Blair's shadow hangs over the Labour Party. Flickr/Centre for American Progress. Some rights reserved.

It’s a shame that the content of Ed
Miliband’s recent speech to the international affairs think tank Chatham
House was overshadowed
by another of the tedious, manufactured rows that have characterised this
election campaign. Nowhere are the actions of government more a matter of life
and death than in the realm of foreign policy, a subject which has been almost
entirely peripheral in the run up to polling day. There’s a reasonable
possibility of Labour returning to power this week, and some scrutiny needs to
be applied to how that power would be used overseas. The fact that those at the
sharp end of British foreign policy don’t have a say or a vote in our election only
increases the responsibility on us to push the issue up the agenda in final days
before the polling stations open.

Miliband’s speech played all the right liberal mood
music, on human rights, multilateralism and so on, but the recital was
scattered with several missed beats and jarring notes exposing the fact that,
behind the melodious rhetoric, the UK’s long-standing emphasis on military
power will continue largely unabated. Doubtless Miliband and his advisers’ sincerely
believe that he was laying out the principles of an enlightened foreign policy.
But if he does enter Downing Street sometime in May, he appears set to carry
forward Britain’s established historical tradition
of making the world a more dangerous place.

Clinging on

One of the more striking aspects of the speech was
Miliband’s choice to attack the Tories from the right on the issue of ‘defence’
spending, holding up with pride the fact that Britain has the world’s fifth
biggest military budget and vowing to protect that status from the danger of
Tory cuts. It is worth being clear about what this really means. British
politicians are always able to think up noble-sounding excuses for military
action, but these high levels of spending are about maintaining the capacity to
project power abroad, not to defend the public at home. This is a hangover from
the days of empire, when the British state acquired a ‘global role’ which it
has clung on to by its fingernails over the last half century of gradual
decline. The malign effects of Whitehall’s power projection abroad are by now well
known, from the imperial period up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
more recently. Playing the same role into the future will inevitably have
similar effects.

Take the current crisis in Ukraine, where Miliband’s
speech echoed the familiar macho talk of armed deterrence, but had nothing to
say about the careful diplomacy that is needed to talk down Putin’s thuggish
regime, as a sharply diminished Russia lashes out in its near abroad. There are
no excuses for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, but there are explanations that
leave less room for liberal Western conceit. One can reject the language of
‘legitimate spheres of influence’ whilst also acknowledging that part of the reason
for the Kremlin’s behaviour lies in NATO and the EU pushing themselves right up
to Russia’s doorstep since the end of the Cold War, the consequences of which
were entirely predictable. Miliband was full of praise for NATO, portraying it
as a purely defensive, ‘security’ minded force, as though East and West had not
both played their part in aggressively stoking a dangerous rivalry from the end
of World War II up to the present day. If he gains office, he will need to
spend less time playing the hard man, and more time thinking productively about
how Ukraine could be relieved of its current status as a square on the geopolitical
chessboard.

Tunnel vision

Another example of this problematic approach is the ongoing
intervention against ISIS in Iraq. Miliband has made much of his insistence in
2013 of strict conditions on any strikes against the Assad regime over its use
of chemical weapons, an intervention which was subsequently called off (more
due to the Cameron government’s incompetence,
and the White House’s reticence, than any role that Miliband played). But the government
motion supported by Labour in the House of Commons last year authorising
intervention against ISIS in Iraq made no mention of a new political settlement
in that country, much less making support for the Baghdad government
conditional on substantive moves toward national reconciliation, which was the
very least that should have been expected. The rise of ISIS has fundamentally socio-economic
and political
causes, and the risk was always clear that military action taken in the absence
of meaningful efforts to address those issues would exacerbate the very conditions
that allowed ISIS to make its huge advances into Iraq in the first place.
Indeed, there
are signs now that the intervention Miliband supported is having
increasingly damaging and counterproductive effects, pushing the day when Iraq
will finally know peace even further into the future.

More generally, with regard to the widespread state of
turmoil in the Middle East, Miliband’s remarks were limited to military and
‘security’ responses, and talk of dealing with regional allies. There was no critical
engagement with Britain’s extensive culpability in creating the conditions that
led to current disasters: the consistent, bipartisan support for tyrants of
various descriptions, and the devastating impact of their neoliberal economic
reforms. Indeed, one of the main reasons the Arab uprisings took such a
disastrous turn was the violent counter-revolutionary backlash from key British
allies, such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,
and Egypt.

Blair's long shadow

Perhaps worst of all was the lack of any discussion of
what is currently happening in Yemen,
where a Saudi led armed intervention involving UK-supplied
fighter-bombers is inflaming domestic conflict and creating a humanitarian
catastrophe, while Britain lends diplomatic
support to the Saudi regime and technical
support to its air force. Hundreds have died over the course of this
intervention, as civilian
targets have been struck repeatedly
forcing more than 150,000
people to flee their homes. It is particularly galling that Miliband spoke
briefly of the need to maintain proper arms export controls, whereas he should
have been demanding that export licences for Saudi Arabia be suspended
immediately, given the way UK-manufactured kit is currently being used. His
shame in failing to talk seriously about Yemen is not diminished by the fact
that it is shared by the rest of the political class, who have shown blithe
indifference to the suffering in that country throughout the election campaign.

For political reasons, support for British militarism
has been seen by successive Labour leaderships as a key test of seriousness and
virility. But this political positioning has real world consequences, beyond
the fortunes of the party. A shallow focus on ‘security’ responses will do
nothing to deal with today’s crises from Eastern Europe
to the Middle East. Indeed, it is likely to make them far worse. Nor is a faith
in the benign nature of British state violence overseas likely to lead to the
safer, better world that progressive people in this country hope for. Whether
Labour win or lose the election, far more critical pressure needs to be brought
to bear on the party’s approach to foreign policy, which has only improved to a
relatively small extent since the darkest days of Tony Blair.