Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I join the many noble Lords who have thanked the most reverend Primate for introducing this debate on this subject, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, for his comments on hard power.

Reconciliation of course revolves around working with other people. One of the things we are about to do in leaving the EU is to remove some of our areas of political co-operation. We will no longer be part of the political co-operation that exists within the EU. They will come to joint statements and we will be invited to associate ourselves with them but we will not be in the room drafting them. We can give them our input in advance and it may or may not be taken into account but the fact is that, like Norway and Canada, we will only be invited to associate ourselves with them.

We could possibly learn a bit by adjusting our foreign policy to be a bit more like that of Norway and Canada, because one of the points that I would make to the noble Lords who have spoken, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, is that the illusion that we have much in the way of independent hard power is exactly that: an illusion. Since we joined the EU, our defence forces have moved from a size that could recapture the Falklands to one where we would be jolly lucky if we could recapture the Isle of Wight. We do not have any effective defence forces on a world basis. We have a fairly adequate force for defending ourselves, but that is about as far as it goes.

We will also notice the difference in our ability to conciliate at the United Nations. There is one country in the EU that is secretly quite happy to see Britain go, and that is France because it will become the only P5 member of the EU and will effectively become the undisputed champion co-ordinator of EU responses to UN initiatives. Again, we will be invited to comment, but we will not be in the room and we will not be shaping those comments. The French Quai d’Orsay is the only other really excellent diplomatic service in Europe, and it will move into the gap because it is capable of doing so.

There is another area where we will find it difficult to conciliate. We have lived for many years under the illusion that NATO defends Europe, almost as though the other members of the EU had nothing to do with it. To an extent, of course, they did not because they thought NATO was an Anglo-American club. They are not too keen on introducing a 2% contribution to a club where they do not see themselves having much influence. Britain has consistently blocked the development of a military capacity in Europe. That block is going to be removed. No one in Europe believes that President Trump is committed to the defence of Europe; they believe that, like most American Presidents, he is committed to the defence of the United States. So Europe sees itself as needing to develop its military capacity, not in the way that it has been developed until now but very much more in a defensive capacity, with the capacity to keep the peace within its own shores.

What should we aim for? The first thing that the forces for reconciliation—the FCO, the British Council and the World Service of the BBC—need is money. The idea that you can constantly cut back on your agents of soft power is totally counterproductive to carving Britain out a new place in the world. There is a need for us to nurture those three institutions, all of them widely respected. I think particularly of the British Council, which in many areas is little more than a business for running language schools. It needs far more input in promoting British values and Britain’s unique contribution.

We also need to reconcile our attitude to human rights on a broader plane than we have. I wonder what the reaction would have been if Mr Jamal Khashoggi had been murdered in the Iranian embassy or consulate in Istanbul. I think it would have been very different: not an embarrassed cover-up, pretending that it did not happen, which is going on at most levels—except, interestingly, in the United States Senate. There would have been outcry. There should be outcry. We must get away from what I think of as selective outcry and step a little away from the policies of Washington when we look at what is in our self-interest.

I met Bashar al-Assad on three occasions before the Syrian war started. It was not the nicest place in the world—no one is pretending it was—but the Christian and Jewish communities had a certain amount of stability there. I always believed that there was some prospect of nudging him forward—more so than in some other Arab states, incidentally. The heavy-handed way we dealt with it has destabilised the region and the border with Israel. It has brought an enormous influx of refugees into Turkey—another country we are prone to misunderstand when it suits us—and it will be with us for many years to come.

It is no good complaining about a refugee crisis when we have caused most of the refugees to exist. These people did not wish to blow up their homes in Aleppo so that they could come to Stuttgart; they wanted to live in Aleppo, but we in Britain and the United States promoted a war which has ended in the dreadful situation there is now.

Yes, we need reconciliation. One element on the way to getting it is to stop believing that we must always have an enemy. However much hard power we have, we are not going to march on Moscow. At some point, we must settle down and try to sort out the outstanding and large problems of Europe, many of which are connected not to Gorbachev or Putin but to the disastrous Yeltsin years, when the Soviet Union was in a state of virtual meltdown. When we talk about Russian billionaires in London, we seldom extend the sentence to say, “Russian people who are billionaires because they have appropriated the assets of their country”. Very few of them worked for their billionaire status. We need to help Russia to re-establish itself but make it clear that there are limits beyond which it cannot go. When I hear that Macron has been in Russia, or that others have been there five times this year, or that Chancellor Merkel—who speaks fluent Russian, as Putin speaks German—is on the phone once a fortnight, but we cannot manage to send even a junior Minister to the World Cup final in Moscow, I wonder if our concept of how to reconcile our relations with Russia is sound, sensible or even halfway thought out.

I conclude on this point about the UN peacekeeping forces. I was recently privileged to go on a delegation to Vietnam on behalf of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. While we were there, we met representatives of the defence ministry. They were about to send a peacekeeping mission to South Sudan as part of the UN force. It was obvious to me that they had not the faintest idea what they were doing. I am pleased to say that the British military attaché in Hanoi is advising the Vietnamese. I raised a simple problem. They said, “What problems do you think we might encounter?” I said, “You could well find that one of your soldiers has a serious family bereavement or illness. You need plans to bring him back”. They said, “Do we?” I said, “Of course you do. The morale of the whole force will collapse if it is seen that you have no plans to offer humanitarian assistance to your soldiers”. I very much take on board the point made about UN peacekeeping forces.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, but with nowhere near his experience, I have had much experience of Cyprus over the years, nearly all of it in the north. The UN peacekeeping force there is regarded as a fixed body. They think it will always be there. They do not need to solve the conflict because it will be there. President Trump occasionally does something sensible. He asked, “Why are we still funding it after all these years? Why is it not being sorted out?” To an extent, UN peacekeeping forces have been seen as an agent for reconciliation when, in reality, they have just been an element for control.

We have a lot of things to think about. I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for initiating this debate, which has enabled us to have a wide-ranging discussion over a whole area that we need to think about very carefully in these perilous foreign policy times, in what now appears to be a post-Brexit world.