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foreign affairs in strategic context
Browsing All Posts filed under »Tony Blair«
Has David Cameron re-nationalised the national interest?
One of my bugbears is what I call the ‘internationalisation of the national interest’. It is the belief that the world has become so globalised and interconnected that every crisis is a threat to our health and well-being and that it is vital we are involved in sorting it out. The result of such a […]
Decontaminating Conservative foreign policy
January 8, 2011
I have had another small breakthrough with my work on Conservative foreign policy, triggered by making notes from Professor Tim Bale’s The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron. He spends the last chapter of the book looking at David Cameron’s ‘brand decontamination’ strategy. The biggest problem the Party had between 1997 and 2005 was that […]
The hidden Blairism in David Cameron’s worldview
November 5, 2010
As pundits focused on the defence cuts last month, Iain Martin at the Wall Street Journal pointed out the government had put an end to the Blair Doctrine with its new National Security Strategy. ‘Britain is out of Iraq, heading for the exit in Afghanistan and scaling back its ambitions to more modest levels.’ The […]
Comparing and contrasting Palmerston and Blair
September 29, 2010
My paper about Afghanistan and the British Conservative Party has led inevitably to Tony Blair, and there is a very good piece by Steven Haines looking at the extent to which the former prime minister influenced British defence policy. Throughout the piece, Haines poses a dichotomy between Blair and Lord Palmerston when it comes to […]
Copying America: The British Tea Party
September 18, 2010
I like freedom. I like democracy. I like choice. But as a conservative, I do not like agitation or disorder or any threats to the status quo. And as I have been trained as a historian, I cannot stand ignorance and myths taken at face value. One can imagine then that the idea of a […]
Hague at the FCO: A new paradigm in British foreign policy?
July 7, 2010
The speech that William Hague gave last Thursday began laying the foundations for ‘clear, focused and effective’ foreign policy, according to him. A friend of mine scoffed at my suggestion recently that foreign policy and national security would be the coalition’s main priority after the economy, him suggesting I should tell Conservative MPs that. There […]
December 16, 2011
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