of it was driven by the instincts of Tony Blair as Prime Minister. He made a significant impact on British security policy, partly defining through his own commitments, the turbulent international decade of his premiership. He shaped the external environment as well as reacted to it. He was said to travel light into global politics, but he took to the status of international decision-maker more quickly and naturally than most Prime Ministers, and he had clear instincts and luck on his side in the early years.

Blairite Security Policy

The foreign and defence policies of the Conservative governments from 1990-97 were based on a realist orthodoxy. This derived from a strong conception of nationhood and sovereignty where policy was fundamentally orientated to the politics and economics of European, Mediterranean, and Transatlantic spheres, with a hard-nosed concentration on trade and commerce elsewhere. This may have appeared logical enough in the circumstances, but the incoming Blair Government was to define this as ‘a doctrine of benign inactivity…the product of the conventional view of foreign policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall’.  By contrast, Blairite policy was characterized by three inter-connected sets of principles which shaped the way the Government looked at those conflicting trends the changing international environment threw at it. Over a decade, these principles grew in consistency and were reportedly articulated in a 2006 Cabinet Paper discussing a decade of Labour policy.

Blair said in 2007 that the first set of principles ‘further our interests in the modern era of globalization and inter-dependence’ and that ‘idealism becomes realpolitik’.  These values were stated simply by the Prime Minister as ‘liberty, democracy, tolerance and justice’.  Values might have to be fought for with military power as much as they should be promoted as a way of allowing us to cope with the implications of globalization and economic liberalism. A failure actively to promote these values, from Tony Blair’s perspective, was not an exercise in Conservative ‘realist orthodoxy’ to safeguard the national interest, but rather a simple failure to recognize Britain’s genuine national interests in the modern era.

A second set of principles involved a holistic conception of how power should be exercised in the pursuit of these values. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ power – the power to compel and the power to attract – must all be seen as part of a policy continuum. Though Britain had traditionally kept these sources of power apart and thought of them somewhat differently, the Blair approach was to try to integrate them through the rhetoric of more ‘joined-up Government’ to the articulation of a ‘comprehensive approach’ to external policy and the creation of a number of agencies and initiatives to try to promote the effective and co-ordinated application of all sources of British power abroad.

A third set of principles revolved around the perception of what was at stake for British security policy. In November 1997, Blair outlined a vision for a pro-active Britain that would use its power and influence to make an impression on the world on the basis of key values it shared with the United States (US) and the Commonwealth.  Ten years later, the message remained consistent but more assertive: ‘Our values’, Blair wrote, ‘represent humanity’s progress through the ages. At each point, we have had to fight for them…as a new age beckons, it is time to fight for them again’.  The mechanisms by which these various principles could be enacted were no less assertive. An activist policy of ‘liberal interventionism’ was built in from the beginning and articulated eloquently in Blair’s Chicago speech of April 1999.  It was a more reflective version of the soundbite that accompanied the Strategic Defence Review in 1998 that, ‘We must be prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us’.  By the end, this had even become an aspiration to define an agenda for ‘progressive pre-emption’ based on a need ‘to think sooner and act quicker’.  It was heady stuff and relied on a willingness, and an ability, to deploy forces, diplomacy, aid and training around the world, possibly well away from Britain’s old Cold War area of concentration in Europe, the Mediterranean and parts of the Middle East.

Equally, however, these principles could only be enacted through what Downing Street referred to as leadership and positioning. For Blair, ‘leadership’ came through the political strength of substantial domestic majorities and his own growing experience in foreign affairs. ‘Positioning’ was a more subtle matter. It was more fundamental than grand strategy and in practical terms, meant staying intrinsically close to the US, whilst also shaping a new European agenda. The Blair Government felt well able to do this in its first term simply by rising above the reactive constraints that had hobbled its predecessor. Of course, such ‘positioning’ became increasingly difficult for the Prime Minister. Many of his officials seemed to lament the fact that he would not personally distance himself from any US policies as they became increasingly tendentious. But for him, positioning was for the long-term, not just a single administration. And during the neo-Conservative ascendancy in Washington, it was certainly not for the faint-hearted. But at least in the first five years, Blairite security policy was characterized by good luck and success. In European politics, the emphasis was put on results and outputs, rather than the institutional progress of the European Union (EU) and Blair displayed a greater sense of give and take with his European partners than had his predecessors. In pressing for enlargement, for Turkish membership of the EU, and for a new defence identity within the EU, the Prime Minister was rising above institutional obstacles to define a place for Europe in global affairs, and a place for Britain in Europe’s affairs. It was all ‘bigger picture’ politics than either the EU, or British political parties, were used to. The momentum that this created was tested, but maintained, in the Kosovo crisis of 1999. The US-led operation lacked credibility or effectiveness without the threat of a ground offensive into Kosovo. The Europeans, led by Britain and France, formed an effective partnership with the US to use the real threat of a European invasion into Kosovo – coercive military power against Serbian behaviour – in its most sensitive of provinces. It was a close call in all respects.  Perhaps it was reckless, but it worked, pragmatically, to create a dynamic that saw the fall of Milosevic in Serbia, his delivery to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague and Kosovo to the brink of independence. Humanitarian intervention looked liked a muscular and moral response to tyranny. The Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq the previous year had been more controversial and was not at the time regarded as a success. Subsequently, however, it emerged that Desert Fox had a major impact on Iraqi decision-making, though Blair (and President Clinton) have received little credit for it.  In 2000, the intervention in Sierra Leone emerged as a textbook example of military force linked to an aid and assistance operation that restored stability to a collapsing state. It did not matter that official assistance to the Sandline private security company operating in Sierra Leone had already embarrassed the Government two years previously; nor did it matter that the humanitarian intervention hardly had the effect of transforming Sierra Leone’s dislocated economy. The fact remains that the result was better than all the likely alternatives had intervention not taken place.  By the beginning of 2001, Tony Blair could look back on his principles and his security policies with the conviction that he was genuinely driving a new orientation in policy that responded to the realities of the post-Cold War world.

Blair outlined a vision for a pro-active Britain that would use its power and influence to make an impression on the world on the basis of key values

The 9/11 attacks changed the post-Cold War world, however, into a post-post-Cold War world. And this and Tony Blair’s luck changed; not because the 9/11 attacks were in themselves world-changing events, but because US reactions to them have proved to be so. The difficulty of maintaining UK ‘positioning’ in the edgy months of 2002 may not have been immediately apparent with the short and sharply successful early operations in Afghanistan. The critical moment came in the spring. When Tony Blair spent the weekend with George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch in April 2002, he came away convinced that the US was determined, come what may, to act against Iraq. There was no question in his own mind that Britain must back US policy, for good or bad, but he did so with a complex and ambitious diplomatic agenda. Britain would deliver united European support for Washington that would build on the Kosovo experience. It could achieve this because it would simultaneously deliver the US to the United Nations for a legitimizing Security Council Resolution. It would leverage such a resolution on the basis of a renewal of the ‘road map’ for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And ‘dealing with Iraq’ would be presented in the Middle East as a pre-requisite to a more grand new deal for the region as a whole. That, in turn, would enlist the backing of the neo-Conservatives in Washington, who wanted to push the democratizing agenda into the Middle East. Russia’s President Putin would huff and puff about the use of coercive force, but would follow his best interests and fall in behind a united front. If this diplomatic coup could be pulled off, muscular diplomacy, with a coercive edge, might serve to prevent a war at all. The lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone could be writ large. The British diplomatic machine tried to manufacture these outcomes as Tony Blair himself confident was that they were within reach. In the event, they all failed. 

The resulting war took more or less the course that was predicted, though the aftermath and the handling of post-conflict operations among the coalition partners has come close to realizing the gloomiest of pre-war predictions. The assertions of 2003 have been whittled away to the point where the mission has become one of extrication. The US and Britain now merely want to withdraw from Iraq with honour; to leave behind a political order in Iraq whose success or failure can be fairly judged to be up to the Iraqis themselves. Iraq was, of course, the defining security policy event of the Blair premiership. It cost him more than only his reputation in the Middle East. The more imaginative approach to European politics foundered after 2002 and his relations with France and Germany deteriorated steadily. President Putin had been able to enlist President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder in a strangely effective diplomatic front against Blair in person which was not much ameliorated by the desire of the major European powers to get back on better terms with the Bush Administration at the end of 2004. Africa emerged as a new focus for the Prime Minister’s long-term thinking, as did climate change, global public health and trade liberalization. The G8 Gleneagles Summit in 2005 created an agenda that formed a new centre-piece of an activist policy, which raised new hopes in diplomats and pop stars alike.  The Summit itself was an undoubted personal triumph for the Prime Minister, but, in retrospect, it was not clear that British policy was appropriately ‘comprehensive’ nor that international efforts to address these major problems were close to any genuine step-change. The agenda was nevertheless very much his own.

The Legacy of Issues and Doubts

The fact remains that Tony Blair’s approach to security policy has raised major questions for everyone else. In his various valedictory addresses on the matter, he posed the major question quite starkly. Having, as he felt, set the aspirational course for Britain in the twenty-first century, he challenged British society to decide whether it was prepared to take on the task and to rise to it.  He had decided that the Western world is divided into those states that are able and prepared to take the initiative and act on behalf of freedom, tolerance and democracy, and those who are not. To the critics, this was the stance of a vainglorious showman who constantly reiterated values and called them by their headlines, but never spelt them out in enough detail or showed commitment to their observation. His stance at the end and its questioning of Britain’s willingness to take on the role he had articulated seemed tantamount to asking whether, as he departed, the nation was really worthy of him. As one commentator put it, ‘Liberal interventionism talks the talk but can barely walk the length of a red carpet. It has failed the most crucial test of any policy in being neither morally even-handed nor effective in action’.  To his supporters, however, all this was merely an honest assessment of the choices all European states now face. It represents a necessary response to modern instability whose failures and successes leave Britain with something that any country with international interests and aspirations must seek to refine.  Few Prime Ministers would have expressed the matter so clearly or with such conviction.

For good or ill, Tony Blair’s instincts illuminated some important truths about Britain’s immediate security environment. One important insight was that the international world should not be assumed to be necessarily benign to Britain now that the Cold War is over and globalization – which Britain is rather good at embracing – has become ubiquitous. In Tony Blair’s vision of security, what needs to be secured goes beyond any traditional attempt merely to affect the international environment in ways favourable to one’s society. Instead, he perceived a genuine and deepening struggle in the post-Cold War world between progressive forces and those of reaction and autocracy. The Jihadi terrorist threat to Western societies was only the most evident facet of it.  But if it can be agreed that the international environment is certainly less benign, there is no convincing consensus on how the various challenges to our current way of life manifest themselves.

Most analyses of the challenges UK security policy faces agree on a fairly standard list of issues, from the most immediate to the more long-term concerns. In the immediate category, the knife-edge stability of the Middle East and the Gulf, instability and challenges in Central Asia, and the possibility of further security problems in Europe’s own backyard – particularly in the event of a resurgent Russia over the next decade seeking to reassert influence in some of its former territories and soviet satellite states – is normally listed. Another category of evident security challenge covers transnational trends which have also reached apparently acute levels. This normally encompasses international crime as a threat to security, a new and unique wave of global terrorism, the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – both in a traditional sense and as part of a terrorist challenge to global stability –- energy security, ‘cyber-security’, and even food security. All of these challenges are comprehensible, if worrying, in themselves, but in combination, may represent security problems of a complexity that have not yet been encountered before, and if manipulated by malign leaderships in some states, could be very difficult indeed to counter. At the broadest level, global inequalities in economic and social provision are sometimes cited as a direct source of security challenge, as are global public health challenges, environmental stress and the effects of climate change. A significant challenge here is also the phenomenon of failing or fragile states as sources of continuing instability.  All such perspectives recognize that the established international order of nation states that is now more than 350 years old is in rapid transition and that the dispersion of political power creates structural forces in global politics that affect the security of all. The problem, however, is that though we can all be agreed on the most specific to the most structural, there nevertheless continues to be uncertainty about the transmission mechanisms that turn these trends into such dangerous forces for us in particular, or quite how a country like Britain should approach these challenges. The UK alone cannot approach any of them effectively, yet the international consensus for tackling such issues is weak, diverse and infused with a weary pessimism after more than a decade of disappointing initiatives and divisive national security policies among all the most major powers.

It is so difficult even for the powerful to exercise their will in contemporary world politics; something that the US has accepted and that countries, like India and China are beginning to appreciate. It seems increasingly evident that the key to the problem lies elsewhere. For Britain, it is important that any long-term planning in security policy must explicitly take account of three other deeply structural problems in the less benign environment faced: the ineffectiveness of traditional international institutions, the lack of influence or control over a systemically complex international environment, and the decline in a rule-based approach to global order and prosperity. These trends are easy to recognize and their importance as an interesting parlour game can be debated but policy-makers tend not to factor them into their strategic thinking, least of all their policy initiatives. They are all just a bit too abstract, just a bit too academic, to be the stuff of real policy. These trends are recognized as a matter of interest, but are taken as just modern facts of international life and beyond control.

The argument works both ways, however. Since Britain is such an open and international player, since it willingly embraces so many social and economic facets of globalization, and since it has an honourable tradition in fostering international rules and a consensus for them, Britain has a direct interest in taking on these issues as a major target of its long-term security policy. Indeed, unless there is some effort to mould security policy explicitly around these problems, British reactions to issues from the Middle East, to terrorism, to environment and international development, will increasingly lack substance. In that case, the security policy hiatus, that is, the bad luck which befell the second half of the Blair Administration, will not be a nasty blip, but instead constitute strategic failure. If Britain still aims to be a global player in the way Tony Blair laid out his valedictory challenge, it must be prepared to tackle a more systemic global agenda and use its skills to help build an international consensus on how to put it right.

That more systemic global agenda is depressing. First, it is clear that international institutions have largely failed the world community since the end of the Cold War. All of the major institutions are either trying to re-make themselves, like the United Nations (UN), NATO or the EU, or else are under visible stress and pressure, such as the World Trade Organization, the Non-Proliferation Treaty Regime, most other arms control treaty arrangements, the World Bank, the IMF and other formal international financial regulatory mechanisms, sanctions and embargo monitors, and development institutions. If Britain is to try to address its security interests in the Middle East and south east Europe over energy or WMD proliferation, the question remains, where are the big decisions really taken? Where is the locus of political power of which Britain should be a part? The answer does not lie within the UN, nor NATO these days. Mobilizing support in the UN, NATO or in European councils may be a necessary part of diplomacy, but it is increasingly difficult to argue that this represents the mobilization of real collective power to make things happen in the world. In the Twentieth century, Britain was a pillar of most of the institutions on which world politics rested. In the Twenty-first century, it is merely a player in a world where there are so many centres of power few of them seem decisively important. The loss of international institutional authority poses Britain with an interesting choice. Should it devote its energies to helping re-invigorate the old institutions, or should it try to work more informally, subtly, with the shifting constellations of power on issues like Iran, or energy security, even at the price of undermining our old institutions further?  

Second, there is a structural problem concerning control and influence in a global environment of such increased socio-economic complexity as we now have. Most modern economies are highly networked in both social and economic terms. This creates both greater density of interactions and at the same time powerful clusters of wealth, knowledge, prosperity and infra-structures both within and between states. The increasing urbanization of the world – moving towards 85 per cent by 2030 – is creating mega-cities in the midst of peripheral hinterlands. Those mega-cities that can cope with the pressures will be sources of prosperity. Those that cannot will be sinks of instability. Political control, in the way that states traditionally exercise it, becomes increasingly difficult in these circumstances. The energy networking that creates power cuts at the other end of a continent; the financial debt manipulation in America that pushes banks around the world into liquidity crises; the dispersion of new technologies that puts real capacity into the hands of terrorist groups, all undermine the ability of democratically elected governments to influence, still less control, the security environment for their citizens. All the globalized advantages for the rich and prosperous, as Britain undoubtedly is, come at the price of a genuine loss of political control at both national and international levels.  

Third, the rules of the game in global politics are changing and sources of legitimacy for playing the game are not now obvious. On the one hand, the rules of international politics are inexorably moving from state-based rules of conduct to those derived more from human rights and notions of natural justice. The development of a recent tradition of international criminal justice, the extension of concepts of war crimes, and the greater enshrinement of the rights of the individual can all be welcomed, but they sit uneasily with traditional notions of state sovereignty and the rights to collective self-defence. And while incipient international law for the individual may be progressing, it is difficult to argue that international law as such is being strengthened. For twenty years now, Western powers have played fast and loose with the concept of international legitimacy, confident in their economic supremacy, confident that what they defined as legitimate could not effectively be challenged directly through countervailing power by those who disagreed. So the muscular peacekeeping of the 1990s, the liberal interventionism of Haiti or Kosovo, the determination to rise above the sclerosis and vetoes of their international institutions and ‘act’ have helped to create a world in which the rules of the game are predominantly set by the powerful and the charge of double-standards has some real force. That might seem acceptable where Western powers like Britain felt confident that they would remain powerful, but this is to be the Asian century and Asian wealth, military power, stability and instability will – sooner or later – all have a bigger effect on Britain’s ultimate security more than it can probably imagine. Rules matter a lot more to the less powerful. They will matter more to those in Europe as the Twentieth century progresses.

this is to be the Asian century and Asian wealth, military power, stability and instability will – sooner or later – all have a bigger effect on Britain’s ultimate security more than it can probably imagine

Depressing as it is, none of this should be a cause for despair to British policy-makers. The task for them is to determine where the major political decisions will be made and to dedicate themselves more explicitly to building international consensus for a rule-based, international regime approach, to policy. The UK has a big stake in the codification of international norms and values when they are under attack from so many quarters.  As an open society with an open economy with an erstwhile sense of internationalism and responsibility, the UK has much to gain in addressing some of its most immediate security pre-occupations if it can be identified as an influential player in a new international consensus on security. It could make the most of its natural diplomatic advantages to help ‘securitize’ a different combination of issues on the international scene and inject some optimism into thinking about the human security agenda as it relates to the more traditional international security agenda. The UK has a track record of more joined-up approaches to policy implementation than many of its partners and a good international reputation for internal coherence in its external policy. It has a relatively centralized decision-making process and a robust party political mechanism to build domestic consensus behind any shift in the direction of policy. The UK also has some long-term leverage on the development and codification of international law and in applying standards of domestic law at the international level.

Not least, the UK has a well-honed military instrument that it should continue to use. The Armed Forces are an important component of a progressive approach to security policy, but the military force should be used only when nothing else will do, as was unambiguously the case in Bosnia during 1995, Sierra Leone in 2000 and Afghanistan in 2001. There is a natural tendency among leaders to turn to the Armed Forces as the one policy instrument they can manipulate decisively. But military force is sometimes too attractive, even glamorous, an option to be used prudently. When military force is required for operations short of war, it should be assumed that humanitarian operations will not merely follow the forces into the theatre, but be an intrinsic part of their planning.  The humanitarian response must be as agile and effective as that of the military. ‘The revolution in military affairs’ needs to be accompanied by an interlocking and interdependent ‘revolution in humanitarian affairs’. Non-military instruments can address the structural challenges of a society’s instability more cost-effectively than the military, but they can only do so and be sustained on the basis of a solid domestic and international consensus.  Otherwise, the international response to instability rapidly becomes part of the problem itself. To its credit, Britain has done more to address these problems than most countries.

Nevertheless, Britain also has some less welcome legacies it will have to live down. It was involuntarily associated with a Cold War international order that is now neither effective nor accepted. Its controversial support for the US-led War on Terror has exaggerated this association and diminished its claim to exert useful influence on American policy. Tony Blair’s bad luck was to coincide with a Bush Administration that has perpetrated a major strategic blunder in the Middle East, and French and German leaders in President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder who were unsympathetic to his early vision and his later dilemmas.  But this does not need to become the run of bad luck that precipitates wider strategic failure.

A new emphasis can be articulated within the continuity of active transatlanticism, and support for more co-ordinated European efforts. The old institutional elements in NATO or in EU defence policy will still exist. But the maintenance of the institutional forms of these associations should not take precedence over the ability to form a wide consensus on the range of threats to human well-being that matter most to the public’s – and the consciences – of our society. Britain will still have to manage its relationship with the US and the hope must be that this will be possible in a more consistent way from 2009. The US, nevertheless, is on a generally divergent course in the Twenty-first century. If we are now in the Asian century the US will have significantly different interests than its European allies as it becomes a ‘Pacific first’ rather than an ‘Atlantic first’ power. This is not a surprise. During the Twentieth century, Britain consistently saw itself as a bridge across the Atlantic – an image strengthened by Tony Blair as Prime Minister. For the future, this will be much harder to sustain. Instead, Britain should see itself as a hub of developed world diplomacy; an influencer and consensus-builder among the progressive security actors in the world. These security actors will include states, global companies, international institutions and groups of influential individuals. There is no reason why post-Iraq, Britain should not be in a good position to perform such a role and use its legacy with the US to represent them to it; rather than it to them. This is probably a first, and most important, diplomatic target for British policy in promoting a new web of multinational diplomacy to deal with security problems that are too complex to deal with successfully in any other way.