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adammcnestrie
18 June 2008 at 22:27

Britain’s foreign policy is being undermined by an unwillingness to acknowledge the full force of an uncomfortable truth: Britain does not have the power to command the foreign policy outcomes that it considers desperately important. The primary baleful consequence is the default decision to continue to fight counter-insurgent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have adopted a policy of wait-and-see or occupy-and-hope, an aimless watching brief, whilst we wait for a deus ex machina to deliver us from our folly. The government’s hope of progress, of “success” is so inane because if one thinks imagines five years time, ten years, twenty – it isn’t clear how any of the fundamentals of the stalemate are going to have changed. Except the atrophy of the western will to maintain these occupations.

We remain in both countries because we don’t have the strength to accept that what we have been trying to do is impossible. We are there because things have not become bad enough, the enterprise has not worn itself out sufficiently, for us to admit that it is beyond us. Before we can conscience withdrawal we have to make sure that we have atoned for our hubris through noble suffering.

The second baleful consequence is a foreign policy that looks inward, not outwards – one which aims to assuage our howling consciences, rather than effecting desired outcomes. The combination of a collection of consciences quickened by the globalised media and British impotence reduces much of foreign policy discussion to the elaboration of empty pieties. Amongst this politics of the conscience-ache, realist discussions of power and national interest are completely absent; as is a clear-headed appraisal of the potentialities (as well as disadvantages) of American power.

Read more at my blog, just who the hell are we?, at:

http://adammcnestrie.wordpress.com/