Eyebrows were raised when Labour MPs attended the launch of the Henry Jackson Society last November. The statement of principles was signed by academics and politicians from across the political spectrum. I am one of the two former Labour ministers who put their names to the list.
The society was formed to provide a cross-party platform for the kind of robust foreign policy debate that has been missing since the end of the cold war. Yet the only question for most journalists was: ‘why are Labour MPs supporting a bunch of neo-cons?’
This response misses the point and closes down a necessary debate. In Britain, ‘neo-con’ is a term of abuse. While the same may be true in parts of America, at least there a vigorous debate is taking place. In the UK, we don’t much like talking about the nature and necessity of power.
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said: ‘There has never been a scheme of justice in history which does not have the balance of power as its foundation. If the democratic nations fail, their failure must be partly attributed to the faulty strategy of idealists who have too many illusions when they face realists who have too little conscience.’
That’s where Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson comes in: loyal Democrat; social liberal; staunch trade unionist; civil rights activist; environmentalist; a man prepared to confront the evils of the Soviet Union; and who established human rights at the centre of US foreign policy. Power and force are inescapable, he argued, and his willingness to use them was something that made many liberals and conservatives uncomfortable.
When Labour was elected in1997, the government separated international development aid from foreign policy. The former was no longer to be merely a tool of the latter, but something important in its own right. There was talk of an ‘ethical foreign policy’, but this largely meant not doing things such as exporting arms, rather than examining at what stage a commitment to human rights gives rise to a duty to protect and a readiness to use force.
When the former Yugoslavia broke up in the early 1990s, non-intervention was tested to destruction. Right in the heart of Europe, thousands of women were raped, the boys and men of entire villages shot and buried in mass graves, and we witnessed the kind of ethnic cleansing which we thought had been consigned to the history books. We watched and waited. The United Nations did not act. Eventually, however, Britain and America did, and, after two-and-a-half years of fighting and 250,000 dead, the war in Bosnia ended.
The Balkan conflict called into question the responses of both left and right. The then-Conservative government and the former foreign secretaries Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind were scornful of the involvement in the Balkans, opposing anything that smacked of morality or idealism in foreign policy. By contrast, the left has traditionally been the great defender of human rights, arguing for international institutions, international criminal courts, development aid, conflict prevention and peace keeping. This is all well and good, but has been a failure time and time-again when dictators, such as Milosevic, simply do not respond.
What do we do at this point? Stand by and watch hundreds of thousands of people get slaughtered? Get better and better at mopping up the blood and giving food to the starving so that those very dictators can go on using hunger as a weapon of war? Or does there come a point when outside intervention and the use of force is justified?
Whatever the answer, at least we should ask the question. That’s why I signed the Henry Jackson Society’s founding statement, which argues for: ‘the spread of democracy not only on idealistic grounds, but also because this is the surest guarantee of security’. This is not a conspiracy to exploit the schism on the British left over Iraq and to create a new governing consensus of the right. The Henry Jackson Society is, and should be, supported by people from all parts of the political spectrum.