Airstrip One

The Hypocrisies of Right and Left

After the first meeting between a British foreign minister and Colonel Qaddafi since the death of Yvonne Fletcher in 1984, there is the definite firming of contacts as Libya has entered the dance of negotiation and gift exchange. For, whatever the outrages that Libya may have perpetrated, it is now in Britain's interest to maintain and expand contacts with such a regime in order to maintain communication, intelligence, an awareness of the regime's attitude towards ourselves and their cooperation in bringing these grievances to a close.

However, Simon Heffer of the Daily Mail excoriates the Foreign Office's ethical foreign policy with his hyperbole.

"Britain has much cause to remember the evil of Gaddafi. His men murdered WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in St James's Square, London, in April 1984. For that crime alone, never mind anything else, we should have no dealings with Libya until Gaddafi is in his grave."

"We were once supposed to have an ethical foreign policy : but there are more ethics in a drugs den run by a kleptomaniacal pimp than are currently exhibited by the Foreign Office."

However, Heffer demonstrates the propensity of many conservatives to find the line of least criticism and join the government in a game of ethics that views foreign policy as a competition in morals rather than a debate to examine Britain's proper interests. As the right has abandoned realpolitik, and draws on the interwar period for inspirational rhetoric, employing a pseudo-Churchillian spine that spurns all contact with terror, they lose impact as there is a preference for pragmatic hypocrites over virtuous nullity.

The same game is played on the Left with the government's 'ethical dimension' coming under attack from hand-wringing bishops and dissident MPs, in relation to the possible war with Iraq.

The Left, in its European, British or dissident forms unconsciously emulates the liberal utopians of the 1920s, such as Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, who tried to write international laws to govern and remove conflict from Western civilisation during unauspicious times. The parallels with the current projects of the United Nations, like the International Criminal Court, suggest that the Left has forgotten the primacy of Machtpolitik.

That is why the realpolitik employed by our political masters, coupled with a loyalty to liberal international institutions and the rule of law, has disturbing consequences. Contact with terrorists and the enemy has been a permanent theme in diplomacy but, if you are determined to meet your opponents and grant some of their demands, there is always a danger that the results of such diplomacy blind you to the needs of your own interests. In order to maintain stability or peace, you enter a Stockholm syndrome where such results and meeting the interests of your opponents become an end in their own right, and can only be maintained through further appeasement. Thus, the peace process in Northern Ireland or the possible consequences if Blair were to seek a diplomatic solution to Iraq through the United Nations.

By placing foreign policy under a moral lens, New Labour maintains the straitjacket of the events leading up to the Second World War that blinds British foreign policy and leads both Right and Left to maintain the rhetoric and symbols of that period whilst forgetting the lessons. Was not another National government with an overwhelming majority run by appeasers?