Up yours America, says the UK's Dauphin.

Gordon Brown, the UK's Prime Minister elect (so he thinks), has announced the basic principles of his junta's foreign policy. In effect, it is Up Yours America, or as the Daily Telegraph more properly summarises:

Gordon Brown vowed yesterday to take on President George W Bush and the Americans over foreign policy as he spelt out plans to break from Tony Blair's approach to the "war on terror".

The Chancellor, who is on course to succeed Mr Blair as Prime Minister this summer, made clear he wanted to place Britain's national interest above the special relationship with Washington.

The Guardian and the Independent also feature the story.

Obviously, Brown is playing to the anti-American rabble in the Parliamentary Labour Party but there has been no indication that he does not actually mean what he says. Yank-hating is a traditional Labour pastime and, despite Brown's claims to be the inventor of New Labour, he is, in fact, a traditional Labour dinosaur.

Since 1997, one of the major differences between Blair and Brown is that whereas, sometime on or about 9/11, Blair, to the surprise of many of his critics, suddenly grew up politically and started acting like a statesman, Brown did not. In a post yesterday, I noted that "The only contribution the Chancellor has made to Iraq is to kill some British troops by refusing to spend a few thousand pounds on life saving equipment."

How to explain the difference between Blair and Brown? In sporting terms, Blair has the broad vision and communication skills to make a good team manager but Brown is so obsessed with fine detail and so lacking in communication skills that he will never operate as other than a second-rate technical coach.

Tags: Gordon Brown, Foreign Policy, Tony Blair

Chatham House: Foreign Policy Report.

The reaction of the British media to yesterday's release of the interim report from the Conservative Party's Security Policy Group has been relatively muted. Or perhaps, more accurately, disinterested because a similar but better report has appeared.

Poor old Cameron has been spiked somewhat by Chatham House, a UK Think Tank which has just published: British Foreign Policy and Its Possible Successor(s). Click here for the pdf version. It says much the same things as the Conservative document - Blair was wrong to support Bush, invasion of Iraq a mistake, Europeans should not have been isolated, lack of influence, role, etc, etc - but at least has the merit of being coherent and readable.

Tags: British Foreign Policy, Chatham House

David Cameron: the Conservative Security Policy Group.

On Friday, in a light-hearted post, I wrote,

Meanwhile the serious part of the Conservative Party shakes its collective head and waits for Cameron's next hostage to fortune.

Previously Cameron's stupidities have been harmless fun, at worst electoral disaster. Today he has moved onto a new level of misjudgement, as unacceptable as it is surprising, in a senior politician. Even in my most cynical moments, I never expected Cameron to start playing party politics with UK security policy at a time when British troops are in action and the country is possibly facing an immediate serious threat.

Following the publication of the Conservative Party's "Interim Position Paper of the National and International Security Policy Group", tomorrows headlines will probably be that Cameron blames the invasion of Iraq for the terrorist threat to the UK. The International Herald Tribune and the Guardian have already picked up an AP report of the story. Expect more of the same and inevitably damage to the UK's reputation abroad.

The Interim Paper can be downloaded here in pdf form. Amongst the criticisms of British policy and anti-American sentiments, for me, the following quote (page 5) stands out:

Management of our key relationships however requires attention. We need to recognise that for our longstanding positioning to continue to serve UK interests and for the UK to avoid becoming merely an echo of American policy, allies and partners must share our aspirations for a functioning alliance and for close, cooperative US/European relations. Not all European partners do to the same extent. Nor will they unless we work at it. The paradox is that unless the UK wishes effectively to retire from the world, in which case a context for action does not matter, British freedom of manoeuvre lies in the existence rather than the absence of this framework. The drubbing that key relationships have taken over Iraq has served the interests only of our (collective) enemies. And anti-Americanism, which polls show has risen especially markedly in the UK, is a self inflicted wound. But it is also a reflection of the discomfort felt in this country with recent policy outcomes.

The debate over the UK's policy interests into relation to the US took place immediately after 9/11 and, as I have written before,Tony Blair rightly concluded that UK interests were the exactly same as those of the US, as enunciated by President Bush. It was not, therefore, "an echo of American policy" that led the British into Afghanistan and Iraq with the US but a transatlantic convergence of principles and national interests. Other European countries took a different view but that is a matter for them. From a British point of view, given NATO's performance in Afghanistan it is obvious who are the UK's most reliable allies, and they are not situated in Europe.

I would say that currently western anti-Americanism is not as bad as it was in the years of President Regan and the Cruise Missile debates. Then we had a Conservative leader in Mrs Thatcher who fought such nonsense, not pandered to it, reacting to opinion polls by seeking votes in such meaningless concepts as "frameworks" and "(collective) enemies". What is a "(collective) enemy" anyway - a kulak?

Where is the "drubbing" Cameron? Yes, there is serious problems remaining in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, but as I have demonstrated more than once this week already, progress, however painful and slow, is being made in the right direction. Not that such things seem to interest Cameron. If he lambasted the government for its operational manning and equipment failures, Cameron would have a reasonable point; however, he seems to show little interest in such things, preferring instead to launch a full scale party political attack which can do nothing to help the situation. Now is not the time for a responsible politician to engage in such things.

19.12.06 @7:35 - minor edits applied for clarification.

Tags: Conservative Party, David Cameron, Foreign Policy

General Augusto Pinochet, 1915-2006. (updated)

Former President of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet has died in a Santiago hospital, aged 91.

In 1973 Pinochet saved Chile from the Marxist depredations of President Salvador Allende and facilitated a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity for the Chilean people.

In 1982 Pinochet's government gave vital assistance to the British task force retaking the Falkland Islands, providing intelligence which saved the lives of many British servicemen.

In later years, the General was the target of an international leftist hate campaign but now he is beyond their reach and at rest. The West has lost a venerable Cold War warrior and the UK has lost a good friend and ally.

Obituaries:

Daily Telegraph; the Guardian; and the BBC.

Update 13.12.06
General Pinochet has been buried. The Daily Telegraph has pictures of the funeral and a report; also, Robin Harris examines the UK's debt to the General for his assistance in the Falklands War.

The Chileans allowed disassembled aircraft to be shipped in for British use. But by far the most important assistance was intelligence. A long-range military radar was installed opposite Argentina's Comodoro Rivadavia air base. With this equipment, the Chileans provided the Task Force with minute-to-minute information on Argentine aircraft movements, so the Task Force commander could prepare his ships' defences and scramble fighters to intercept. On June 8, however, the long-range radar had to be switched off for overdue maintenance. Argentine aircraft were thus able to launch a surprise attack, sinking the troopships Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram, with terrible casualties. Whether Britain could have won the Falklands War without Chile's help is debatable. Whether it could have done so without far greater loss of lives is simply not. Pinochet, who took every key decision, fully deserved Mrs Thatcher's gratitude.

And the gratitude of us all.

Tags: General Pinochet.

French EU plans

Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate for the French presidency has said that the UK needs to choose between Europe and America. The Daily Telegraph says she had plans for new EU constitution, to be embedded in a new treaty.

Britain would be asked to sign up to the new treaty, but if it rejected calls for increased protectionism, an EU foreign minister, convergence on tax rates and moves to create a European army, then France and her allies would agree a treaty among themselves..

The EU constitution is dead in the water since the French and the Dutch peoples rejected it but that will not stop the Euromaniacs trying again and again until they get their way.

Europe or America? As they say in polite society, F the French.

Tags: European Union

The EU and Afghan reconstruction

At a meeting of the European Foreign ministers, the British and Dutch asked the EU to contribute more to building up Afghanistan's police and judiciary. This seems to be a follow up from an earlier request by NATO for the EU to make a greater contribution to the civilian reconstruction of Afghanistan. The response has been sadly predictable.

According to the International Herald Tribune, the French were lukewarm and would agree only to a (yet another) fact finding mission.

"It seems to me that before launching into such an operation, it would be a good idea to be a bit more clear and to not do something is not coherent or logical," said French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie. "That is why I gave my agreement to a fact-finding mission and that's all for the moment."

Translation: France will evaluate the possibility of trade deals and will join in only if it is both safe and potentially profitable.

Online - Pakistan summarises the EU's contribution to Afghanistan reconstruction to date, and provides a candidate for amazing comment of the week:

...a European Commission spokeswoman brushed aside the criticism, from NATO, saying the commission had a record it could be ’very proud of’ in Afghanistan.

'We made a pledge back in 2002 to spend one billion euros (1.3 billion dollars) over five years. We have overshot that target in the work that we have done in Afghanistan,’ said Emma Udwin, spokeswoman for external affairs.

’We have spent very substantial amounts of money given our overall budget and we have been very effective in making that money work in the interests of the population,’ she said.

That record would seem to be a number of fact finding missions, some ineffective Afghan police training by Germany and, from Italy, even less effective reform of the Afghan judiciary. Neither is the financial contribution all that impressive. The total EU budget is somewhere in the region of just over 100bn euros a year.

Tags: Afghanistan. European Union

Blair : foreign policy speech,

Last night in his speech to the Lord Mayor's Banquet in London, Tony Blair advocated solving the problems of the Middle East, including both Israel and and Iraq, by enlisting Iran and Syria as partners for peace.

The purpose of ideological terrorism, Blair said, is "now plain:" it is,

to provoke civil war. The violence is not therefore an accident or a result of faulty planning. It is a deliberate strategy. It is the direct result of outside extremists teaming up with internal extremists - Al Qaida with the Sunni insurgents, Iranian backed Shia militia - to foment hatred and thus throttle at birth the possibility of non-sectarian democracy. These external elements are, of course, the same elements driving extremism the world over.

The Prime Minister said terrorism is a global problem which needs to be approached through a "whole Middle East strategy". In the key passage of the speech, linking the problem of Islamic terrorism directly to Israel and Palestine, he continued,

There is a fundamental misunderstanding that this is about changing policy on Syria and Iran. First, those two countries do not at all share identical interests. But in any event that is not where we start.

On the contrary, we should start with Israel/Palestine. That is the core. We should then make progress on Lebanon. We should unite all moderate Arab and Moslem voices behind a push for peace in those countries but also in Iraq. We should be standing up for, empowering, respecting those with a moderate and modern view of the faith of Islam everywhere.

The British government will not be seeking a military solution to the dangers of a nuclear Iran. Instead, the Iranian government will be offered "a clear strategic choice": Iran can either accept a partnership in the Middle East peace process and the fight against terrorism or face isolation.

Wow. Isolation , with presumably the implicit threat of United Nations sanctions. The policy outlined in the speech is exactly what had been signalled earlier. It is hard to resist the conclusion that, in the US elections, Bush was holed below the waterline and now the British rat is leaving the sinking ship. As a Daily Telegraph leader observes, the lunatics have been invited to run the asylum.

In the UK press: the Guardian emphasises the shift of focus to the Palestinian problem; the Times headlines the Syria and Iran angle; and, for a headline,"Our new friends in the Middle East" the Independent renames some of the paper's very old friends.

Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph reports that Blair's new Iranian friends are plotting to replace the ailing al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, with individuals sympathetic to Iran. As the paper observes, before moving on to analyses Blair's speech,

The revelation will deal a major blow to Tony Blair's hopes of establishing a "new partnership" with Teheran.

Tags: Iran, Israel, terrorism, Tony Blair, War on Terror

Panama makes the UN big time.

At last the smoke has gone up. After 48 rounds of voting, Panama has been elected to a two-year term on the UN Security Council, beginning in January. Very handy if the council members ever need any laundry.

Panama does not have an army so it will not be able to take an active role in enforcing any Security Council resolutions but then neither do most of the rest, so nobody will notice. It does, however, have an impressive canal on which you can take a time-lapse cruise at YouTube. There is also some fun stuff on Google Video.

NATO ask for EU help in Afghanistan.

In a wonderful example of wishful thinking, NATO has asked the European Union to make a greater contribution to the civilian reconstruction of Afghanistan. According to the Washington Post the request was made after a meeting with the UN, the World Bank and the EU.

"Particularly the EU has a great opportunity to make a significant and very timely difference in the area of the judiciary and the police," NATO's top civilian representative in Afghanistan, Ambassador Daan Everts, told a news conference.

"The goal is wide open. They just have to kick the ball," he said...

...there was an acute need to train and equip judges and police and to build administrative capacity -- areas of EU expertise.

The EU is more likely to kick the ball in its own net, so the best NATO can hope for is funding. The last thing Afghanistan needs in the imposition of EU-style administration from an organisation which is a textbook example of an over-staffed dysfunctional bureaucracy, in which fraud and corruption are out of control. Moreover, it is becoming clear that European police forces cannot control Islamic extremists in their own backyards, but it might be fun to see them trying to police the Taliban, on their own turf.

Update 3.11.06 @13:30

There is now more details of the meeting on the NATO website, including an audio file (with so much reverb it could have recorded underwater) and a transcript of the press conference, and also video interviews with Everts and a World Bank official.

Tags: Afghanistan, European Union, NATO.

Fat Man over Japan

Watch out Japan. Lock up your geishas. John Prescott is coming to play diplomat in the Far East, where he is to solve the problems of North Korean nuclear testing, militant Islam and climate change. As the Daily Telegraph observes,

The Americans send out Condoleezza Rice, a respected foreign affairs specialist. We send a philandering buffoon.

The only reason this clown can still enjoy his croquet at the taxpayer's expense is that Tony Blair's political position is so weak that he dare not sack any cabinet minister whose loyalty can be totally relied on.

Tags: Prescott

European Defence Agency Vision

The European Defence Agency has been running up the white flag. This glorified subcommittee of the Council of Europe has presented defence ministers with its 20 year vision of European defence and security. As befits such a grandiose endeavour (even Stalin only planned 5 years ahead), the document has a grandiose title: An Initial Long-Term Vision for European Defence Capability and Capacity Needs. There the grandeur stops.

Underlying the report is a pessimistic analysis of a Europe with neither the political will nor the military capability to defeat its enemies; a Europe in which maintaining a largely pacifist, ageing population takes priority over military and defence expenditure. The Daily Telegraph has a concise summary for those who cannot face wading through the 28 pages of the full report. (Direct pdf download here.)

In places, the 73 paragraph document is virtually meaningless verbiage, full of the latest fashionable jargon, which paragraph 43 will serve to illustrate:

43. Synergy. In the future, joint forces composed of land, air, space and maritime elements will increasingly use precision firepower, intelligence and focussed [sic]logistics in order to deliver military effects in a more discriminate way. And the capabilities of other agencies and actors, including non-governmental organisations, will contribute to the management of conflict. The media, with its increased reach and effectiveness, need increasingly to be taken into account. Synergy between these different capacities will create the effects necessary for mission accomplishment within acceptable levels of risk, while minimising undesired effects. Synchronisation across organisational, institutional and component boundaries moves the joint force from traditional de-confliction and coordination procedures to the integrated, comprehensively-planned operations required.

"Focussed"? Perhaps they should be more discriminate and deconflict their spell-checker.

The one clear message is of defeatism: in future, victory will not be achievable and the best Europe can hope for is to achieve some sort of compromise (paragraph 35):

In cases of intervention by force the main task will be to gain control of the dynamics of conflict, reduce its destructive power and break the cycle of violence. The objective is not “victory” as traditionally understood, but moderation, balance of interests and peaceful resolution of conflicts – in short, stability.

Defeatism at the outset. One inference is that, if a society cannot defend itself by defeating external enemies, it is unlikely to have the will to defend against the enemy within. Read in that context, the Vision can be interpreted as a long-winded, almost embarrassed, conformation of Mark Steyn's penetrating analysis of European society and its defence failings.

Tags: European Union, European Defence Agency.

Gibraltar Betrayed.

It is not just Crumbling Spires which regards the recent deal between the UK and Spain over Gibraltar as sell-out of the Rock's sovereignty by the ever-treacherous Foreign Office. Keith Azopardi, leader of the Progressive Democracy Party opposition knows full well what is going on and that Chief Minister Peter Caruana has been misleading the population. Panorama reports,

On Thursday night at the Chamber of Commerce Dinner Mr Caruana clearly stated that Gibraltarians flying to Spain would not have to go through Spanish Passport Controls either leaving Gibraltar on route to say Madrid or returning to Gibraltar from a Spanish airport.
The next day he contradicted it, saying in a television phone-in when he accepted that on route to Madrid or Barcelona a Gibraltarian leaving Gibraltar will be subjected to Spanish controls both on route to the plane and immediately after landing.
“The bottom line is that a Gibraltarian flying from what is meant to be his Airport to Spain is being checked by a Spanish Official and when he returns home from Spain to his home airport he is being checked by a Spanish official before reaching Gibraltar officials," says the [PDP] statement.
What happens if a Gibraltarian refuses to show his passport to the Spanish Authorities when he lands? Will he be able to come home? Will he be refused entry within his own airport? Will he be arrested, and if so by which authority? Can he be arrested by the Gibraltar Police for not showing his passport in Gibraltar to a Spanish official?” said the PDP.

On past form, the answer is that Spanish will do whatever they like and the British government will meekly accept it.

Tags: Gibraltar

Gibraltar

The Foreign Office and Spain have signed a deal over Gibraltar which has attracted favourable comment in the press, including both the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. However,experience teaches us that, when the Foreign Office does a deal, it is often a mistake to take it at face value.

For this analysis, I will use the Daily Telegraph's report, although the Guardian's reporting is so similar that both papers have obviously swallowed the FO line cast at the same briefing. Three areas need to be highlighted briefly: territorial sovereignty; border control; and taxation. First, territorial sovereignty:

...In what will be seen as a symbolic coup for Spain, the Spanish flag will, for the first time in more than 50 years, be flown on the British territory.

So the Spanish flag will fly over Gibraltar in a "symbolic coup". What symbol does a national flag represent if not national sovereignty. The sub-text is clear: Spain is claiming de facto the sovereign right to be on this territory and the FO is not arguing the point.

I will deal with border control and immigration together.

...A new [airport] terminal will have entrances on both sides of the border so passengers and cargo travelling to and from Spain can bypass Gibraltar controls and taxes.

Although border control and taxation are two vital ingredients of any worthwhile definition of sovereignty, in certain circumstances, on Gibaltarian territory, Spain will not be subject to local taxes and immigration controls. Again the sub-text is clear: this small part of Gibraltar is to be regarded de facto as a part of Spain.

Thus the thin end of the wedge is inserted. The principle that Spain has some claim to sovereignty over the Rock, however tenuous,has been conceded with the obvious danger is that, in future meetings between the UK and Spain, the FO will find it much easier to begin to ceding that sovereignty.

Euro collapse

Daily Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks the impending collapse of the Euro could be the way ahead for Europe.

Those of us who have been thundering ever since Maastricht that EMU is a woefully misconceived idea that will destroy the very Europe it was intended to cement, can only say: welcome to the club. In truth, it is a well-kept Brussels secret that many of the EU's own experts fear the euro will blow apart in the next nasty recession, with Italy, Portugal, Greece, and Spain shaping up as prime candidates for ejection.

As The Daily Telegraph's Brussels correspondent, I used to meet for furtive lunches with a Commission economist who was so worried about the coming smash-up that he had switched his savings into "hard" currencies, choosing foreign accounts beyond EU reach. I joke not. He knew, from his ringside seat, that the single currency had been thrust on Europe by the Delors crowd for entirely political reasons in the face of vehement warnings from the pros at the Directorate of Economic and Monetary Affairs.

The question now seems to be not if the Euro will collapse but just how much economic and social damage will occur before the unrepresentative EU political elite finally bows to the inevitable?

As suggested in Evans-Pritchard's article, the collapse of monetary union could, in the longer term, lead to the unravelling of the single market. To which we can add, if the single market unravels that will surely hasten hasten the collapse of political union. Suddenly Europe's future seems brighter than it did.