What the Labour party’s foreign policy should be for

To think about a Labour foreign policy after Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the midst of Syria and Ukraine, we need to think about the nature of power in the information age. The world’s old security paradigm is broken. Liberal interventionists need to understand this change so they can rethink the basis for supporting the forces around the world that are pushing for freedom and pluralism. This has significant implications for the foreign policy of a liberal interventionist party like Labour. At times in the last two decades we have been militant in our interventionism. That path liberated the people of Iraq and Afghanistan but failed them in the aftermath of war. Militancy was unsustainable in terms of the terrible human cost and the lack of consensual support in the United Kingdom. The people who gave their lives to try and build liberal and pluralist states in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be left to their fate. Labour has to have a meaningful policy for the stabilisation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it has to have a response to Syria and Ukraine.

Britain does not have the force or resources to fulfil our obligations under the responsibility to protect through the use of hard power and the United States does not have the will to carry out regime change on the basis of the long-term and massive commitment necessary to achieve a sustainable governance system. We understand the limits of hard power. This does not mean that we are powerless, or that we need to listen to the appeasers and isolationists of the left whose understanding of modern Russia seems to be derived from a misreading of the cold war long over. They have no grasp of Putinism. Nor does it mean that the policy of the UK should be determined by our partners in the European Union or by the vagaries of the flawed international governance system. It does mean that it must conform to international law. Though unilateral action can be morally right and legally justifiable, even if it is vetoed by Russia on the security council, collective action is always better.

The new security paradigm, which is not reflected in the institutionalised structures of collective action, will require new forms of action sanctioned by international law in new ways. The challenge for the Labour party is to articulate what the architecture of the new security paradigm should look like, and to reserve the right, with our Nato partners, to pursue an independent course when the responsibility to protect demands it. This thinking and these actions need to be firmly based on the responsibility to protect, on the principle of the global application of equality of opportunity and on internationalism that is based on actions and not just words. This does not mean that liberal interventionism equals military intervention. But it does mean that a Labour foreign policy is not based on a contract of mutual indifference, but a social contract of mutual care.

Our responsibility to Iraq and Afghanistan should be redoubled in terms of the exercise of soft power support. That means dealing with Pakistan. Britain is in a unique position to do so. Every means of soft power at our disposal should be directed towards a change of policy in Pakistan. In Iraq, a Labour policy must be one of continued engagement through soft power at all levels. We have extended the hand of friendship and support for a long time, and quite rightly, to the Kurds. We should extend that to the rest of the country. It is madness that Iraq is not a priority country for the UK government. The threat of al-Qaida’s affiliate, ISIS, in Iraq and the spillover of the Syrian war require all the friends of Iraq to step forward with assistance in counterterrorism.

The British genius over the last 200 years has been to almost always have the technology that gave us the strategic edge. From sail to steam to Spitfires to nuclear we have had the technology we needed when we needed it. What we need now are weapons that can support the forces of pluralism wherever they stand, that can understand the nature of complexity and that can read the language and the content and meaning of the global social media world. If Labour is to play a relevant role in the great conflicts of the new security paradigm then it needs to engage with the best principles from its history and harness those through the new mediums of our age in the service of freedom and plurality globally. In the information age the Ministry of Defence should be much more like the World Service, the British Council and UK universities than an aircraft carrier. Nothing illustrates the role we could play better than the Ukrainian crisis, where Russian propaganda has won every round in the media war.

The new shape of militant liberalism needs to be a strategically focused campaigning tool that can: fight alongside the forces of pluralism in the battlegrounds of social media; spread effective communications strategies among those who embrace debate; swamp the internet with objective reporting in all the languages of Babel; and educate writers, thinkers and preachers that the values of tolerance can be reconciled with the surety of faiths. But to do this we need to redefine the foundations of our national mission abroad. This must become a mission to be the BBC of the world. The educator of the world. The champion of dialogue in every conflict. Not neutral but the pluralist power. We have the means. If a fraction of the budget of the Department for International Development were diverted to fund a global communications strategy that stood by every force in the world that supported pluralism it could transform, in the long term, the governance debate. This would alleviate poverty much more effectively and permanently than any number of conventional international development palliatives. It is what the Labour party’s foreign policy should be for.

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