Britain's global reach is further than ever before - though the doom-mongers may have a point when they criticise our defence spending
What nonsense are the American 'declinists' spouting about us now?
Photo: Bloomberg
By Christopher Meyer
04 Jun 2015
The Telegraph
257 Comments
Sir Christopher Meyer was British Ambassador to the US and Germany and is now a senior associate fellow at RUSI
The hour of the Declinist is upon us – an American term for pundits who preach the inexorable decline of the US. Now they have swivelled their basilisk stare to Britain. This week, the American guru, Ian Bremmer, said: “Britain’s greatest global influence today has fallen to what The Economist manages to write every week”.
Before him, Fareed Zakaria, another US heavyweight, claimed that “Britain had essentially resigned as a global power”. These are not isolated voices. There has been a chorus of lamentation about Britain’s disengaging from the world.
I have to go back to the Seventies to recall a time when our international standing was as open to question as it is today. Then, it was almost a humiliation for a young diplomat like me to represent Britain. The country was wracked by industrial unrest, double-digit inflation and a tumbling currency. Greek style, we had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF.
There is something perversely eccentric about the declinist picture of Britain today. The UK economy of 2015 cannot be remotely compared to 40 years ago. We out-perform most advanced Western economies. The UK attracts prodigious quantities of investment from abroad, with London a pivot of the global economy.
Money is as much part of a nation’s hard power as military might. But there are other ways of measuring a country’s global influence. Britain’s soft power is formidable, beginning with our language. People want to be educated, and to do business, in the Anglophone world. With around a fifth of secondary students at private schools in Britain coming from overseas; and even higher percentages at our universities, the footprint abroad of British values and influence is incalculable. The notion that we are becoming little Englanders is absurd.
But this is not enough for the declinists. Britain, they say, has lost the will and ability to exert diplomatic and military muscle around the world. Much is made of our absence from the front rank of European diplomacy after Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Others point to Parliament’s rejection of Cameron’s wish to intervene in Syria in 2013. Had the West got involved, they argue, then the opposition to Assad would have prevailed and Isil would never have come into being. But the opposition was never a coherent force. Had we – rashly, stupidly – put boots on the ground, our comrades-in-arms would have been the various Al-Qaeda off-shoots, including Isil itself, the unintended offspring of the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. Worse, we would have inserted ourselves into the wider civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and Sunni.
The doom-mongers are on more solid ground when it comes to defence and the Government’s refusal to commit to spending the Nato target of 2 per cent of GDP. But this is only one manifestation of a much deeper problem in our foreign and security policy. In the last five years there has been no discernible strategy. We bomb Isil in Iraq, but not in Syria. In 2011 we rushed aircraft to Libya to protect Benghazi from Gaddafi’s vengeful troops. Then, we helped topple Gadaffi. The result is a failed state, with an Isil presence, that has infected the entire Sahel to the south and bids fair to do likewise to Europe in the north.
It all went wrong with the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) of 2010. This should have been a top-to-bottom review of national security. Instead we got a thinly disguised cost-cutting exercise, which has led to grossly under-resourced diplomacy and armed forces, with international aid inexplicably enjoying a permanent stairway to fiscal heaven.
There will be another SDSR this year. It will be an opportunity to put right the incoherence of the last one. It is high time the Department for International Development were placed under the authority of the Foreign Secretary where it used to belong. The legislation that guarantees aid comprise 0.7 per cent of GDP should be repealed and the money cut back to bilateral projects over which the UK has direct budgetary control. The savings should be apportioned between the Foreign Office and MoD.
The next SDSR should also have something useful to say about intervention abroad. The last time this was done was in 1999 by Tony Blair in Chicago. It is the great unresolved debate of foreign policy. It lies at the heart of declinist disaffection with us. This yearns less for the now-discredited liberal interventionism of Tony Blair, more for Margaret Thatcher’s robust view of the national interest. It puts a premium on rigorous analysis and clear thinking. Read her famous speech made in Bruges in 1988 about Britain’s relationship with Europe, a masterpiece of strategic coherence, as pertinent today as then.
Extrapolating a mega-trend from a brief interlude is usually a fool’s errand. Twenty-five years ago gurus feared the econonomic eclipse of the US by Japan. As predictions go, this was as bad as it gets. If the Government can only deploy a stiff dose of Thatcherian rigour to the approaching SDSR, it will consign the Bremmers and Zakarias to the same dustbin of history.
HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first of the Royal Navy's new 70,600 tonne carriers
What nonsense are the American 'declinists' spouting about us now? - Telegraph
What nonsense are the American 'declinists' spouting about us now?
Photo: Bloomberg
By Christopher Meyer
04 Jun 2015
The Telegraph
Sir Christopher Meyer was British Ambassador to the US and Germany and is now a senior associate fellow at RUSI
The hour of the Declinist is upon us – an American term for pundits who preach the inexorable decline of the US. Now they have swivelled their basilisk stare to Britain. This week, the American guru, Ian Bremmer, said: “Britain’s greatest global influence today has fallen to what The Economist manages to write every week”.
Before him, Fareed Zakaria, another US heavyweight, claimed that “Britain had essentially resigned as a global power”. These are not isolated voices. There has been a chorus of lamentation about Britain’s disengaging from the world.
I have to go back to the Seventies to recall a time when our international standing was as open to question as it is today. Then, it was almost a humiliation for a young diplomat like me to represent Britain. The country was wracked by industrial unrest, double-digit inflation and a tumbling currency. Greek style, we had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF.
There is something perversely eccentric about the declinist picture of Britain today. The UK economy of 2015 cannot be remotely compared to 40 years ago. We out-perform most advanced Western economies. The UK attracts prodigious quantities of investment from abroad, with London a pivot of the global economy.
Money is as much part of a nation’s hard power as military might. But there are other ways of measuring a country’s global influence. Britain’s soft power is formidable, beginning with our language. People want to be educated, and to do business, in the Anglophone world. With around a fifth of secondary students at private schools in Britain coming from overseas; and even higher percentages at our universities, the footprint abroad of British values and influence is incalculable. The notion that we are becoming little Englanders is absurd.
But this is not enough for the declinists. Britain, they say, has lost the will and ability to exert diplomatic and military muscle around the world. Much is made of our absence from the front rank of European diplomacy after Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Others point to Parliament’s rejection of Cameron’s wish to intervene in Syria in 2013. Had the West got involved, they argue, then the opposition to Assad would have prevailed and Isil would never have come into being. But the opposition was never a coherent force. Had we – rashly, stupidly – put boots on the ground, our comrades-in-arms would have been the various Al-Qaeda off-shoots, including Isil itself, the unintended offspring of the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. Worse, we would have inserted ourselves into the wider civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and Sunni.
The doom-mongers are on more solid ground when it comes to defence and the Government’s refusal to commit to spending the Nato target of 2 per cent of GDP. But this is only one manifestation of a much deeper problem in our foreign and security policy. In the last five years there has been no discernible strategy. We bomb Isil in Iraq, but not in Syria. In 2011 we rushed aircraft to Libya to protect Benghazi from Gaddafi’s vengeful troops. Then, we helped topple Gadaffi. The result is a failed state, with an Isil presence, that has infected the entire Sahel to the south and bids fair to do likewise to Europe in the north.
It all went wrong with the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) of 2010. This should have been a top-to-bottom review of national security. Instead we got a thinly disguised cost-cutting exercise, which has led to grossly under-resourced diplomacy and armed forces, with international aid inexplicably enjoying a permanent stairway to fiscal heaven.
There will be another SDSR this year. It will be an opportunity to put right the incoherence of the last one. It is high time the Department for International Development were placed under the authority of the Foreign Secretary where it used to belong. The legislation that guarantees aid comprise 0.7 per cent of GDP should be repealed and the money cut back to bilateral projects over which the UK has direct budgetary control. The savings should be apportioned between the Foreign Office and MoD.
The next SDSR should also have something useful to say about intervention abroad. The last time this was done was in 1999 by Tony Blair in Chicago. It is the great unresolved debate of foreign policy. It lies at the heart of declinist disaffection with us. This yearns less for the now-discredited liberal interventionism of Tony Blair, more for Margaret Thatcher’s robust view of the national interest. It puts a premium on rigorous analysis and clear thinking. Read her famous speech made in Bruges in 1988 about Britain’s relationship with Europe, a masterpiece of strategic coherence, as pertinent today as then.
Extrapolating a mega-trend from a brief interlude is usually a fool’s errand. Twenty-five years ago gurus feared the econonomic eclipse of the US by Japan. As predictions go, this was as bad as it gets. If the Government can only deploy a stiff dose of Thatcherian rigour to the approaching SDSR, it will consign the Bremmers and Zakarias to the same dustbin of history.
HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first of the Royal Navy's new 70,600 tonne carriers
What nonsense are the American 'declinists' spouting about us now? - Telegraph
