Britain Has Found Its Role

President George W. Bush said on the evening of September 11, 2001, that his country had been attacked by terrorists and was at war with terrorism. There is not the slightest doubt that Iraq is an international terrorist-supporting state, nor that the conventional methods of containment of Iraq—restraint, sanctions, and moral suasion—have been a complete failure.

The only method to achieve the promised and internationally required disarmament is to have a regime in Baghdad that wishes to disarm. That is why President Bush has called for "regime change" in Iraq.

It is not the least of the many irritations that have arisen in the debate over the war that America has been scolded for not giving Security Council Resolution 1441 an adequate opportunity to achieve the disarmament of Iraq.

President Bush spoke at the UN on September 12 last year entirely in support of the principles of international law. Given the gravity of the provocations it has endured and the military might it deploys, America has behaved with exemplary restraint.

America has not acted unilaterally, but those who seek to impose unreasonable conditions on it will force it and its genuine allies to act on their own authority. Those who claim they want to strengthen the UN are in danger of completing its degradation by obliging the only power capable of enforcing international law and its allies to do so outside the posturing and the cynical chicanery of the Security Council.

Other reservations about American policy toward Iraq raise the legitimate question of the right of any country to strike pre-emptively against another. In the case of Iraq, America already has a casus belli: Iraq's subsidization of terrorist acts, and its twelve years of violation of the Gulf War peace terms. These provocations, and the flouting of seventeen UN Security Council resolutions, overcome this strong and sensible reservation about pre-emptive military action. It is not, in effect, pre-emption at all. It is response.

The primary facts in the Iraq crisis are that America has more military power than all other countries in the world combined and that, in the present crisis, it is prepared to use that power in a distasteful but urgent cause.

Yet underlying most complaints against American policy toward Iraq is simple anti-Americanism, which goes hand in hand with an absurdly exaggerated legitimization of the UN, an organization of corrupt, failed despotisms nevertheless now held by some to be an unappealable world supreme court.

My enthusiasm for the miracle of modern Europe is no less than that of the most fervent Euro-integrationist. The level of cooperation and benevolence between these formerly hostile countries is an inspiration and a blessing. However, Europe is not a coherent force in international affairs and does not behave like a great power.

Nearly sixty years after the Second World War, Western Europe's foreign policy is one of deliberate and enforced weakness, emphasis on soft options, sanctions, persuasion, commercial incentives. Domestically, they pay Danegeld to the working classes at the expense of economic growth.

In Italy, three people work for every two on benefit. In the 1990s, in America, 44 million jobs were eliminated as superfluous or inefficient, and 75 million private-sector jobs were created, for 31 million net new jobs. In the EU, apart from Britain, a net five million jobs were created, all in the public sector.

The paradox is that the Europeans do not see that American power, which they resent, maintains their ability to be weak, and to have a general attitude of righteous lassitude.

Chris Patten, the EC's external relations commissioner, grandly assures us: "Frankly, smart bombs matter, but smart development assistance matters more." Not necessarily, and Chris Patten doesn't know a great deal about it either, but smart EC commissioners would be welcome too.

There are, of course, many things about America that may not be pleasing to everyone. But determination of alliances between great nations are not referenda on fast food or Hollywood. Relations between great nations are, or should be, determined by their national interests.

The national interest of Britain requires a good and close relationship with Europe and with America. In general, Tony Blair has done a commendable job of facing down the lobotomous old Left in his own party, and being close but not obsequious to Washington. He has adhered to a position that is not popular in his party, and has been reviled, outrageously, as a poodle of America. He has put principle before expediency.

The clear American preference is to work with reliable allies, but not to be strangled by Lilliputians masquerading as allies. America gave the world the League of Nations and the UN. It is an enlightened and civilized democracy that generally tries to behave responsibly, with as much success in this regard as any other important country. It certainly has no lessons to learn on state morality from the Germans and the French.

America's greatest strength is its concept of individualism and freedom. Under its constitution, all unallocated powers reside with the people, who famously endowed themselves with that constitution; its rights were not devolved to them by any other authority.

This, even more than their economic, military, and cultural force, is the source of American power. When the students and dissidents of Eastern Europe were dismantling the Soviet empire, their public readings were of Jefferson and Lincoln.

Our satirists, intellectuals, and leftist journalists may prattle as they will, but there has never been anything like the rise of America from a few vulnerable colonies with a population smaller than Greater Birmingham's, to, as Churchill said, "a height [of] strength, might, and glory never attained by any nation in history."

America will pay more attention to Britain than to any other power. This status has been earned by British leaders of both parties, with rare exceptions, from Churchill to Blair. After America, there is a group of about eight quite important countries—and Britain is one of them. We have the fourth-largest economy in the world and have earned considerable respect throughout the world.

When Iraq has been resolved, there will remain many urgent challenges. The principal countries will need to elaborate the so-called Bush Doctrine: to gain acceptance for a version of pre-emptive military action that distinguishes genuine proactive self-defense from disguised aggression.

We will also have to launch a determined and generous aid program to underdeveloped countries capable of channeling such aid into genuine progress for the needful. We must make it harder for the West to be caricatured as indifferent to or even exploitative of those countries.

We should devise some form of trusteeship for failed states that stabilizes them and prevents them becoming infestations of terrorists. And some plan for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement will have to be sponsored by the Americans, Europeans, and the reasonable Arabs. The UN has to be modernized if it is to be useful, and NATO cannot go on as it is; it must be reformed as a genuine alliance with a revised mission. Ideally, the EU's federalist pretensions would be re-examined also.

In all these initiatives, except the strictly European ones, and in many others, little can be accomplished without America. But it cannot be accomplished by America alone. There is a huge opportunity for Britain in all of these areas.

It is more than forty years since the American secretary of state Dean Acheson said that Britain had lost an empire but not found a role. Being the junior but influential partner of America in modernizing world institutions and alleviating the conditions that breed political extremism is an important role. Never has a country that was once the most influential in the world managed so slight and so dignified a diminution of status.

To give maximum service to the causes of freedom and economic growth, Britain must maintain and build on our unique alliance with America. It is preferable to continue to be envied because of our success and attachment to principle, than to fall any further into the company of those governments for which cowardice is wisdom, ingratitude is Olympian serenity, and the spitefulness of the weak is moral indignation.

This article appeared in London’s Daily Telegraph on February 2, 2003, and is reprinted with permission.