{"id":48453,"date":"2024-07-06T07:51:48","date_gmt":"2024-07-06T15:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=48453"},"modified":"2024-07-06T08:07:12","modified_gmt":"2024-07-06T16:07:12","slug":"the-dreadful-continuity-of-british-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/06\/the-dreadful-continuity-of-british-foreign-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dreadful Continuity of British Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Wright doesn\u2019t think much<\/a> of the foreign policy direction of the new Labour government in Britain:<\/p>\n

[Labour shadow foreign secretary] Lammy depicts his foreign policy vision as new, but it\u2019s pretty much the same vision that has long guided his party and comparable western parties, including the Democratic Party in America. And this vision is, in critical respects, not very different from the neoconservatism that has dominated Republican foreign policy for most of the past few decades. Lammy\u2019s progressive realism is one of the several variants of Blobthink that have together played such a big role in creating the mess we\u2019re in.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wright is responding to Lammy\u2019s article<\/a> in Foreign Affairs from earlier this year, and his assessment lines up with what I wrote about it then. In my post<\/a>, I focused on Lammy\u2019s rote recitation of the conventional talking points about the \u201cred line\u201d episode in Syria and its supposed implications for U.S. credibility, but I also noted that it seemed as if Lammy had learned nothing from his party\u2019s last stint in power. As I said, \u201cI suspect Lammy is just trying to put the bad ideas of New Labour under a new label.\u201d International relations scholar Van Jackson raised<\/a> similar concerns that Lammy\u2019s vision \u201cshows worrying signs of rehashing Blair-style neoconservatism, which was of course disastrous.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Labour victory on Thursday will give Starmer a huge parliamentary majority with more than 400 seats<\/a>. Despite winning just 34% of the vote, his party will have almost two-thirds<\/a> of the seats in the House of Commons. They owe that result in large part to the collapse of the Tories and the ensuing split on the British right. A government with such a large majority will be able to do more or less whatever it wants for the next few years, but it will have the same relatively narrow base of popular support that Labour has had for many years. The sheer incompetence and self-destructive tendencies of the Conservatives under multiple leaders made this government possible.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Starmer is the heir to Blair<\/a> in more ways than one, and when it comes to foreign policy he has given us every reason to expect him to be almost as bad as his predecessor. His support for the war in Gaza is one important example of that, and that position has already cost<\/a> Labour a few seats to independent candidates that ran in opposition to the war and the party. Judging from Labour\u2019s election manifesto<\/a> and Starmer\u2019s record, we can expect mostly continuity in Britain\u2019s foreign policy. That will be reassuring to many in Washington that count on having a subservient Britain as a reliable supporter of the U.S. position, but it will be bad news for Britain and for whichever countries next end up in the crosshairs of our two governments. Starmer has also backed<\/a> the ongoing war against the Houthis in Yemen, for example, so U.K. involvement in that useless conflict will continue.<\/p>\n

This brings us back to Jackson\u2019s critique:<\/p>\n

Lammy swears progressive realism will not repeat \u201cthe failures of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya,\u201d but makes no attempt to convince us why it will not. He offers nothing to suggest peace-like ambitions, and nothing that would create distance from a militarist mindset.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the biggest flaws of New Labour has been its leaders\u2019 quick resort to using and backing the use of force in other lands. It is easy for Labour leaders today to say that they won\u2019t repeat the terrible mistakes of their predecessors (no one is going to campaign openly on launching new disastrous wars), but if they don\u2019t acknowledge who is responsible for the earlier failures and if they don\u2019t understand why those interventions failed or backfired it is unlikely that they will avoid making similar blunders. Jackson notes Lammy\u2019s weird reference to the \u201cred line\u201d episode and adds that it \u201chints at the worrying possibility that his progressive realism lacks the wherewithal to resist the \u201cimperial\u00a0temptation\u201d that always exists within liberalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia<\/a>. He is former senior editor at<\/i> The American Conservative. He has been published in the<\/i> New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and<\/i> Culture11, and was a columnist for<\/i> The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Wright doesn\u2019t think much of the foreign policy direction of the new Labour government in Britain: [Labour shadow foreign secretary] Lammy depicts his foreign policy vision as new, but it\u2019s pretty much the same vision that has long guided his party and comparable western parties, including the Democratic Party in America. And this vision […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-48453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"Prime Minister Starmer is the heir to Blair in more ways than one."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48453"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48459,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48453\/revisions\/48459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48453"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=48453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}