At a time when we should be forging new alliances with the powers that will affect our destiny, when we should be vigorously promoting new and more flexible structures for the EU, when we should be building up the Commonwealth as the ideal soft power network of the future, at a time when we should be massively modernising our security forces to meet asymmetric threats, when we should be reconstructing and upgrading our whole diplomatic system, we are doing none of those things.
We need to rethink our foreign policy
As a dynamic and threatening new world order evolves, the country is drifting, says David Howell. Lord Howell of Guildford is a Conservative spokesman on foreign affairs, and former head of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee
A country is defined by its foreign policy. And given the almost universal uncertainty about the state of the economy, and the reputation of our political and parliamentary institutions, the need for clarity in our national role and purposes becomes more necessary than ever.
At the same time, however, an amazing new world has evolved around us. The US remains a great and powerful nation, but its unipolar moment has passed. It no longer leads the world, because there is no single "top dog" in the old sense. Pax Americana is no more; and Western hegemony is in severe decline.
This is why it is surely time for a clean break, and a new strategic direction – or, at the very least, to answer some immediate and important questions for British foreign policy. Do we have the right stances and tones, as well as the right distribution of diplomatic resources, in our relations with Brussels, with the new rising powers of Asia and the Middle East, and especially with Washington? Or does President Obama's brush-off of Gordon Brown in New York this week now tell us a different story?
Following on from that, do we have the right military and security dispositions to meet these new conditions? Are the international institutions of the 20th century the right ones for the new century? We take pride in belonging to so many of them – Nato, the EU, the United Nations Security Council, the World Trade Organisation – but are they still the best channels for projecting our aims and guarding our security today?
Are we investing in the Commonwealth as a power network of the future, embracing as it does some of the fastest growing and most dynamic nations on earth? Are we right to invest so much time and effort in institutional reform of the EU, and to channel so much of our overseas development efforts through it? Have we adjusted our foreign policy priorities to our new pattern of energy needs, environmental imperatives and climate change concerns?
Perhaps above all, do we have the right ministerial and administrative systems in London to adjust, flexibly and swiftly, to the new conditions, and the right balance and co-ordination between our major departments concerned with overseas affairs?
There is a single answer to all these questions: a blunt "no". As foreign secretaries come and go, quarterly and annual reports continue to flow from the Foreign Office, asserting the same priorities, sometimes shuffled a bit to meet new fashions (such as climate change). The keystones are the European Union, and the UN. Barely a mention of the Commonwealth network. The old Adam – a fear of being "left out" of the European integration show – still dominates the Foreign Office's thinking. Yet the UK's history, experience and connections give it a potentially huge advantage.
The Commonwealth is weak today, not least because it is startlingly under-resourced. The British contribution works out at about 20p per person per year, as against £54 per person to the EU. A more ambitious and better-resourced Commonwealth, prepared to harden somewhat its international response to world issues, and to welcome other like-minded democracies, could deliver influence and reach for British interests which other nations would envy.
Meanwhile, with North Sea oil and gas running down, the UK has again become a major importer of both fuels. Procuring the gas we need reliably and pushing nuclear energy forward should both be foreign policy priorities. After all, what could be more central to our security than reliable power supplies?
But perhaps the most important and immediate issue of all is how to establish the right machinery to carry out our agenda. Lord Hurd, the distinguished former Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, has spoken of a "malaise" developing in Britain's once much-praised diplomatic service, and of a "hollowing out" of the Foreign Office. Both he and many others have expressed unease at the extraordinary imbalance that has developed between the tight funding of the FCO and the resources allocated to the Department for International Development, now with a budget four times larger. If the two departments were united in their perceptions of our foreign-policy goals, that would present no more than a problem of co-ordination. But that is far from the case.
A dispiriting picture emerges. At a time when we should be forging new alliances with the powers that will affect our destiny, when we should be vigorously promoting new and more flexible structures for the EU, when we should be building up the Commonwealth as the ideal soft power network of the future, at a time when we should be massively modernising our security forces to meet asymmetric threats, when we should be reconstructing and upgrading our whole diplomatic system, we are doing none of those things.
In the 1930s, Churchill described Britain's foreign policy as being "adamant for drift". The same could be said now.
This article appears in The Daily Telegraph today.