In a House of Commons vote on supporting the UN-approved commitment to Libya, only 13 of the 570 members of Parliament present rejected the motion. And of 280 Tories, only one dared say no. This from the party of Lord Salisbury and “splendid isolation.” ~Freddy Gray

I enjoyed Freddy’s article, and he is correct that the Tories are now defined even more by an interventionist foreign policy than the GOP is here in the U.S. Despite having made some of the right noises once he was leading the opposition, Cameron remained a supporter of the Iraq war all along. Despite some hints of restraint coming from Hague on Libya early on, he has become one of the leading figures in orchestrating the Libyan war. When people warned that Cameron was a Tory version of Tony Blair, they usually meant that he was imitating New Labour on domestic policy, but clearly the Blair mimicry extends to foreign affairs as well.

This is disappointing for a few reasons. As an early Cameron critic, I had started to give him the benefit of the doubt on account of his austerity budgeting and some of the hints of Red Toryism in his “Big Society” scheme, and I had been encouraged by his willingness to criticize neoconservatism. Thanks to the Libyan intervention, Cameron is going to have to undo some of the military spending cuts he pledged to make, the “Big Society” is going to be sidelined as Libya eats up time, attention, and resources that might be used elsewhere, and the neoconservatives in his Cabinet are in the ascendant. Most of the things that seemed promising about Cameron and the coalition government are vanishing.

The coalition government seemed as if it were going to be more sensible in foreign policy than Labour had been, and the biggest problem that the coalition government seemed to have was that it might be perceived as insufficiently Atlanticist. Instead, the coalition has produced something like the worst of both worlds: the humanitarian interventionist rhetoric of the Liberal Democrats combined with the neoconservative Tory eagerness to use military force. There had been a fear among interventionists and a hope among non-interventionists in the U.S. that a British government dominated by skeptics of the lopsided “special relationship” would be less willing to support future American wars of choice. Instead, the coalition government has been responsible for helping to pull the U.S. into one of its wars of choice. Perhaps this will help Americans discover what a bad deal “special” relationships tend to be.

Freddy and I are in agreement about all of this. However, his remark about “splendid isolation” is a little bit off. There are things to admire about Lord Salisbury and his government, but British foreign policy during the Conservative-Unionist government that he led wasn’t as encouraging an example as Freddy suggests. “Splendid isolation” was a phrase coined by the aggressive imperialist and leading Liberal Unionist Joseph Chamberlain, who was Colonial Secretary under Salisbury and the driving force behind the South African War. Talk of “splendid isolation” was his attempt to spin the growing diplomatic isolation Britain experienced as a result of its war of conquest against the Afrikaner republics. To appreciate how different the world was then, we need only recall that American public opinion was strongly sympathetic to the Afrikaners and hostile to British imperialism, and it was the British public embracing jingoism abroad.

The first use of the phrase “splendid isolation” came in 1900 when Chamberlain was articulating a vision for a united British imperial system that would allow Britain to rely on its colonial possessions, including those recently acquired by the defeat of the Boers, to sustain it in the face of international isolation.

According to a retrieved New York Times article dated October 25, 1900, Chamberlain said this after describing the “splendid isolation”:

The new imperialism means the recognition of the fact that all British colonies are entitled to the same rights as England herself. I hope that the federation of Canada and Australia will be an example to South Africa. Imperial federation will ensure the empire to continue its mission of justice and civilization, its mission of peace.

It’s worth noting that he made these remarks in the wake of the success of the first phase of the South African War. This was before it dragged on into its ugly counterinsurgency phase against the kommandos that involved scorched earth tactics in the countryside and rounding up Boers into concentration camps. It was the sort of premature triumphalism that has characterized more recent American wars. How Chamberlain reconciled unprovoked wars of imperial conquest with a mission of peace is anyone’s guess. In any case, this is yet another example of how isolation and peace don’t have anything to do with each other, and more often than not the governments that seek or experience isolation are not minding their own business at all.