British diplomacy in the dock

In 1997, just ten days into office, Labour’s foreign secretary, Robin Cook, issued a new mission statement for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He invited its staff to work with the Blair government “in a joint project to make Britain once again a force for good in the world”. He had the grace and political wit to write “once again”. Since then, the phrase – stripped of that crucial qualifier – has been used repeatedly in official publications as if it represented past, present and future reality. In the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, for example, the defence secretary, George Robertson, noted that: “Our forces must also be able to back up our influence as a leading force for good in the world” (the phrase appeared another nine times throughout the document). It also appeared in the 2005 Defence Industrial Strategy. In 2019 Dominic Raab, then foreign secretary, claimed that “Global Britain is leading the world as a force for good”. The “Integrated Review” of 2021 claimed “a renewed commitment to the UK as a force for good in the world”. 

Arthur Snell, a British diplomat between the late 1990s and 2014, who served in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, is contemptuous of the idea and the delusions behind it. “Put bluntly,” he writes, “a lot of the bad stuff happening right now is happening because of Britain.” From Kosovo to Brexit, Britain’s role in the world has been a force less for good than for the lamentable and abhorrent. It never stops to ask if it could actually “punch above its weight”, or even whether it should be trying to punch at all. Snell exaggerates the UK’s status in world affairs, but nonetheless offers a lucid rap sheet of egregious errors and self-delusions that have left destruction in their wake.

Continued in the New Statesman 24 August 2022