The final phase of preparing the country for Prime Minister Cameron is under way. Having decontaminated the brand and marched ahead of Labour in the polls, the Tories are now introducing the country to Statesman Cameron.
Politics abhors a vacuum. So with Gordon Brown hunkered down planning his autumn ‘relaunch’ and David Miliband practising looking like an innocent flower while being the serpent underneath, Cameron had the opportunity to act the statesman during the Georgia crisis. He did so, even going to Tbilisi to convey Britain’s solidarity with Georgia. As one top Tory purred to me, ‘He’s combined the toughness of a Thatcher, with the tactical acumen of a Blair.’
It is a sign of the change in the political weather that during this episode Cameron appeared a plausible Prime Minister; the contrast to the Conservatives’ chaotic response to the war in the Lebanon could not have been starker. But the last few days have also shone a light on what foreign policy might be like under a Cameron government.
Predicting how a Prime Minister would handle world affairs is an art not a science; few would have foreseen in 1995 that Tony Blair would fight five wars as Prime Minister. We do not know who the next American president will be, arguably the most important determinant of what Cameron’s foreign policy would be — note how a conversation with John McCain was the precursor to a further toughening of the Tory position on Russia. Nor do we know what might happen in the next two years — a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a war over the Crimea — to reshape the international order. It is no surprise, then, that those inside the policy-making process stress that it is a work in progress. But the Tories are further down the road than you might think. They have developed relationships with pretty much every important world leader apart from Putin and the last few days have given us a sense of Cameron’s foreign policy instincts as well as confirming his ability to spot a political opportunity. Talking to senior Tories, one constantly hears that Cameron’s ‘robust’ response was ‘indicative’ of how the Tories would behave if they were in government.
This casting of Cameron as an international tough guy comes as a bit of a surprise. Since 2003, Iraq has been used as the measure of a British politician’s foreign policy instincts. On this score, Cameron comes across as a David Miliband-style figure. He was never an advocate of the conflict in the way that Liam Fox, William Hague, George Osborne and Michael Gove were and no one imagines that if the Tories had been whipped to oppose the war he would have rebelled — heavy hints used to be dropped to journalists that Cameron privately opposed the venture from the off. As leader, his policies on Iraq have not inspired confidence. The Tories were sceptical of the surge which has helped transform the situation in Iraq so dramatically and have repeatedly made jejune calls for an inquiry into the war. But Iraq will no longer be a dominant issue in British foreign policy by 2010. For good or ill, no similar mission to Iraq is on the horizon. Instead, great power politics is returning to the fore to go alongside the challenges posed by failing states and terrorism.
The last few days suggest that Cameron’s instincts tend towards aggressive containment. He also has a keen sense of the importance of a British Prime Minister; something that will lead him — as it did Blair — into a more interventionist stance if elected and closer to Washington, still the locus of global power. It is noticeable that in private the Tories admire the energy that Nicolas Sarkozy has shown during this crisis and on the world stage generally. Stylistically, he is seen as a blueprint for how to behave. Some will see this as just a desire from the Tory leadership to appear on the ten o’clock news, but being in shot requires you to do something — to have an active not a passive foreign policy.
The other key lesson from Cameron’s behaviour during the crisis is that he is quite prepared to lead diplomatic opinion when he needs to. The holding statement put out by William Hague’s team on Saturday was — like the one released by Barack Obama — the kind of call for restraint and an end to fighting by both sides beloved by diplomats who confuse inaction with wisdom. Yet by the next Saturday, Cameron was in Tbilisi declaring, ‘This is a free, independent sovereign country that has been wronged by a Russian invasion.’ The need to instil clarity into foreign policy pronouncements will only increase in government, given the institutional pull of the Foreign Office.
To be sure, there is much still to be done on foreign policy by the Tories. They have yet to work out how their national security council would function, what the precise role of the national security advisor would be; and at present there is no commitment to increase defence spending, something that is needed if the Tories are to ensure that Britain continues to punch above its weight internationally. Then there is the issue of how to ensure greater co-operation between DFID and the military in post-conflict environments. Some believe that this might ultimately require amending the International Development Act — a decision that would draw fire from the development community and that the leadership currently balks at.
The Tories would be wise to carry on thinking about foreign policy. After all, there is a real chance, as colleagues have warned Cameron, that they could find their first year in office dominated by an international crisis. For instance, intelligence estimates suggest that late 2010 could well be the five-minutes-to-midnight moment at which the United States feels obliged to act against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Intriguingly, on this issue both the Tory foreign and defence teams take a hard line.
Cynics might wonder if Cameron’s hawkish tone over the past few days was mere political positioning, a clever attempt to outflank the government. But this misses the point. Cameron is now interested and aware of what he is saying on foreign policy. The leadership also know that other countries are listening — and judging — what Cameron says.
So, where should we place Cameron on the foreign policy spectrum? He is definitely not a neocon, despite the distinctly neocon foreign policy speech he gave during his leadership bid in 2005. In private he has been known to tease the more neocon-inclined members of his team, and a Cameron foreign policy would lack the Wilsonian idealism of Blair’s or McCain’s. But it would be principled. It might be no coincidence, as one shadow Cabinet member notes, that he succeeded Douglas Hurd as MP for Witney, but it is worth remembering that he is a relative of Duff Cooper, who resigned from Chamberlain’s Cabinet over Munich; and his instinctive reaction to Russia’s aggression show that he is no dove. Perhaps the best description of his foreign policy is a very British hawkishness, strong in defence of the national interest but with a distrust of ideology. This approach will be sound in dealing with Russia and maybe even Iran. But when it comes to Islamism, the Tories need to grasp that you need an ideological approach to an ideological problem.