British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his foreign secretary, Robin
Cook, were all the quicker to congratulate George W. Bush on
confirmation of his election because they knew that they had a good
deal of ground to make up. For months Labour Party figures had
scarcely concealed their scorn for the Republican presidential
candidate. Blair's eminence grise, Peter Mandelson, then Northern
Ireland secretary, was even indiscrete enough to tell journalists his
opinions of Bush and his policies at a drinks party before Christmas,
and then had to issue a public retraction.

If the problem were simply the result of New Labour nostalgia for the
cozy relationship built up with the Clinton administration, it would
have little long-term significance. But its roots go much deeper than
that and lie not in personalities but in policies, indeed in
conceptions of the very purpose of Western foreign and security
policy. Even on the occasion of Messrs. Blair's and Cook's formal
felicitations, their words, consciously or not, contained more than a
hint of trouble to come. "President-elect Bush", said Blair, "is a
man who shares our values [and] wants Europe and America to stand
side by side." Still more significant, Cook looked forward to working
with the new President and to "keeping Britain as that unique bridge
between America and Europe" [emphasis added].

Policymakers in Washington ought to study and reflect on these
apparently anodyne phrases and the attitudes that lie behind them.
They need to ask themselves whether America really wants Europe to
stand at its side rather than to stand behind its leadership. And
they should consider and then articulate whether they expect Britain
to be a "bridge" ("unique" or otherwise), or whether they prefer the
traditional British role of highly effective and strongly committed
ally. These questions, which the Clinton administration was happy to
fudge, and the Blair government even more so, will sooner rather than
later have to be resolved.

Pivots and Policies

Tony Blair has a sense of the historic, if not exactly of history. He
wants, as his friend Bill Clinton ever more desperately wanted, to be
seen by posterity as having shaped events and bestrode them. In a
November 1999 speech at the Lord Mayor of London's banquet, the
traditional annual occasion for a British prime minister to review
foreign policy, Blair thus expansively reflected upon the legacy of
empire. Successive generations of British politicians from Churchill
to Thatcher had, he said, tried and failed to find for Britain a
satisfactory post-imperial role. He continued:

"However, I believe that search can now end. We have got over our
Imperial past, and the withdrawal symptoms. No longer do we want to
be taken seriously just for our history, but for what we are and what
we will become. We have a new role. . . . It is to use the strengths
of our history to build our future not as a superpower but as a
pivotal power, as a power that is at the crux of the alliances and
international politics which shape the world and its future."

This was vintage Blair. The passage has a self-confident, even
visionary assertiveness that smacks of Margaret Thatcher. At the same
time, it reassures the liberal media with its appeal to modernity and
internationalism. And, equally typical, it contains at its core an
embarrassing intellectual vacuum.

"Pivots" are, of course, in fashion. Paul Kennedy, for example, has
argued that a "pivotal states strategy" should be at the heart of a
realistic American approach to foreign and security policy. But
Kennedy's category of pivotal states was not one within which any
British prime minister would greatly wish to see his country slotted.
Such states are "pivotal" precisely because--like Mexico, Algeria or
Egypt--they face a precarious future, and because that future matters
to the West as a whole. Clearly, Blair was not talking about that
kind of pivot.

In truth, it is difficult to envisage why any state or any individual
would voluntarily act as a pivot. Pivots have no life of their own.
They are necessarilyrigid and static. Their value is simply as a
means of permitting movement by others.

This objection is not just pedantry. Such metaphors drawn from
engineering for use in political discourse--like engines, power
houses, gear changes--always belie a confusion of ends with means.
Blair sees that Britain is a nuclear-armed state and a permanent
member of the UN Security Council, that it has close relations with
America, that it is a leading power in Europe, that it has links with
Africa and Asia through the Commonwealth, and that it enjoys the
advantage of English being the language of international business.
But he confuses the possession of these undoubted geopolitical
strengths with possession of a policy to apply them. Does Britain, in
fact, currently have such a policy?

Out of Africa

Oddly enough, the beginnings of the answer may be found in a
downtrodden, poverty-stricken, blood-drenched corner of West Africa.
Blair may pride himself on exorcising the demons of empire, but his
government's approach to Sierra Leone strongly suggests the opposite.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Kipling's lament is particularly appropriate to Sierra Leone. The
settlement of Freetown was created by the British in 1787 for slaves
repatriated from Britain and the United States, and for others
liberated from the slave ships. It grew over time into a small,
prosperous and well-educated colony. But since independence in 1961
it has slipped from dictatorship to kleptocracy and from kleptocracy
to anarchy. It is as pointless to apply Western-style labels to the
individuals and factions concerned as it was to those in the old
Soviet Union--which, however, has not prevented the British Foreign
Office from doing so.

In truth, the one common factor in the tangled events of Sierra
Leone's recent history is that British politicians and diplomats have
managed to be wrong at every stage. The political struggles in Sierra
Leone and in neighboring Liberia are mainly about control of the
diamond business. Belatedly realizing this, Britain has persuaded the
UN to take measures to outlaw "conflict diamonds." But, of course,
the mere act of outlawing something, without any prospect of
enforcement, will not work in Sierra Leone any more than it has in
Angola, where civil strife rages unabated. Greed always finds a way.

And the story of Sierra Leone is one of greed on an epic scale. In
1991 Foday Sankoh, a former army corporal, teamed up with Charles
Taylor, then a militia leader and now Liberia's president, to
overthrow the government of Sierra Leone and seize the diamond mines.
But before they could finish the job, a military coup brought a
baby-faced young captain, Valentine Strasser, to power. Strasser was
initially much feted by the West as a "reformer"--until he damaged
his international reputation by having twenty-six of his opponents
taken out to the beach at Freetown and summarily executed. Britain
suspended aid, but later provided Strasser with a refuge when he was
ousted in 1996: he is now drawing social security benefits and living
in a modest house in north London.

Amid much international rejoicing, democracy was re-introduced.
Elections brought to power President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. But it was
South African mercenaries who kept him there. Unfortunately, white
mercenaries--the traditional prop for black African governments--are
frowned upon in the global village. So the mercenaries were sent home
and the government promptly fell, overturned in another military coup.

At this point, the Labour government took office in Britain and Robin
Cook entered the imposing portals of the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office. Cook resolved to flex his muscles. He decided that
"democracy" must be "restored" in Sierra Leone. But how? The foreign
secretary's first error was to will the ends without being realistic
about the means. While pretending that Britain was adhering to an
internationally agreed arms embargo, the Foreign Office secretly
supported a mercenary effort to overthrow the military regime. That
regime was indeed ousted in February 1998. Nigerian troops were sent
in, but Freetown was extensively looted in the fighting.

The leader of the rebels, Sankoh, was now captured by the Nigerians.
He had one of the worst reputations for human rights abuses in
Africa. His forces' specialty was mutilation, as the piteous
photographs of limbless women and children begging in Freetown
testify. Sankoh was sentenced to death in absentia by a Sierra
Leonean court. But the foreign secretary now intervened. Cook, not
known for his tolerance of crimes when allegedly committed by
white-skinned former Chilean heads of state, pressed President Kabbah
to pardon Sankoh and to grant him immunity. The foreign secretary
also persuaded Kabbah to appoint Sankoh as his vice president and
minister for natural resources--which afforded the latter's men
control over the diamonds for which the whole struggle had taken
place. This was Cook's second, and egregious, error. Naturally
enough, Sankoh and his men exploited the new opportunity to the
maximum, and ignored all previous undertakings of good behavior.

Cook's third mistake was his decision to commit substantial numbers
of British troops to support the Sierra Leonean government against
Sankoh's now fully reactivated forces, without hard-headed assessment
of the mission's purpose. The stated objectives were initially the
sensible, limited ones of liberating kidnapped UN soldiers and
affording protection to British nationals. But there was no doubting
that the mission had a much wider and more ambitious long-term
goal--the establishment of democratic order. The triumphalism with
which the operation was announced confirmed as much: "Britain will
not abandon its commitment to Sierra Leone", proclaimed Cook.

The immediate outcome was encouraging. Given the professionalism and
firepower of the force committed, that was hardly surprising. The UN
soldiers were released. Sankoh was captured--again. But Cook
seriously misjudged British public opinion, which was now alarmed
about the risk of British troops becoming sucked into an unwinnable
war in an impossible country for inexplicable ends. Accordingly, the
800 paratroopers were withdrawn and a much more modest force of
Marines took over with a mandate to train and arm the Sierra Leonean
army.

This, though, compounded the mistake. Too small a force had been sent
to perform too large a mission. The factions involved in the Sierra
Leonean civil war were actually already quite well trained, both in
killing each other and civilians. They were also well armed. In any
case, Britain could exercise little control over the weapons sent.
Some, to Cook's embarrassment, were used by child soldiers fighting
for the Sierra Leonean government. Others fell into the hands of the
rebels. Indeed, it was increasingly hard to decide who the "rebels"
were, given the chaotic shifting of allegiances. The "West Side Boys"
who captured eleven British soldiers and held them hostage had
actually started out on the side of the government. The subsequent
rescue by British troops of their comrades in a prolonged and bloody
battle was a difficult mission well accomplished. But where did it
all leave Sierra Leone?

As an exercise in futility, the whole operation increasingly
resembled the disastrous U.S./UN mission in Somalia in 1993. The
conclusion should have been the same. Again, Kipling:

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

But will it? Almost certainly not. As the UN force in Sierra Leone
crumbles--amid mutual recriminations and withdrawals--Britain
continues to increase its commitment. A British officer is now chief
of staff; major amphibious exercises are planned; a naval task force
has been sent. In the eyes of the British government, if in no one
else's, the business is not just deadly but deadly serious. And,
indeed, once you takeaway the braggadocio and misjudgments, you are
left with something resembling a doctrine to which both Blair and
Cook are committed.

Ethics and Interests

This, it should be said, is not a doctrine specifically relating to
Africa. It is not, for example, at all equivalent to the traditional
French approach to the francophone countries of that continent.
French strategy consists of a more or less unashamed pursuit of
national interest, aimed principally at resisting and undermining
American and British influence. Ever since the revelations about
France's role in the Hutu genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, Paris has
trodden more lightly; but its footprints are still apparent, and
their direction is clear.

By contrast, Britain's attitude is naive rather than self-serving.
Until the late January re-shuffle caused by Mandelson's resignation,
the Foreign Office minister with responsibility for Africa was Peter
Hain. Hain still entertains the same romantic illusions about the
black man's liberation struggle as he did when he was a young
activist agitating against South African rugby tours. It is just
that, as with other members of that political generation, hi-tech
globalist rhetoric has been larded into the old prejudices. Thus Hain
could recently be heard forecasting a bright future for Africa
because of exciting new technologies. Somali pastoralists using
mobile phones to price the cost of goats in Jeddah, allowing them to
operate in the wider world outside the confines of inefficient
state-owned fixed line systems, is a graphic illustration of the
possibilities.

It is difficult to imagine Hain's French equivalent preoccupied with
the sale of Saudi goats. There is, indeed, more than a trace of farce
about British foreign policy today. Some of this is simply a
reflection of Robin Cook himself, not least his bombast. In
opposition, Cook's rhetorical flourishes across the dispatch box of
the House of Commons were admired. But in office, when a measure of
authoritative sobriety is expected, his grandiloquence threatens to
turn him into a buffoon. Who else in British politics could say the
following:

"Since I took office in 1997, Madeleine [Albright] and I have worked
closely together on tackling some of the biggest foreign policy
problems of our age.

I come to America as the President of a European Union going through
immense and exciting change.

Britain will not turn its back on Sierra Leone. Today I will go there.

There is no greater national duty than the defence of our shoreline.
But the most immediate threat to it today is the encroaching sea."

Yet, for all that, Cook is the spokesman for a serious--if also
seriously flawed--doctrine of liberal internationalism. The Foreign
Office "mission statement" still claims that it exists to serve the
national interest. But it then goes on to elaborate that interest in
terms so nebulous that the expression is drained of meaning. Nor is
this at all surprising, for, according to Cook, "the global interest
is becoming the national interest." Thus in one trite slogan some
four centuries of debating, calculating and executing policies
designed to maintain Britain's standing and promote Britain's
interests in the world are abandoned. The Victorians generally
assumed that what was in Britain's interest must also be in the
world's interest. The Labour government now assumes the precise
opposite, that what is in the global interest must be in Britain's.
Each proposition is as unthinking as the other, though at least the
Victorians had no illusion that their view commanded universal
assent. Today the high priests of globalism have simply decreed that
distinctions, priorities and choices in foreign and security policy
are outdated relics of old thinking. And all that therefore remains
is to resolve the Manichaean conflict between (in Blair's words) "the
forces of progress and the forces of conservatism."

In this make-believe world, where the forces of progress are always
identifiable and by definition correct, there is no room for moral
ambiguity. We know what is right--the international community tells
us so--and there is no excuse for shirking. And so it was, in Cook's
words, that the "ethical foreign policy" was born. The pursuit of
this approach has, however, provided the government with so many
headaches, and its critics with so much ammunition, that the phrase
has now been banned. The Labour Party's draft manifesto will, it is
reported, omit it entirely. It is easy to understand why.

The government has behaved, as governments will, according to double
standards, and it has frequently been caught out. The British Left
has always railed against the arms trade, refusing to accept that it
is not the possession of arms but the intentions of the possessors
that matter. So Cook declared it an ethical aim to "curb the supply
of weapons that fuel conflict." The policy was soon exposed. Hawk
military aircraft were supplied to Indonesia right up to the time of
the first large-scale atrocities in East Timor. Still worse, Cook
found himself pressured by Downing Street into allowing the export of
spare parts for Hawks supplied to Zimbabwe, which is deeply engaged
in the bloody civil war in the Congo.

Similarly, Cook began by promising to "put human rights at the heart
of our policy." But weak, vulnerable countries proved a good deal
more likely to experience Cook's condemnation than great powers--just
as was the case with Jimmy Carter's reign. Here China was the test
case. The foreign secretary reversed the previous British position
adopted in the UN Human Rights Commission by refusing to back a
resolution condemning China's abuses. When Chinese President Jiang
Zemin visited Britain in 1999, protestors with the temerity to remind
him of Chinese brutalities in Tibet were kept out of sight and their
banners confiscated. When the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng sought
a meeting with Cook, it was first refused and then, when it did
occur, the foreign secretary's office ensured that the two were not
photographed together, for fear of Beijing's reaction. When Lee
Teng-hui, the former president of Taiwan, sought a visa in order to
visit his granddaughter, it was only granted on condition that he say
nothing embarrassing during his stay. All of these positions were
adopted in response to Chinese pressure. Under Messrs. Blair and
Cook, Britain has become a virtuoso of the kowtow.

Do such double standards matter? Arguably not. Contrary to Cook's
confident assertions, global relationships are still governed by
interplays of power. The arms business has to go on if its employees
are to be paid. And great powers with unpleasant regimes must
sometimes be shown respect or they will take umbrage and may
retaliate. The problem with hypocrisy on the scale practiced by the
British Foreign Office today, however, is that it makes Britain a
laughing stock. And on any definition of the national interest that
should matter.

Doctrinaire Interventionism

It certainly matters to Tony Blair, whose preoccupations, if not his
policies, are somewhat different from those of Cook. Both Blair and
Cook were once men of the Left. For example, they supported the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the body that pressed for
unilateral Western abandonment of the nuclear deterrent throughout
the crucial stages of the Cold War. (Hain, who has been representing
Britain in nuclear non-proliferation talks, is still a CND member.)
Yet Blair could never have been heard telling a Labour Party
Conference, as Cook did in 1982, "I come to this rostrum to beg
Conference, to ask Conference, to plead with Conference to vote for
unilateral nuclear disarmament." As a young politician Blair was
always too pragmatic and ambitious to get into such scrapes. Now as
prime minister both his pragmatism and his ambition--and increasingly
his pride--incline him toward a more robust posture than could ever
be welcome to the sinuous officialdom of the Foreign Office. Hence
Britain's role in the Kosovo operation.

Both the Bush (Senior) administration in America and the Major
government in Britain seriously mishandled the crises that followed
the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The resolve shown in
dealing with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War was noticeably lacking in
dealing with Slobodan Milosevic in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia.
For the European Left, however, the lessons went well beyond
arguments about wider or narrower views of national interest and
about the expeditious use of overwhelming force. Balkan genocide was,
rather, according to its analysis, a manifestation of the failure of
the international community to defend a liberal, multicultural model
against the forces of nationalism. Kosovo thus provided at once an
opportunity to impose the values of a new liberal order and a
prominent occasion to demonstrate international clout. The
combination was hard for Blair to resist.

Accordingly, Britain was at the forefront of the Kosovo campaign at
both its inception and its conclusion, when British troops raced the
Russians to Pristina. The campaign itself was botched, though this
was largely the result of rules of engagement dictated by Washington.
Partly because of these constraints, the Serbs were given the
opportunity to drive out much of the Albanian population. Since then,
in retaliation, the Albanians on their return have ethnically
cleansed the Serbs, over half of whom have now departed. According to
Madeleine Albright, "We all want a multi-ethnic Kosovo." But
evidently "we" excludes the majority of Kosovars--and nothing that
the new government in Belgrade does is going to change that one whit.
Kosovo thus hangs in a kind of limbo, between independence and
rejoining the rump Yugoslavia; a poor, corrupt, misgoverned colony
administered by reluctant imperialists.

It is difficult to imagine that the experience of Western involvement
in Kosovo would have provided much inspiration for New Labour's
global interventionists. But it has. Blair's hubristic belief in his
ability to rework the patterns of the past and impose modern liberal
shapes and sizes now knows no bounds. Speaking in Zagreb last
November, for example, he offered "the chance of a new history for
the [Balkan] region."

Above all, the Kosovo affair prompted Blair to make a speech in
Chicago that encapsulates the ambitions of his government's foreign
policy. Arguing that the Kosovo campaign was "a just war . . . based
on values", the Prime Minister put forward what he called "a new
doctrine of international community." This was required, he said,
because "we are all internationalists now, whether we like it or
not." Most important, "we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the
violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to
be secure."

Of course, a moment's reflection reveals this to be nonsense. In most
cases, human rights abuses in other countries have no practical
impact on us whatsoever. Perhaps it is true that "no man is an
island", but states are at best morally peninsular. Yet with Blair's
pronouncements it is not intellectual substance, or the lack of it,
that counts, but rather what his aides refer to as "the signals." In
this case, Blair was signaling that Britain is now wholeheartedly
committed to a program of ubiquitous international interventionism.

What is less clear is precisely how this bold, vast, novel project is
to be accomplished. After all, Britain cannot undertake it alone; it
cannot lead it; and there are even doubts about how much it can
contribute to it, at least in direct security terms. British defenses
have been run down since the Cold War, like those of most other
Western countries, largely to pay higher welfare bills. The British
Army has been cut by about a third. The chief of the defence staff
has recently warned that it will not be fully manned for another five
years, because of reduced career prospects and upheavals resulting
from constantly changing deployments. And Britain's forces are
already suffering from a serious case of overstretch. There are over
20,000 servicemen in Germany, about 3,000 in Bosnia, over 5,000 in
Kosovo, more than 3,000 in Cyprus, and a growing number in Sierra
Leone. Moreover, it is far from clear that the United Kingdom's number
one domestic trouble spot, Ulster--where almost 14,000 are currently
deployed--will remain conveniently untroubled while Britain
minds other peoples' business.

Equally important, Britain simply no longer has the military
technology to act effectively as a world policeman. Compared with
America, it is no more than special constable at best. This was
embarrassingly demonstrated in the Kosovo campaign, when none of the
European air forces could operate effectively without U.S. support,
and not very effectively even then. The trend will inevitably
accelerate with advances in the use of networked information and
precision weaponry--the "revolution in military affairs."

One solution to this problem would be to leave the real business of
military interventions to the Americans, with the British and others
confining themselves to subordinate tasks. But that runs up against
U.S. reluctance--a reluctance that will certainly be more evident as
Secretary of State Colin Powell makes his mark. In any case, that
kind of U.S.-led globalism would look rather too similar to Western
imperialism to be acceptable to the New Left in Europe. Realizing
this, Tony Blair's Britain has instead become a vociferous champion
of the proposals contained in the recent report to the UN
secretary-general for a much larger direct military role for the UN.
That was the message that Blair brought to the UN Millennium Summit,
when he called for implementation of the report "within a twelve
month timescale." Britain has also offered to act as host country for
a permanent staff college for peacekeepers.

Just possibly, something may come of this. But it is in the realm of
institutions rather than military operations that the consequences of
Blair's "doctrine of international community" are most likely to
manifest themselves. Here, too, the Balkans provide the peg.

The war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, set up
in 1993 and 1994 respectively, were responses to Western apathy,
impotence and (in the case of Rwanda) collusion in genocide. Neither
has worked as intended. It was only when the perpetrators began to
lose that the prospects for their apprehension and punishment
increased--confirming that the only possible international justice
always turns out to be victor's justice. In fact, now that
prosecutions are belatedly gathering pace, the most likely effect,
especially in the Balkans, will be to make a return to order and
reconciliation more difficult.

Undaunted, Britain has become one of the leading advocates of the
creation of an all-embracing International Criminal Court (ICC) that
would intrude far more comprehensively into the affairs of sovereign
states. During the ICC negotiations, the British delegation
consistently argued for the most radical options--for example,
insisting that the definition of war crimes should include crimes
committed in internal conflicts. As a sign of its commitment, Britain
has also offered to imprison those convicted of crimes against
humanity. Again, there is globalist theory at work here, and in its
most extreme form. As Cook expressed it: "It is no longer sufficient
for states to claim that they have the sovereign right to decide what
is going to be legal and what is going to be illegal. The
international community can both determine and enforce that"
[emphasis added].

The objections in principle to such an approach to international
justice have been trenchantly and persuasively put by others. But the
main objection in practice, which weighed heavily with the United
States under Clinton and will weigh more heavily still under
President Bush, is the prospect of American politicians, high
officials and military personnel being made internationally
answerable for overseas interventions. This cuts no ice at all with
Britain's Foreign Office. Yet on any common-sense view it should.
Britain is not as feared as the United States, so its personnel are
that much more vulnerable. At the same time, Britain is uniquely
closely associated with America in operations that are anathema to
many members of the international community. What the Argentineans
would already like to do to Margaret Thatcher others will probably
want to do to Tony Blair, and perhaps even Robin Cook.

The issue of the ICC has also exposed another fundamental weakness in
the Blairite "doctrine of international community." This is that the
latter's most important members sometimes sharply disagree. That does
not so much bother Cook, who still appears to enjoy nothing more than
the opportunity to cock a snook at the United States. But if America
maintains its objections, it may yet come to bother Blair.

This is because the Prime Minister entered office deeply and rightly
conscious of the importance of the Anglo-American relationship as the
basis for his and his country's international standing. And in that
he was greatly influenced by the career of his predecessor-but-one.

In Her Footsteps?

Indeed, Tony Blair has spent the last four years beset with something
bordering on an obsession with Margaret Thatcher's premiership. He
correctly judges that the influence that Britain wielded with the two
superpowers and their leaders--Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev--in the 1980s allowed Thatcher to impose her views and
values both at home and abroad. He wants to do the same.

Hence Blair's extraordinary and even undignified efforts to establish
a friendship with Bill Clinton, a man whose moral standards and
personal behavior must surely jar with his own almost too good to be
true uprightness of character. Hence also the still more bizarre
campaign to ingratiate himself with Vladimir Putin. It was Clinton
who described the Russian leader as "a man we can do business with",
echoing Thatcher's often quoted comment about Gorbachev. But it was
Blair who took the risk of flying off to endorse Putin even before
his election victory, and at the same time indirectly endorsing the
latter's brutal, indeed genocidal, campaign in Chechnya by describing
it as a fight against "terrorism."

Blair was lucky with Clinton, whose survival of the impeachment process vindicated the British Prime Minister's support. By contrast, his luck appears to have run out with Putin, who ever since the initial plaudits and flattery has consistently lived down to all that should be expected of a not very talented KGB apparatchik. Blair has made repeated efforts to woo Russia. He has backed Moscow in its vociferous campaign against major revision or abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty--another issue on which he will find himself sharply at odds with the new U.S. administration. He has turned a blind eye to the continued heavy-handed suppression of Russian media freedoms. He even tried to persuade the block-headed chiefs of the rusting Russian navy to accept his offer of help in rescuing their submariners, dying on the floor of the Barents Sea. But all to no avail. The prospects of Blair's friendship with "Vladimir" enhancing Britain's international standing sank with the Kursk.

The one crucial failure of British foreign policy in the Thatcher years was, Blair believes, in dealings with Europe. On taking office he therefore pledged to "end the isolation of the last twenty years and be a leading partner in Europe." One should not exaggerate the originality of this aspiration. It was shared by the Conservative government in 1979. It was still more deeply shared by John Major, who pledged in 1991 to put Britain at the "very heart of Europe." But with Tony Blair the project has become a veritable passion.

In its pursuit, he has continued to state his support for the principle of abolishing sterling in favor of the European single currency--even though the euro still looks sick and the British public remains deeply hostile. He has undergone humiliation within the ranks of the European Left, as his ideas of a "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism have been cold-shouldered by the other members of the club. Most significant of all, he has reversed Britain's previously hostile attitude toward the integration of the country's armed forces with those of the other European Union members outside the framework of NATO.

Whether Blair understood how the United States would see this radical about-turn in British security policy is perhaps doubtful. Certainly, a large measure of the blame must go to the Clinton administration, which failed properly to articulate the Pentagon's amply justified misgivings. But it was the Prime Minister's conviction that alternately massaging and intimidating the British media would prevent difficult questions being asked that finally misled him.

Blair's objective was quite simple, if also extremely cynical. He sought at one and the same time to magnify the importance of Britain's European defense commitment, thus pleasing his opposite numbers in France and Germany, while downplaying that same commitment in order to reassure opinion in Britain and America. Unfortunately, this stratagem was repeatedly derailed by unwelcome home truths blurted out by the Europeans. Thus European Commission President Romano Prodi confirmed that the planned European rapid reaction force was indeed a European army. As he told the Independent newspaper: "When I was talking about the European army I was not joking. If you don't want to call it a European army, don't call it a European army. You can call it 'Margaret', you can call it 'Mary-Ann', you can find any name."  The French, whose anti-Americanism has provided the driving force for the project, have also repeatedly emphasized that the rapid reaction force is to be the core of a European army and is intended to op erate independently from NATO.

But what most preoccupies Blair is the effect that adverse reactions in Washington might have upon otherwise somnolent British public opinion. So in the run-up to the December 2000 European summit in Nice, at which the plans for the new force were due to be agreed upon, he took pre-emptive action. Ten Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence launched a fierce campaign to deny that any American worries existed about the Euro-army and to portray British Euroskeptic newspapers as driven by blind prejudice in reporting the contrary. This campaign boomeranged spectacularly. It prompted a final and public break with Margaret Thatcher, the politician whose views on security matters were most likely to be taken seriously on the other side of the Atlantic; she denounced Blair's support for the European army as "an act of monumental folly" taken "to satisfy political vanity." It also prompted the outgoing U.S. defense secretary to issue what amounted to a correction and a rebuke. And it prompted U.S. opponents of the planned European force to speak out more clearly than ever before.

Blair's real problems do not, however, lie mainly with his domestic or even his foreign critics, but rather with the contradictions in the policy itself. He cannot indefinitely appear to adopt both Eurocentric and Atlanticist approaches. He has to choose.

One year after he had described his "pivotal" foreign policy at the Lord Mayor's banquet, the British Prime Minister returned to the same broad theme before the same distinguished audience. This time he called for, in terms that would be familiar to an American audience, "engagement, not isolation." Yet isolation from Britain's oldest and most important ally, the only global superpower, is precisely where Blair's foreign policy doctrine is ultimately bound to lead if it continues to be pursued. And this, of course, will only be the latest, if by far the most serious, in a by now lengthy list of foreign policy failures that have flowed from that same doctrine.

An Alternative Course

GOVERNMENTS must often, it is true, encounter failure in the pursuit of foreign policy. Failure does not necessarily mean that the policy itself was misconceived. Unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances may simply have overtaken it. What is really dangerous for a nation, however, is when a government does not even know how to measure failure, for then failure risks becoming cumulative.

Blair's government continues to reinforce failure in Europe, as it does in its dealings with Africa, the Balkans and Russia. And unless there is a swift change of course, failure will characterize Britain's transatlantic relations, too. The British government re-inforces its failures for the same reason that it pursues an "ethical" foreign policy, enmeshed in unresolvable contradictions, and welcomes initiatives, like the International Criminal Court, that jeopardize British interests. It behaves in this fashion not merely because of Cook's incompetence or Blair's delusions, but because it has abandoned the concept of national interest as the lodestar by which to plot its course.

Establishing just what that national interest requires at any time is intellectually demanding. Putting the conclusions into effect may be difficult, painful and sometimes dangerous. And beyond that, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott says of politics in general is surely truer still of foreign policymaking in particular, that it is an activity in which

men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

But does New Labour, or the New Left anywhere, really have the stomach for that?

Robin Harris was director of the Conservative Research Department and a member of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street Policy Unit. He is now a freelance writer.