The Tories are not jingoes
Douglas Hurd believes there are better, more sober conservative approaches to foreign policy than interventionism
Alively conference, a stately home looking out on acres of daffodils tossed by an Atlantic gale — from Knowsley the Earls of Derby dominated Lancashire. It was to Knowsley that the Conservative History Society and the University of East Anglia summoned us to join a work of political resurrection. The 14th Earl was the best debater of his time, translator of the Iliad, patron of the turf, three times prime minister, now forgotten. The 15th Earl was foreign secretary under Disraeli until forced out of office by his prime minister; he crossed the floor to serve Gladstone, then recrossed as a Liberal Unionist over Home Rule.
But we were not there simply as an act of piety to the Stanley family. The papers read to us began to pose a heretical question. What is the essential tradition of Conservative foreign policy? At first sight few would doubt the answer. Many of us were brought up on 'Land of Hope and Glory', the platform decked with the Union Flag, the loudly applauded speeches about 'putting the Great back in Britain'. We enjoyed it all enormously. Without realising that there were other definitions, we gained the impression that patriotism was a rather noisy business, which might involve being rude to foreigners and, by jingo, if necessary bombarding their ports or invading their countries. This tradition goes back to Disraeli. That great conjuror took up Palmerston's mantle, stood up to the Russians, outwitted the French, fought Zulus and Afghans, bought the Suez Canal and made Victoria Empress of India.
His successor, Lord Salisbury, stood grandly outside any tradition, and the Great War was too awful an event to fit any category. But after 1918 the argument began again — argument, because there was a different strain of our tradition. Castlereagh, then Wellington, Peel and the two Derbys represented a more sober Conservatism, wary of rhetorical xenophobia and the waste of lives, conscious of the need for order and balance in the world. Neville Chamberlain and Halifax tried to apply this approach to the fascist dictators. Their failure and the political triumph of Churchill in 1940 settled the debate for a generation. Appeasement, which till then had been a word of praise, became the ultimate in political abuse. No doubt the peacemakers were still blessed, but somehow they had to set about their work without making any compromises or listening to any points of view except their own. Eden, a skilled practitioner of the cautious approach, used it in 1954 to end the first Indo-China war, then abandoned it two years later and led us into the disaster of Suez, replete with patriotic phrases and false analogies.
Tony Blair recaptured from the Tories the noisy definition of patriotism. He has added an element of his own, or rather borrowed it from the American missionary tradition. He proclaimed the doctrine of interventionism. The use of force need no longer be confined to protecting our own interests. It is justified, indeed it becomes a duty, when foreign rulers behave abominably to their own people. Those who enthusiastically follow this path criticised with some justice our uncertain handling of the Bosnian crisis. We saved lives, we sent troops, but not in a way which forced a solution. The war dragged on despite all our peacemaking efforts, and only ended when President Clinton imposed a peace at Dayton.
The next crisis, in Kosovo, was briskly dealt with. Innocent people were killed, but hardly any on our side. Milosevic was bundled out of Kosovo and then out of power. I suspect this was the high point of interventionism in this generation. At the time of Kosovo I wrote, 'We are all interventionists now.'
But that was 1997. How about May 2004? We simply do not know. For these traditions are shaped by events, not by rational discussion. We are now in the middle of a test in Iraq which will shape our thoughts and actions for years to come. Will the experience of Iraq, by producing a halfway decent outcome, consolidate the lesson which the Prime Minister tries to teach us? Or will it extinguish the doctrine of military intervention for humanitarian purposes in the same way as the experience of Munich extinguished the doctrine of appeasement?
Neither the one nor the other, I expect. The doctrine itself will not go away. There will always in this world of mass television be pressures to intervene to stop monstrosities; it will sometimes be possible and right to do so.
Intervention cannot be a universal duty. There was a recent rush to apologise for the world's failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda; at the same time we sit inactive while something not entirely different happens in western Sudan. We must not be deceived by our own generalised rhetoric. Intervention will always be partial and occasional.
Next, intervention needs some authority apart from the judgment of those who wish to intervene. The Security Council of the UN is defective in many ways, but the Charter under which it operates is as far as the world has got in devising a source of such authority. Failing a Security Council resolution, those who intervene need at least to show what the American founding fathers called 'a decent respect for the opinion of mankind'. The Anglo-American invasion without such backing set a precedent for other big countries, say China or Russia, to dismantle neighbouring regimes which they dislike. Somehow we must retrieve the precedent we have set. This will certainly involve Britain being willing to differ occasionally from the United States. A worthwhile friendship must be strong enough to bear this strain. The unwritten bargain by which Tony Blair welcomes in public every twist of American policy in exchange for unspecified private influence is no longer credible.
Lastly, those concerned with intervention must consider the aftermath. In the recent film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara, now 88, broods over the lessons of his own experience. One of these is that in war you have to do evil to achieve good. That is a hard calculation to get right. We have freed Iraq from a brutal tyranny, losing several hundred of our own men, killing about 15,000 Iraqis, pushing the country into disorder, and discrediting our own reputation for good sense and humanity. We have to get that equation into better shape in the next few months. We have to regard McNamara's other advice — act in proportion to the evil you are fighting, and know what you are up against. In Iraq we have ignored both lessons.
War is about killing and being killed — a truism familiar to generals but one which politicians and commentators in their excitement sometimes forget. We are sobering up now.
Douglas Hurd was Foreign Secretary from 1989 to 1995. His memoirs were published last October and he has started work on a life of Sir Robert Peel.
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