The decision to hold the Iraq inquiry in secret shows Gordon Brown has not understood the 21st century preconditions of a liberal internationalist foreign policy.

Those preconditions were set out in 2007 by Anne Marie Slaughter, now President Obama’s Head of Policy Planning at the State Department, in Democratiya. She told me that the most radical difference in the foreign policy terrain is that it is invaded by the domestic and the popular more than ever before.

‘It used to be that the world of ‘foreign policy’ was a ‘post-election’ world. In other words, the elections were run on bread and butter issues and then when somebody came into office, he or she could appoint the foreign minister and that person would work with the diplomats. Well, no more. You really have got to be paying attention to what sells domestically, and at the same time know how to take that little political space you’ve got, intercept it with the political space of 191 other nations, or at least the nations of a region, and create something that will actually fly. Because, these days, we have to engage a much wider group of citizens in decisions about our foreign policy if we’re going to be able to create the political space necessary to do what we need to do.’

The trauma of Iraq narrowed that ‘political space’ drastically because it caused a dramatic collapse of trust among the public, and because the intervention was, in so many respects, a disaster. Learning the lessons of Iraq in an open and transparent public inquiry, and really engaging the British people in that inquiry, just might have begun the work of restoring some of the trust, and so some of the political space, needed to create what we might call the doctrine of the international community 2.0. Gordon Brown’s secret enquiry will not.