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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Britain and the Dishonest Charge of “Retreat” Revisited

Britain isn't "retreating" from the world.
davidcameron

Janan Ganesh criticizes the claim that Britain is retreating from the world:

All zones of public discourse have their excesses and irrationalities, but none like foreign policy. In our golden age of data, this is one area that remains resiliently unmeasurable. So anyone can say anything as long as they say it sonorously and use the word “strategy” a lot.

And so the idea has taken hold that Britain is withdrawing from the world. The charge is built on topical grievances against Prime Minister David Cameron: his euroscepticism, his implied cuts to the defence budget in the coming years, his absence from the Franco-German diplomatic front against Russia. These observations are each true, to a point, but they add up to a partial reading.

It would be one thing if Britain were dramatically reducing its engagement with the rest of the world, but it isn’t doing that. Ganesh goes on to explain that Britain has been quite active in its international relations under Cameron. Being active is not the same as being successful, but that is a different question. He notes that the critics’ problem with Cameron is not that he is engaging in “retreat” or withdrawal from the world, but that he isn’t being as activist as they want or he isn’t doing what they would like him to be doing. Compared to some of his most recent predecessors, especially Blair, Cameron may not be as preoccupied with foreign policy, but then Blair’s hyperactivity and constant meddling abroad is hardly an example one should aspire to match.

Ganesh continues:

Critics of Britain’s insularity tend to come in two forms: those who do not mean what they say, and those who do not know what they mean.

It is often the case that hawkish critics use the charge of “retreat” dishonestly. They know very well that no “retreat” has taken place, but they want an even more aggressive and activist policy than the current one. They prefer to make it seem as if they are the only ones offering a foreign policy of engagement with the rest of the world, since that allows their typically bad policy preferences avoid close scrutiny. The goal of these hawks is to make it seems as if their preferences are synonymous with being an internationalist, and that anything less than what they want represents withdrawal.

We’re also familiar with the second group of critics here in the U.S. These critics rely heavily on generalities and vapid calls for “leadership” and “action” and insist on the need to “do more”:

In the absence of precise answers to these questions, the criticism boils down to a hunch that Mr Cameron should put himself about a bit more, as if a prime minister is delinquent in his duties by not maximising his country’s visibility. We chuckle at armchair football coaches who yell at players on screen to run about more and get stuck in, but this mania for perpetual motion in foreign affairs is not much different.

Attacking Cameron for presiding over British “retreat” is all the more strange when one considers that the biggest single foreign undertaking of his government has been the war in Libya, which has proven to be so disastrous for Libya and the surrounding region. This was a war that had broad support across all major parties in Parliament, and it was one that Cameron urged the U.S. to join. It was also a colossal blunder. Cameron wasn’t chastened by this failure, and was only too willing to join in another unnecessary war in 2013. He could have added a foolish war in Syria to his list of achievements if he had not been blocked by the House of Commons. Given that record, one would think that Cameron would be actively discouraged from doing more than he absolutely has to on foreign policy rather than being called on to interfere in a lot of other places.

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