An Ethical British Foreign Policy?
Robin Cook’s vision of an ethical foreign policy was a good idea, but New Labour failed to deliver it. Corbyn’s put it back on the ballot and this time, Labour mean it.
UK Politics
James Whittaker
_________________________________________________________
“Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension” explained Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary in 1997. An ethical foreign policy is not only good for its own sake: it prevents blowback and ensures stability and security. Fast forward to 2017 and Theresa May continues to permit arms sales to regimes which violate human rights and make the world a more dangerous place. Invoking Cook’s vision, Labour have now promised to block such arms sales. While New Labour failed to live up to Cook’s rhetoric, Labour’s 2017 manifesto and Jeremy Corbyn’s own foreign policy record suggest that things would be different this time around.
Cook’s foreign policy with “an ethical dimension” seemed to signal a departure from the Thatcherite era. Thatcher’s foreign policy was defined by a kneejerk and ethically dubious anti-communsim. She notoriously called the African National Congress “a typical terrorist organization”. Fighting virulently against the sanctions campaign against Apartheid South Africa, the Conservative government were willing to sacrifice morality at the altar of anti-communism. Likewise, General Pinochet, who overthrew an elected socialist government in a military coup, was a firm favourite. Thatcher described Pinochet as a “true friend”, even as he tortured and imprisoned thousands of dissidents.
Thatcher’s kneejerk anti-communism made the world a more dangerous place. Weapons were sent to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, who were an antecedent to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, of which Bin Laden was a key figurehead. Similarly, Pakistan’s Wahhabi-Islamist military dictator was supported and praised by Thatcher for his “courage and skill”. Later, the Major government found itself embroiled in the Arms-to-Iraq scandal. It had been revealed that the Conservatives had sent arms to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War: Khomeini’s Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Thus, the Thatcherite foreign policy was unethical and made the world more unstable.
Nonetheless, for all its rhetoric, New Labour failed to deliver an ethical foreign policy too. Even several years before the Iraq war, it had become clear that it had other priorities. Peter Hain, a Foreign Office minister at the time, worried that Cook’s moralism “was a hook on which we found ourselves”. The Labour government continued to back Suharto’s Indonesia which had a human rights record comparable to Ba’athist Iraq in its egregiousness. Britain was delivering BAE’s Hawk jets for Indonesia to use against the East Timorese even as Australia was carrying out a peacekeeping mission and the EU attempted to enforce an arms embargo. Equally, the Blair government was also keen to export Hawk jets to Mugabe’s notoriously dictatorial regime in Zimbabwe. Weapons were also funnelled to the Colombian government which colluded with paramilitaries involved in extrajudicial and politically-motivated executions. Recent documents have also revealed the cooperative relationship Blair enjoyed with Gaddafi’s regime at the time too. MI5 was allegedly involved in rendering terrorist suspects to Libya where they could be tortured for information. Add to this Blair’s relationship with Bush and the calamitous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and it’s not a pretty picture. Hence, New Labour fell far short of its moralistic foreign policy rhetoric.
Furthermore, more recent British foreign policy has shown that the Conservatives haven’t changed their spots. Despite David Cameron’s humanitarian rhetoric, the House of Commons revealed that the UK spent 13 times more money bombing Libya than rebuilding it. IS and other Wahhabists also exploited the failed state that emerged after the intervention. Likewise, from Thatcher, through to May, all British governments have arranged weapons contracts with Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s leading exporters of terrorism.
Nonetheless, under May, the callous and dangerous policy of legitimising and empowering unsavoury regimes has reached a new level of brazenness. The Saudi regime has bombed Yemeni civilians using British planes and British bombs. Yemen remains under blockade, from the UK among others, even as the humanitarian situation becomes extremely desperate. This has created a situation which local IS and Al-Qaeda groups have benefited from immensely. Erdogan’s Turkey, another regime with a questionable relationship with Islamist terrorism, is also being armed to the teeth even as it locks up journalists and destroys whole Kurdish towns. Finally, Duterte of the Phillipines, who made headlines last year for his extrajudicial execution of thousands, “shares British values” according to Conservative trade minister Liam Fox.
Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry has been extremely critical of this unethical approach. A Labour government would stop arms sales to repressive regimes and quit cosying up to King Salman, Duterte, Erdogan and, of course, Trump. Corbyn’s foreign policy will be one “with integrity and human rights at its core”. This time around, Labour need to be taken at their word too. Corbyn’s own record shows that when it comes to foreign policy, he was never singing from New Labour’s hymn sheet. Indeed, Labour is now a very different beast to the Blair years. Even Conservative commentators like Peter Hitchens and Peter Oborne admire Corbyn’s intervention in the foreign policy debate.
As well as opposing war in the Middle East, Corbyn opposed arming Iraq in the 1980s and was famously arrested while protesting against apartheid. Corbyn was also an opponent of Pinochet’s regime and he campaigned for his extradition and arrest for crimes against humanity. He’s also a steadfast defender of the civil, national and political rights of minorities such as the Palestinians, Kurds and the Irish Catholics. Labour’s reversal of the Saudi prison contract that Cameron’s government had arranged, was a sign of things to come.
A foreign policy devoid of ethics has been a mainstay of contemporary British politics, despite the fact it makes the world (and Britain) less secure. However, Corbyn bucks this trend. We might imagine how the world would have looked if Cook had meant what he said about an ethical foreign policy. More important however, is to contemplate how Labour’s ethical foreign policy could offer a model on how to make a dangerous and unstable world that bit safer.
