Foreign policy: missing in action?

As observed in a recent Policy Critical post, this election campaign is giving short shrift to foreign affairs. This is understandable in the context of campaign speeches and promises, since voters want to hear most about the issues that have the greatest impact on their day-to-day lives: taxes, healthcare, education and so on.

But how the government conducts its relations with its international partners – and the trade-offs that it must make in deciding what issues to prioritise – also has profound implications for the country’s economy and national security, broadly defined, so these issues deserve to be addressed in much more detail.

It is encouraging that the manifesto statements of all three parties appear to have recognised that Britain’s place in the world has changed in recent decades. Without making too much of the argument that we are a power in decline, it is clear that we cannot afford to maintain the kind of full-spectrum combat capabilities that we enjoyed in the past. In the short term, this is because the financial crisis has limited the resources available to spend on security and defence.

More significantly, the changing nature of the security challenges we face – which include extreme weather, pandemic diseases, nuclear proliferation and transnational crime, as well as more conventional threats such as inter-state conflict and terrorism – mean that the tools and strategies we use to tackle them must also change. Greater specialisation is required, and a commitment to working in partnership with allies old and new should be seen as a strategic imperative, rather than an optional add-on to a unilateral foreign policy.

However, Labour and Conservative acceptance of this principle has not led either party to offer particularly specific suggestions for what Britain should be doing more of and what it should be doing less of. Both manifestos offer long laundry lists of desirable foreign policies – which include maintaining current spending on aid, improving conditions for the Armed Forces and delivering a sustainable peace settlement in Afghanistan – while kicking difficult questions about the cuts that must be made in order to achieve these goals to the strategic defence and security review due to be carried out in post-election period. Only the Liberal Democrats have given a firmer indication of their position on this, through their pledge to rule out the like-for-like replacement of Trident on the grounds that a price tag of £100 billion over the course of its lifetime is unaffordable.

A more realistic debate about the future contours of British foreign policy among the electorate is urgently required: it is a shame that none of the manifestos published this week have seized the opportunity to bring this about.

Alex Glennie

Extreme domestic bias?

The announcement yesterday that Gordon Brown will miss Obama’s nuclear summit is yet another indication of how domestic is trumping foreign policy in this election.

A domestic bias isn’t really surprising of course. In the scrabble for votes politicians focus – naturally – on obvious vote winners; and the electorate focus – naturally – on what happens in their own backyards.

But this concentration on the domestic feels extreme compared even to past electoral battles. Whereas in the past Iraq, the Gleneagles commitments or the need for an ‘ethical foreign policy’ figured large, in 2010 only two ‘foreign’ policy issues are attracting even a marginal degree of attention – Trident and Afghanistan. And crucially, though each encompasses a set of complex considerations, they have been reduced in electoral sloganeering to a simple domestic core, ‘can we afford it?’ (Trident), and ‘how many Brits will die?’ (Afghanistan). (Indeed, the extent to which Afghanistan is now being seen solely through the lens of soldiers’ deaths – ignoring issues of British security, Afghan security, cost, the future of international cooperation, the ‘war on drugs’ and numerous other issues – has become so extreme that even the Army is complaining).

There are two worrying aspects to this trend. First, it seems likely that we are focusing so much on the domestic because things here in the UK seem so bad. When the economy has looked rosy, when we have felt confident about our place in the world – indeed, at times of ‘Cool Britainnia’ – it has been easy to consider events beyond our borders. But when things look rough, when we have to cut a deficit, find jobs for our young people and try to find a way to make our banks work for us, there is a tendency to hunker down. In other words, this isn’t just an electoral trend. Dealing with the deficit and reorganising our economy is a major task which seems likely to preoccupy the next government, whoever is in power.

Even if we have our fingers in our ears, the tree falling in Afghanistan, or the US, or Europe, or China, still makes a sound. In fact, as ippr’s National Security Commission made clear it’s a sound we can less and less afford to ignore. President Obama is calling a summit to try to limit the growing spread of nuclear weapons – a terrifying prospect for the UK. Why do we not see it as a priority? And this is just one of many challenges (including climate change, poverty, terrorism and banking regulation) in our interdependent world that require us all to act together. Let’s start by listening.

Laura Chappell