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Cameron Was Always an Interventionist

Oliver Kamm gets more things wrong: But from Afghanistan to Libya to Syria, Cameron’s foreign policy has been quite different from the modest, Major-like attitude that was expected of him. A “Major-like attitude” wasn’t expected of him. The similarities between Cameron and Blair on foreign policy were apparent from the beginning. During the run-up to […]

Oliver Kamm gets more things wrong:

But from Afghanistan to Libya to Syria, Cameron’s foreign policy has been quite different from the modest, Major-like attitude that was expected of him.

A “Major-like attitude” wasn’t expected of him. The similarities between Cameron and Blair on foreign policy were apparent from the beginning. During the run-up to the Libyan war, I noted that Cameron’s support for intervention wasn’t surprising at all:

Despite occasionally saying reasonable-sounding things in the last few years, Cameron was a member of the Tory front bench that supported the invasion of Iraq, and as Massie reminds us he made a fool of himself over Georgia. Hague remains Foreign Secretary, and he belongs to that batch of Tories that fell under the sway of hawkish interventionism and Hannan-esque preaching about democracy during the first decade of the century*. Cameron and McCain both wanted to show solidarity with Georgia in 2008, which caused them to stake out misguided and somewhat irrational positions on a conflict that they didn’t really understand, and both of them have been at it again in Libya.

Pretending that Cameron was not perceived to be an interventionist all along is like mistaking Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war as an indication of what to expect from his foreign policy as a whole, except that in Cameron’s case there were even fewer signs that he would be different from Blair once in office. In the speech that Cameron gave that represented his sharpest criticism of U.S. foreign policy before or since, Cameron said the following:

Let me start by making clear where I agree with the neo-conservative approach. I fully appreciate the scale of the threat we face. I believe that the leadership of the United States, supported by Britain, is central to the struggle in which we are engaged. I believe that the neo-conservatives are right to argue that extending freedom is an essential objective of western foreign policy. And I agree that western powers should be prepared, in the last resort, to use military force. We know from history that a country must be ready to defend itself and its allies. More than that, we and others are justified in using pre-emptive force when an attack on us is being prepared, and when all means of peaceful dissuasion and deterrence have failed. Furthermore, I believe that we should be prepared to intervene for humanitarian purposes to rescue people from genocide.

You might be wondering what part of neoconservative arguments Cameron doesn’t accept. Essentially, Cameron struck a pose as a skeptic of “grand schemes to remake the world,” he favored more multilateralism and development aid, and he objected to indefinite detention of terrorist suspects. That’s not nothing, but these are mostly differences of degree and not of kind.

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