‘Skyfall’. Photograph: Francois Duhamel.

What role should a post-imperial Britain play in the world? This question has dogged us since at least 1962, when the former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson made his infamous remark. Arguably, though, the new Bond film has an answer: Our role is to kill bad guys competently and with style.

Throughout Skyfall, it is repeatedly emphasised that the world is threatened by all kinds of sinister chaps and it’s Britain’s job to foil their fiendish plans. It is a message that is conveyed explicitly – such as in the testimony that ‘M’ gives to a panel of sceptical politicians and later, in the final scene, when ‘M’ forcefully reminds Bond that there is work to be done – but it is also subliminal. For example, in that last scene, there is a painting of ‘a long line of Trafalgar era fighting vessels, primed and ready for action, looking magnificent in formation.’ As David Costelloe points out, this is meant as a riposte to Q’s comparison of Bond with Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, but it can also be seen as a statement of intent from Britain. (Indeed, the contrast between the two paintings may be the filmmakers’ way of telling Acheson to go fuck himself…).

Yet who are the bad guys? A criticism that my friend and ‘blogeague’ Adam Elkus has about Skyfall and other recent films in the franchise is that the villains Bond and MI6 do battle with don’t reflect the real world threats to the United Kingdom and its allies. Rather than foiling an attempt to control 60% of Bolivia’s water supply, maybe Bond should have tracked down Osama bin Laden to Abbottabad and put a bullet in his brain – followed by a quip about having already banged his forty virgins…

There are two points I’d make in response to Adam’s criticism. First, I can’t think of a villain who actually reflected a real world threat – even in the 1960s ‘golden age’ of Sean Connery. Soviet Russia was more an opponent with whom MI6 would occasionally cooperate to foil mutual threats (e.g. in The Living Daylights). In From Russia With Love, Moscow seemed to have a wary relationship with SPECTRE, reminiscent of Pakistan’s with the Taliban. Second, we don’t know what the ‘real’ threats are in the Bond universe. Perhaps British policymakers have a completely skewed threat perception and Bolivian public utilities are considered a vital national interest – something that MI6 just has to deal with as best they can. This doesn’t require a leap of the imagination given the ‘internationalisation’ of the national interest over the last decade and a half.

David has compared Bond’s battle with Silva in Skyfall to the one between Batman and the Joker in The Dark Knight – something that has been pointed out elsewhere. Yet there is a difference. Unlike most recent actions films, and, indeed, unlike previous films in the franchise, Bond is depicted as being rooted in an institution – the British espionage bureaucracy. He isn’t a superhero or a ‘fascistic’ strongman who operates outside the law for the (perceived) good of the community – Bond is an instrument of this country’s foreign policy. (Given our license to kill, I think his next mission should be the pre-emptive liquidation of the Avengers due to the fascistic thinking they displayed at the end of Avengers Assemble…).

A couple of weeks ago, the United Kingdom was declared ‘the most powerful nation on Earth‘ – at least as far as soft power is concerned. Skyfall, and the 50th anniverary of the Bond franchise, are explicitly marketed as part of it. Yet they are essentially a justification of hard power and the British punching above their weight in world affairs – not because we necessarily want to, but because there’s just work to be done.

At eleven o’clock Saturday morning, on December 27^th 2008, the New Year’s War in Gaza began. It was at this time the payload from Israel’s first airstrike detonated. The attack was the country’s initial response to the missiles directed at its southern cities by Hamas, the political party and paramilitary group which had seized the Gaza Strip over a year before. No war happens unexpectedly, and the New Year’s War in Gaza was long in the making. Throughout the three weeks’ fighting, ancient and recent grievances were said to be the cause from Hamas’ insistence on firing rockets into southern Israel to the existence of Israel itself. What drove the two belligerents specifically towards this conflict, however, was the dynamic which replaced the old one motivating the Arab-Israeli rift. The new dynamic reflected divisions in the internal politics of both Israel and Palestine precipitated by shifts in attitude, as well as pressures from elsewhere in the Middle East. It created circumstances that made war inevitable as well as necessary if the peace process were to move forward. When unilateral ceasefires were declared on January 18^th, over a thousand Palestinians had been killed and nearly twenty Israelis. In the coastal enclave itself, one in seven buildings had been completely or partially destroyed, with losses estimated at two billion dollars. But whatever the anger and destruction caused, this was an important conflict because it created the conditions necessary for peace negotiations and highlighted the changed character of warfare in the early 21^st Century.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

The old dynamic motivating the Arab-Israeli rift is the one which many continue to use when discussing the problem despite its rapid disintegration four years ago. It was between an expansionist Israel whose governments either encouraged its settlers in Gaza and the West Bank or failed to rein them in and a Palestinian Authority more concerned with maintaining, not solving their eternal feud. The process was self-perpetuating. More Israeli settlements meant greater Palestinian resistance; greater Palestinian resistance meant tougher Israeli responses, demanding further resistance. Like spoilt children, Bradley Burston wrote recently in Ha’aretz, each side claimed the other ‘started it’ and an act of violence necessitated retribution for the sake of fairness. The disintegration of the old dynamic and its replacement by a new one happened over a period of two years and began with Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. It triggered the transition between the two dynamics by not only removing an ancient grievance from the equation but also splitting the traditionally hard-line Likud. Some argue that whether a party is left-wing or right in Israel’s fractious political culture depends on their willingness to cede land in return for a peace deal, but Ariel Sharon’s decision to remove Jewish settlers from the Strip caused a shake-up in the country’s politics. His new party, Kadima, sought to manoeuvre between hardliners and the more conciliatory centre-left. It was a deft balancing act that Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, was arguably ill-suited to pull off. And the task was made increasingly difficult by the vacuum which the withdrawal created in Gaza. Dennis Ross, the chief American negotiator in the region for twelve years, has argued that instead of making things better the Israeli evacuation simply worsened the situation. ‘It became completely lawless’. Hamas capitalized on the subsequent discontent with Mahmoud Abbas and the moderates Fatah to win the 2006 Palestinian elections. The victory undermined the old dynamic further. Although the group omitted its desire to destroy Israel from its election manifesto, it refused to reject this as a long-term goal, as well as refusing to eschew violence. This meant the risks to Kadmia’s middle-of-the-road approach became more serious, especially after the infamous remark by Iranian president Ahmadinejad about wiping Israel ‘off the face of the map’. It was the war in Lebanon that summer which put an end to the old dynamic and created the circumstances that led to the fighting in Gaza.

How Hamas and the Israeli government handled the latter’s conflict with Hizbullah, the Lebanese paramilitary group three years ago created a dynamic that only further war could resolve. The incoherent response by Olmert to the threat posed by Iranian proxies on Israel’s borders reflected his inexperience in national security policy. Although the Israeli Defence Forces were more successful than is popularly remembered, its apparent failure against the Islamists impacted on Israeli defence strategy and its domestic politics. The most powerful and sophisticated armed forces in the Middle East had been seen off by ‘irregulars’ equipped with standard or improvised weapons. It undermined the aura of invincibility the IDF has cultivated for decades to deter hostile neighbours at a time when Iran was becoming more and more belligerent. This raised the electoral stakes for Olmert to perform on defence issues and heightened domestic pressure on Kadima’s balancing act over a peace settlement. Negotiations with Abbas and the Palestinian Authority couldn’t move forward so long as the Israeli government hadn’t the political capital to restrain settlers in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Hamas’ relationship with Fatah stretched to breaking point when the former supported Hizbullah in the summer of 2006 by attacking Israel in the south. Patience snapped, and the Palestinian territories were effectively partitioned between the two factions in the ensuing fight. The next year was characterised by intermittent ceasefires between Hamas and Israel, and the Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu harried Olmert for failing to tackle the group seriously. He and others argued that the ceasefires allowed Hamas to rearm via secret tunnels under the Strip’s border with Egypt despite a blockade that organizations like Amnesty International condemned as inhumane. Whereas the old dynamic had been a self-perpetuating process, the new relationship was static. The only way to break the stalemate was by radically altering the balance-of-power. Hamas’ refusal to renew the ceasefire on December 19^th provided the Israeli government with the opportunity to create another dynamic in its favour. It would restore the country’s military prestige as well as strengthen Kadima’s domestic support. ‘We will not agree to return to the old rules of the game,’ declared Olmert. ‘We will act according to new rules that will guarantee that we are not dragged into an incessant tit-for-tat war’.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal

Before one can begin to look at the conflict, it is necessary to look at the problems Hamas poses the international community (its implications as a military opponent are explored below). Like Hizbullah or the Sadrists in Iraq, Hamas combines the ethnic nationalism of a separatist movement with the absolutist beliefs of revolutionary Islam. ‘We will not rest until we destroy the Zionist entity’, said Fathi Hammad, a senior figure in the organization. Another felt Hamas was ‘not just fighting for food to be brought in, but for al-Aqsa’, the Islamic holy site in Jerusalem. The challenge the international community faces with absolutist beliefs like these is that negotiation is made impossible, as how can one negotiate the will of God? With regard to the Palestinian question, this has worrying implications. ‘Are we going to preserve the Palestinians as a cause that is national,’ Dennis Ross has asked, ‘or are we going to deal with [Palestinians] who’ve become an Islamist cause?’ If one attempts to negotiate with Hamas, however, efforts are quickly hampered by their unlimited objectives, as well as the organization’s fractured hierarchy. If a demand is met then new ones follow, and unless they are met too, peace is out of the question. Haniya, the Hamas leader in the Strip, said ‘The aggression must stop, the crossing must open and the blockade must be lifted and then we can talk about other issues.’ In other words, discussing the rocket-fire was only possible if all the obstacles put in the group’s way to acquire rockets were removed. Alternatively, demands are so unreasonable that no one can agree to them. ‘Egypt should allow Palestinians into the country without condition’, argued Haniya. ‘Only the sick and wounded – I won’t allow that.’ Hamas is also plagued by a fractured decision-making process spread across the region making it difficult to know who to talk to. Authority is divided between Haniya in Gaza and the overall leader, Khaled Mashaal, in Syria. Power struggles within the Strip also led to a rift between the political leadership and the military wing which the fighting in January accentuated. Only by understanding Hamas’ complex web of beliefs, structure and decision-making process can we study the New Year’s War in Gaza.

The Israeli offensive lasted twenty-three days and was carried out in two phases, a sustained attack on the Strip through airstrikes and naval bombardment followed by a large ground invasion. Ostensibly, the aim of the operation was to silence Hamas’ rockets, which the Olmert government repeated throughout the conflict. ‘We are not war hungry,’ said defence minister and Labour Party leader Ehud Barak, ‘but we shall not allow a situation in which our villages, towns and civilians are constantly targeted’. This was easier said than done, however. In the first four days of the conflict, Hamas managed to fire two hundred and seventeen rockets into southern Israel and ninety-five mortar shells. Moshe Arens warned in Ha’aretz that if the IDF failed to suppress the rocket-fire then the Islamists would be seen as the victors by not only Iran and the Arab states but also the wider international community. A second defeat like Lebanon would serve as ‘an invitation to further provocations and aggression by Israel’s enemies in the years to come.’ Others argued that the objective of the war should be Hamas’ extermination. This certainly was the attitude of hardliners, with Netanyahu warning that his government will have ‘no choice’ but to ‘finish the work’ if Likud won the February elections. It is difficult to know what ‘extermination’ means, however. Although one could try to kill every Hamas agent and operative in Gaza, how would you ‘exterminate’ the ideas they represent? The Israeli military worried that if the army pursued each and every Islamist to the last abandoned house or barricaded alleyway then the power vacuum left in the Strip could throw up enemies much worse. (Al Qu’aida has always wanted a presence in Palestine). Instead, the war would do two things. Firstly, targeted airstrikes and the Special Forces units sent into the territory would ‘behead’ Hamas’ political and military leadership. On January 1^st 2009, an airstrike killed Nizar Rayyan, a senior commander in the organization who advocated a return to suicide bombings. Three more senior Hamas figures were killed three days later. Secondly, the scale and ferocity of the Israeli offensive would restore the armed forces’ deterrent quality by undermining the assumption held by Islamists like Hamas and Hizbullah that they dictate the beginning and end of conflicts. If there were to be a ceasefire, it would be on Israel’s terms. The Israeli commentator Ofer Shelah wrote how the country will present itself to its enemies as the ‘crazy country’, responding to even the slightest provocation with a ‘massive and unfettered assault’, albeit after a period of patient endurance. ‘We restrained ourselves for a long time but now is the time to do what needs to be done’, warned Barak. Whatever the ostensible aim for the war, one can argue that the above two were the underlying objectives.

Until the army moved into the Strip on January 3^rd, many worried Israel would repeat the mistakes of Lebanon, when the government assumed the air force could achieve most of its objectives single-handedly. ‘There is no way to take Hamas out without going into Gaza,’ said Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general. But memories of its ‘indifferent’ performance against Hizbullah had made a deep impression on the IDF, The Economist reported. ‘This time military spokesmen say that planning has been meticulous and training for the operation long and careful.’ By January 4th, the territory was split in two and Israeli forces were engaging Hamas fighters around Gaza City, as well as Beit Lahiya and Jabaliya. The town Beit Harroun was surrounded and Raffah suffered an overnight naval bombardment. Khaled Meshaal had warned that ‘doom will await’ the soldiers of Israel if it embarked on a ground assault. ‘Our people will fight from one street to the next, from one house to the other, and on every inch of land.’ Fiery rhetoric like Meshaal’s is typical of the sort all paramilitary groups use to mask defeat, but it reflected how out-of-touch the external leadership was about the realities in the Strip. The IDF understood how bloody fighting the Islamists from street to street would be and instead surrounded Hamas strongholds while continuing sustained airstrikes. How absent the external leadership were from the conflict was further apparent as rocket-fire became sporadic and the fighting slowed into a stalemate weighed in Israel’s favour. The Gazan leadership were more amenable to a ceasefire based on an international force while those elsewhere dismissed it outright. ‘The idea of an international force is rejected and such forces…will be dealt with as [an] enemy,’ declared Osama Hamdan, the group’s representative in Lebanon. Meanwhile, fearing assassination, Haniya and others fled into hiding and communication between the political wing and the militants broke down. Israeli commanders joked how the leadership no longer had offices to meet in and Israeli intelligence reported that, if a ceasefire were negotiated, it wasn’t sure whether Hamas’ fighters would accept it. On January 18^th, the Olmert government ordered an end to the offensive, believing its objectives had been achieved. ‘The operation had real accomplishments.’ Barak concluded. ‘Our deterrence has been restored. Hamas was dealt a blow like no other since its creation.’

Over a thousand Palestinians had been killed by the end of the fighting, three times that number wounded; most civilians. Images of the death and destruction were heartrending but these scenes are becoming grimly common today as the distinction between war and peace and civilians and combatants is increasingly blurred. The ambiguity simply reflects the enemies Western powers currently face. We no longer fight countries but fight within them against paramilitaries or terrorists who purposefully integrate their fighters’ into the civilian community. Like Hizbullah, the centrality of Hamas to its host community lets them infiltrate all aspects of daily life and integrate their military wing into densely populated urban areas. It is a strategy based on brinkmanship. An army cannot achieve specifically military objectives without incurring disproportionally high civilian causalities, which outrages international opinion (images of bombed schools and bloody, limbless torsos) and rallies the population and its kin around the ‘resistance’. Insurgents bet on the outside force blinking first by cynically manipulating the rules of war they have signed up to as well as the basic humanity of the soldiers and their commanders. The New Year’s War in Gaza was an important conflict because it captured the changing character of warfare in the early 21^st Century and the difficulties for Israel in the new paradigm. In both Gaza and Lebanon, Israel faces nationalist aspirations coloured by sixty-years of conflict mixed with the goals of revolutionary movements who are proxies of a hostile regional power. Hamas and Hizbullah have so infiltrated every aspect of daily life in their countries that Israel cannot attack their military infrastructure without killing innocents. The latest counterinsurgency theories developed in the United States by experts like John Nagl and David Kilcullen are inapplicable to the situation, however. Kilcullen and others argue that emphasising the well-being of the population by living amongst them and keeping them safe, you isolate the insurgents. The difficulty in this for Israel is that its soldiers living amongst the Palestinians was the problem in the first place and led to their withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. But Hamas’ goal to destroy Israel means it would be fatal to allow them to exist. An irresistible force met an immovable object in December last year. The only way the stalemate could be broken was through radically altering the balance-of-power between the two forces. By mid-January, it was undeniable Israel had altered it in their favour and it was not important that the occasional rocket was still fired because Hamas had been seen to be defeated. They could not defend the people they claimed to represent and their fiery rhetoric was no substitute for ineffective counter-attacks. Only by rendering the group impotent could the underlying confrontation begin to be resolved, but it was a bloody and brutal achievement for Israel.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy with Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni

‘Like in every hot conflict between Israel and radical Palestinians,’ observed the German liberal newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, ‘…diplomatic machinery has been kick-started that will merely heighten the general frustration.’ Throughout the three weeks’ fighting, diplomats and politicians from Europe and the Middle East flew to one another’s capitals expressing outrage at what was happening in Gaza and attempted to broker a ceasefire. But these efforts at knee-jerk diplomacy were undermined from the beginning by an uneasy marriage between the cynical reasons Arab states had to end the fighting and a misguided belief by the Europeans that peace means the absence of war. Images of bombed schools and bloody, limbless torsos succeeded in angering the international community but in the Middle East the rage had revolutionary potential. Over two thousand protesters gathered across Cairo demonstrating against the conflict and rumours were widespread that the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was encouraging the Israelis to exterminate Hamas. He was therefore quick to try to mediate between the two belligerents, having succeeded numerous times before. Nicholas Sarkozy, the most theatrically inept Frenchman in foreign affairs since Napoleon III, appointed himself peacemaker in the dispute. ‘France holds a special responsibility because it has succeeded in creating a band of trust with all those involved’, he said. Attempts to negotiate a ceasefire were undermined from the beginning, however, as one initiative after another failed on the most basic levels. ‘I don’t see how this can help,’ commented Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister and Olmert’s successor as head of Kadima. The failure reflected a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the conflict. An irresistible force had met an unmoveable object and it was only through changing the military situation on the ground could any political solution be attempted later. The Israeli government understandably rejected ceasefire initiatives like those pushed by the French because they would recreate the dynamic that led to war in the first place. ‘A temporary solution might sound nice, but it’s a mirage’ argued Mark Regev, a senior Olmert spokesman. ‘It will blow up in our faces in a couple of weeks or a month.’ In the Middle East, the Süddeutsche Zeitung continued, strength is what counts but uncoordinated proposals by conflicting diplomats and politicians conveyed only weakness. The unilateral ceasefires declared by Israel and Hamas on January 18^th reinforced the failure of the international community to influence events in the region. It was the American approach that, although criticized at the time, allowed the creation of a new dynamic that President Obama has utilized.

What is the dynamic operating in the region now and is it conducive to peace? The developments which occurred in the aftermath of the New Year’s War have created new circumstances that could lead to an agreement. Although no deal can be reached without Hamas, the conflict neutralized the Islamists as an immediate threat and a current factor in negotiations. Israel restored its deterrent myth and, by striking the organization with such ferocity, tangled them in infighting. Amnesty International reported in February that twenty-four Palestinian men were shot and killed by Hamas as ‘collaborators’ during the Israeli offensive. Fatah accused them of rounding up at least a hundred and seventy-five of its members and torturing them. Ehab al-Ghsain, a Hamas spokesman said: ‘The internal security service was instructed to track collaborators and hit them hard.’ There has also been dissension within the paramilitary group and challenges by more extreme factions. In September, Hamas fighters took back a mosque in Raffah which the ‘Warriors of God’ had seized to challenge the ruling Islamists and proclaimed stricter religious laws. The threat posed by Hamas has been weakened further by the election of Likud and its governing coalition with other hardliners. Gaza proved a crucial issue in the Israeli election in February, but despite widespread approval for how Livni and Barak handled the conflict, Netanyahu capitalized on the feeling it didn’t go far enough. ‘After this operation,’ declared Likud’s ‘Benny’ Begin at a rally in Jerusalem, ‘the terrorists came out of their hiding places waving not white flags but the green flags of Hamas!’ One can therefore imagine leaders in the Strip thinking that, if they received such a pounding from a weak prime minister and a fractious government, what could they expect from Netanyahu? By neutralizing Gaza as an immediate issue, however, attention has shifted to the West Bank and Israeli settlements are now seen as the main impediment to a peace agreement. ‘For peace to come, it is time…to live up to our responsibilities’, said President Obama in his Cairo speech; construction of settlements ‘undermines efforts to achieve peace.’ The extent to which Netanyahu can use his reputation as a hardliner to calm his supporters and make a deal with Abbas will determine how successful the latest dynamic will be in achieving peace in the region.

The danger when writing about foreign affairs is crudely shaping the fate of millions through the shaping of one’s prose. In looking at the New Year’s War in Gaza, this article has tried to explore only the high politics and military strategy of the conflict, as well as underlying currents. The ancient grievances motivating the belligerents are no longer a local issue or a cause celebre. A sudden conflict like the one last December and January could impact on the stability of regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the wider confrontation with Iran and the counterinsurgencies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year, American inactivity was a tactical strength; in any new outbreak of fighting, an inability by the current administration to force an immediate end would be a strategic disaster. It is too early to assess President Obama’s efforts at a broader peace agreement, and the fascinating overlap of history and religion, politics and economics, ideologies and personalities involved would already require an extensive study. One thing can be said confidently, though. The old view of the Arab-Israeli rift – simply a matter of an expansionist people and an oppressed one – is inadequate given the new overlap of nationalism, religious ideology and geopolitics and the relation of those three themes to the overarching ‘War on Terror’ and Iranian nuclear ambitions. As the character of warfare is changing this century, so is the Palestinian question. If we are to resolve the issue soon, it is important old divisions are healed and antiquated beliefs shed.

Lord Palmerston: An iconic British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in the mid-19th Century

A conceptual problem with British defence policy is that it is too focused on deterring threats, not on safeguarding interests – a problem unintentionally highlighted by The Telegraph today. It reports that the United Kingdom may increase its military presence in the Persian Gulf region ‘to counter the growing threat from Iran’, not to protect our interests there, or to project power.

The problem is a consequence of the way that politicians and commentators have understood, and talked about, national security since the end of the Cold War: policies and procurement choices are only valid if they deter a paradigm threat, like the Soviet Union. In the weeks before the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) in October 2010, the Prime Minister was the most senior advocate of this kind of thinking in the British government. David Cameron told the broadcaster Andrew Marr…

“What you have to do is look at the threats we face today…We’ve inherited a situation where we’ve got a lot of battle tanks ready to roll into Russia. That’s not what you need today. We’ve got fighter jets that are ready to go into dogfights with the Soviet Union air force. That’s not right.”

He repeated the point when justifying cuts in the defence budget to MPs later that month: “We’ve got to get away from Cold War tactics.” By prioritising threats, however, the current government, and successive ones, risk taking British defence and foreign policy on a wild goose chase. The late Sir Michael Quinlan best expressed the danger of this path:

[Threats] we expect we plan and provide for. What we plan and provide for, we therefore deter. What we deter doesn’t happen. What does happen is what we did not deter because we did not plan and provide for it because we did not expect it.

Safeguarding interests is a better guiding principle for policy-making than simply deterring threats, as it is conceptually broader, and it will also bring a measure of stability: to echo Lord Palmerston, the United Kingdom has no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. If policy and procurement were aligned to the latter, and not the former, then we would avoid the kind of situation that the Prime Minister thinks we are in with regard to “irrelevant” Cold War equipment.

As far as increasing our presence in the Gulf is concerned, the interests-first approach is also sensibly long-term, as it is perfectly possible that Iran could become an ally in coming decades, and our policy would need to be completely overhauled if it was just focused on deterring a (questionable) threat from Tehran.

Update: Since publishing this post this afternoon, numerous people on Twitter have querried the distinction between ‘safeguarding interests’ and ‘deterring threats’, so to save myself continually saying the same thing to different people, I thought I’d make myself clearer. As I wrote above, ‘safeguarding interests’ is conceptually broader than ‘deterring threats’, but I didn’t stress that that means deterring threats also comes under the rubric too. My key point was that deterring threats is to narrow, conceptually.

George F. Kennan: The key figure in early U.S. containment policy towards the Soviet Union

Whenever I have written about Iran, I have looked at the problems of numerous policies to deal with the country, rarely offering my own suggestions for solving the Iran problem. There are two reasons for this, one of which is that it is ridiculously complex and no one can really come up with what I call ‘single phrase solutions’ – like “Sanctions!” or “War!”. I share President Obama’s view that anyone claiming that Iran is an easy problem to solve “doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

The other reason why I mostly critique other commentators’ suggestions and don’t offer any of my own is that the ins-and-outs of the Iran debate fascinate me just as much as finding a solution. I look at underlying assumptions, the evidence they’re based on; the use and abuse of history to justify policies, etc. As I was trained as a historian, this last aspect of the debate fascinates me especially. No matter where commentators stand on the policy spectrum, they use history to justify their positions. With neoconservatives and other hardliners, attacking Iran is framed in the context of Appeasement and the run-up to the Second World War, as I explored on this blog a couple of years ago. One hardliner, the British Conservative MP Robert Halfon, has described the country as “the Soviet Union of the Middle East” – a description I mocked in my TRG column. Those who want a ‘grand bargain’, like Flynt and Hillary Leverett, have cited as precedent the Nixon administration opening up Mao’s China – an example that was mocked by academic Daniel Drezner. Yesterday, I became aware of the problematic history underpinning another single phrase solution to the Iran problem: containment.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading Lawrence Freedman’s excellent book A Choice of Enemies, about U.S. Middle Eastern policy since 1977, and he points out two problems with American attempts to contain both Iraq and Iran in the 1990s that are especially relevant to the debate today. In the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a deeply antagonistic confrontation, but both countries had had a long, strong diplomatic relationship with one another. Freedman points out that this history of regular communication created best practices and principles ‘facilitating crisis management, avoiding unnecessary upset, and, over time, identifying shared interests (most notably preventing nuclear war).’ Secondly, the Communist Party had a tight grip on internal affairs, and political power was highly centralised, thus, after an agreement with the United States had been made, ‘there was no question that the Soviet side could abide by any undertakings.’ Neither of these things existed vis-à-vis Iran in the ‘90s and they don’t exist today: for example, the U.S.-Iranian diplomatic relationship since the hostage crisis has been characterised by the occasional communication undermined by deep, mutual mistrust. Furthermore, the competing power centres in Iran make it ‘hard to move to any political agreements and then ensure that they [stick].’ If much of the reporting about the internal politics of the country is true, the decentralisation of power to competing factions in the regime has accelerated since 2009 (just see the seemingly bitter rivalry between Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad).

I know I ought to develop my Iran writings to go beyond just critiquing the bad use of history, but I think it serves an important purpose: It’s too easy for pundits and politicians to adopt a bad policy – or persuade people to support one – by using historical examples implying everything will turn out fine. As far as containment is concerned, it is too easy for people to think it worked in the Cold War, thus it will work with Iran too and everything will turn out okay in the end, as it seemingly did after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘Political and other leaders too often get away with misusing or abusing history for their own ends because the rest of us do not know enough to challenge them’, writes the historian Margaret MacMillan.

Professional historians ought not to surrender their territory so easily. We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity. We must contest the one-sided, even false, histories that are out there in the public domain. If we do not, we allow our leaders and opinion-makers to use history to bolster false claims and justify bad and foolish policies.

In the Telegraph today, commentator Paul Goodman argues that David Cameron should replace Mr. Hague with the current Home Secretary Theresa May in a big reshuffle that he thinks would restore a sense of purpose to the beleaguered coalition government. He justifies this move by arguing that the Foreign Secretary has done what he set out to do: restoring “the seriousness, standing and self-confidence of the Foreign Office” after years of Labour “pillage”. Why Mrs. May should replace him isn’t explained in any detail, only that she may be just a bit more Eurosceptic (which hardly implies she has the potential to be a British Hillary Clinton…).

Mr. Goodman is a good pundit, but I think his ‘take’ here is flawed: if the Foreign Office seems to carry more weight in government than it did under Labour, it is due to William Hague’s personal authority, not because his reforms have imbued it with authority. The changes he has made to the department will take years to come to fruition, but if they are to be successful at all, they need a Foreign Secretary as personally powerful as Mr. Hague to nursemaid them. If anyone is going to put the Foreign Office back at the heart of British foreign policy-making, it is the de facto deputy leader of the Conservative Party, not a mildly competent technocrat like Theresa May.

There are many other reasons why William Hague must continue as Foreign Secretary until the next election. His policies are, broadly speaking, good ones for Britain, even if I think they often contradict one another. Mr. Hague is also likeable, charismatic, and has built up good connections, which aren’t bad things when it comes to diplomacy.

Few pastimes are as pleasurable for politicos as ministerial musical chairs and there will be dozens of op-eds over the coming weeks recommending all kinds of new cabinets to the Prime Minister that would allegedly restore his political fortunes. Yet William Hague is simply too good at his job to be moved – indeed, the same is true for most of the senior ministers in the government.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement gave to both Britain and France large areas of the Middle East; it did not create the nation-states we know today. France was supposed to receive not only Lebanon and Syria, but also northern Iraq and a sizeable chunk of Turkey. Although the eventual post-war carve-up resembled the deal, it actually started to unravel just as soon as Sir Mark Sykes had negotiated it. British officials in Cairo hated the Agreement and hoped to undermine it: they wanted Syria to be part of a Greater Egyptian viceroyalty that would rival the Raj. ‘I am afraid that swine Monsieur P[icot] has let M. S. badly down’, wrote the politician and diplomat Aubrey Herbert, who was serving in Cairo at the time. ‘This is what comes of disregarding the ABC of Diplomacy and letting Amateurs have a shy at delicate and important negotiations.’

 In 1917, the deal unravelled further when the Bolsheviks leaked the details in order to embarrass the Allies and there was a fierce reaction to what was viewed as outdated imperialist thinking. Sykes wrote that the sooner the Agreement was scrapped the better, as the world had ‘marched so far’ since it had been negotiated and it could ‘now only be considered as a reactionary measure’. His change-of-view coincided with one higher up in the British government after David Lloyd-George became Prime Minister. He wanted to increase Britain’s sphere-of-influence way beyond that which Sykes had negotiated just a few years before. In his book A Line in the Sand, James Baar reports a conversation between Lloyd-George and French premiere Georges Clemenceau in which the latter conceded to British demands. “Tell me what you want,” Clemenceau is supposed to have asked him.

“I want Mosul.”

“You shall have it. Anything else?”

“Yes, I want Jerusalem too.”

“You shall have it,” said Clemenceau. These concessions were recognised in the many peace conferences after the First World War, thus by 1922 the Sykes-Picot Agreement had completely unravelled.

The Middle Eastern order that Mr. Jumblatt worries about disintegrating was created long after this much-maligned deal was a dead letter, and centuries-old problems in the region cannot be reduced to what was even then considered to be old-fashioned thinking about Great Power politics.

I spent a large portion of the day on Civilisation III, as Catherine the Great of Russia. The experience has been a trying one: plunged into wars of attrition against my will, where the phrase “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” did not apply.

My empire consisted of western Russia, Poland, much of the eastern Balkans, the European side of the Sea of Marmara, and the northern Caucuses. England, whose empire was more or less that of Austro-Hungary, and Rome, which controlled Turkey, were my two principle neighbours. After me, the two most powerful European countries were India (in Spain) and Persia (in France). The northern Middle East was mostly made up of inconsequential powers: Babylon (in Lebanon), Egypt (in Syria), and the French on an exaggerated Crete. The other three nations on the map were the Zulus in Italy, the Germans in North Africa, and the Greeks under Alexander the Great in Britain.

How the whole world was plunged into war was inexplicable, unpredictable; something that I couldn’t have envisaged. For no apparent reason whatsoever, Rome declared war on me. This came totally out-of-the-blue, as Rome was my closest ally: we enjoyed close relations, had waged war together on Egypt, and she was protected by my great Black Sea Fleet.

Of course, as soon as she declared war, I mobilised all my resources for a lightning campaign. Dozens of troops were transported from outside of St. Petersburg and western Poland to the Bosphorus and soon had them on mainland Turkey. The Black Sea Fleet was activated and began bombarding Rome (situated where the Asian side of Istanbul would be). I also mobilised the army I had in the Caucuses and quickly took Palmyra on the southern coast of the Black Sea and had them move from city to city along the shoreline until it had reached my main invasion force outside Rome. Through Metternichian diplomacy, I formed a Grand Coalition, not just against the Roman Empire, but also her ally, India. The Persians transported vast numbers of troops to Turkey via the Caucuses and were soon capturing and raising as many cities as I was. Babylonia was expanding at the Romans’ expense, too, and Egypt was taking back the land she’d lost in their recent war with them.

It is not surprising, then, that given the overwhelming might of the Russian and Persian armies, as well as the parasitic activities of the minor Eastern powers, Rome was soon reduced to a rump state on the southwest coast of Turkey. Once this happened, my plan was to set up a city on the isthmus connecting Peloponnese to the Balkans, so I could transport my armies via ship quickly to attack, first, what was left of the Zulus in Sicily (after their disastrous war with Persia, England, and myself), and then the Indians’ empire in Sardinia and Corsica. The plan was worthy of Alcibiades and wasn’t at all disrupted when, again inexplicably, Babylonia declared war on me.

Through shrewd realpolitik, I created another perfect situation from which only I could benefit. I had the Persians declare war on the Babylonians, tying down the forces they still had in Turkey, which would hinder my expansionist interests there. When Egypt then declared war on Persia, I was delighted, as the Middle East would become a slaughter ground: the Persians’ Turkish army bogged down in two wars with two countries themselves at war with one another.

Content with the little hell I had created, I established a transit city on the Isthmus of Corinth and sent off two shiploads of troops to capture a Zulu city on Ithaca. It was as my army made its way across the Aegean Sea that the inexplicable reared its head again and plunged me into another conflict. Without any sign of discord in our friendship, England declared war on me.

I had had my sights set on conquering the entire Balkans for a while now and had begun garrisoning my border cities in Poland in preparation. The plan was to have a string of heavily fortified towns from Danzig to Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. This would allow me to invade the western and southern Balkans, as the English army smashed itself against my defensive line. However, when England declared war on me, only the Polish frontier had been fortified. The next thing I know, my empire in Romania and Bulgaria was crumbling as English cavalry took or raised town after town. I had to start moving what was left of my army in northern Turkey to the Balkans, as well as stop the troop ships in the middle of the Aegean and redirect them to the nearest English city. My plan was to simply raise every single one I took and “delete” the captured workers. When I brought Persia and India into the war on my side, I felt the situation had been stabilised and prepared myself for a small war of attrition.

Events soon spiralled out of control, resulting in an almost Hobbesian war of “all against all”. The only neutral country in the East was France and I knew that at some point I would have to bring them into the war against Babylonia. When England declared war on me, I kept pushing it further and further down the agenda. Then my foreign policy advisor told me that France had formed a military alliance with the Babylonians. I dismissed this contemptuously: France had barely any military presence on the continent or upon the seas. Yet becoming their enemy was the biggest mistake I had made, as I soon found myself at war with her principal ally – Persia.

The one country whose military I feared most after India’s was Persia’s. With my Turkish army now in northern Greece, and the remnants of the Caucuses army fighting off the English in the eastern Balkans, I had barely anything to defend the Roman cities I’d captured along the Sea of Marmara. Facing a war on several fronts, I contacted the Indians and persuaded them to side with me against Persia. Whatever Persian forces were left in France would have to deal with the Indians along their southern border and the English on their eastern one; meanwhile, I could squeeze England, as well as hopefully destroy Persia’s army in Turkey.

Who could’ve guessed, then, that I’d soon be at war with India, too? I had had a mutual protection treaty with Germany for some time now, and it was just as I had concluded my alliance with India that Germany decided to attack her possessions in North Africa. The Indians had attacked the Germans in response, and, due to the terms of the mutual protection treaty, I was required to declare war on India!

The world stage had become a farce! Around the town of Tbrisis in Bulgaria, the English and Persian armies fought one another, while I destroyed whichever military units had survived the battle. My treasury began to run low as I hurried production on my own forces, but they often arrived too late to save the situation in the Balkans. It seemed that soon I could lose possession of the European side of the Sea of the Marmara to the English.

Meanwhile, in deepest, darkest, most northern Russia, a Persian army appeared: one made up of those units formerly garrisoning Persian oil and fur colonies in the High North. So, forces had to be scrambled to face them, as well as Persian forces coming up through the defenceless Caucuses. I briefly lost Kiev, as well as a few other Ukrainian cities. They were eventually recaptured, and I managed to pick off English forces in Poland, but these where my only military victories. My future looked bleak: not only could I lose the Sea of Marmara, but most of my empire too. Catherine the Great would become the ruler of some small Polish amalgamation, as inconsequential in world affairs as Egypt or Babylon, or even Rome.

Yet the Hobbesian mess that almost brought about my destruction soon began to work in my favour. India and Persia fought one another in the Alps while they captured or raised English towns. As they did, my army in the southern Balkans began breaking the back of English rule, and was soon in Hungary, not far from the new English capital of Norwich (London having been raised by the Indians…). The situation in the Caucuses had been stabilised, with a defensive line of Cossacks and infantrymen preventing what was left of the Persian army in Turkey from moving anywhere else in my empire. Now that the East had been quelled, I could concentrate on the West, and Tbrisis was the springboard for recapturing those towns in Bulgaria and Romania that the English hadn’t burnt down. These forces soon met up with my main army on the outskirts of Norwich.

Peace was concluded with both Babylon and France and, then, India, who became my ally again in the war against both England and Persia. Eventually, peace was restored between Persia and myself, with only England and Egypt were still at war with me. Across the Russian Empire, towns began celebrating “We love the Czarina” Day.

What was the situation when I left the game? Much of the Middle East and the Balkans are uninhabited, and so, therefore, ripe for colonisation and settlement – Russia is the best placed country to do so. Peace was eventually restored with England, but only when I found myself at war with India when Germany attacked her again! So things have turned full cycle: another Grand Coalition between Russia, Persia, and England has been formed against India. Only this time, the armies of the last three are severely weakened and England is only a loose collection of unconnected cities dotted across southern Germany.

Bismarck once said that the secret of international politics is to “make a good treaty with Russia”. Perhaps not for the inhabitants of my Europe…

Cameron is the guy who undertook the wrong kind of modernisation, then didn’t win an election that he should have won, then took us into a coalition, which is proving to be the biggest mistake of all three. The Liberal Democrats are retoxifying the Conservative Party.

It is not a good sign when Conservatives as violently different as Tim and I, plus many more besides, are so disappointed in the Prime Minister this early in his premiership. He should think himself lucky that there is no viable alternative to him.

Perhaps we are being unfair on David Cameron? The political commentator Janan Ganesh tweeted earlier that Mr. Cameron’s government’s is the boldest one Britain has had since the Second World War, bar those of Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. It is implementing radical changes in education, welfare, and policing, to name just three areas of reform. ‘Some Tories want the moon on a stick’, Mr. Ganesh remarked.

In reply to Mr. Ganesh, I stated what I believe should be the approach of disgruntled Conservatives towards David Cameron in the absence of an alternative: we should never praise him for whatever bold actions he has taken, but constantly punish him for underperforming. The Prime Minister is too much of a coaster as a leader and too much of a loser electorally to be blindly trusted with the fortunes of the Conservative Party. We must constantly pressure him, therefore, and then, after he retires, we will praise his achievements and ignore his many faults.

Unfortunately, as Mr. Ganesh then pointed out, most Conservatives aren’t as strategic in their thinking as this, which seems to be the constant lament of this blog…

When thinking about foreign policy in a strategic context, the role of historical analysis and quantitative research cannot be undervalued; the work being conducted by current undergraduates may become the new and influential school of thought in years to come. That is why we are pleased to introduce The Walsh Exchange, the first undergraduate research conference devoted solely to undergraduates studying international relations, to the readers of Thinking Strategically. With its inauguration this April at Georgetown University, The Walsh Exchange will provide students the opportunity to gain wider exposure for their work as well as the experience of presenting their work in a formal conference setting.

The Walsh Exchange is being organized by a group of Georgetown undergraduate students with the support and partnership of several organizations within our university. The conference will follow the format of a professional research conference, with students presenting their work and receiving feedback from some of Georgetown’s renowned faculty; in addition, we will be welcoming a soon-to-be announced keynote speaker as well as holding a reception where presenters can mingle with each other and DC thought leaders.

Focusing on the three broad themes of international institutions, international politics and security, and area studies, we believe that the spirit of the Walsh Exchange fits in well with the mindset of readers of Thinking Strategically and its focus on strategy in both theory and history. So to all of you undergraduates reading this article, why submit a paper? Besides the obvious benefits of wider exposure for your original research and the experience gained from presenting at a formal conference, the Walsh Exchange is a great way for the best and brightest young undergraduates in IR to meet and network with their peers from other schools and hear feedback on their work. After all the hard work that goes into writing an original research project or senior thesis, why not share it? And to all the other pre- and post-college readers, we’d still love your support! The dialogue on international relations has two sides, and even if you can’t submit a paper you can still follow along with The Walsh Exchange as the conference date approaches.

So to learn more about the Walsh Exchange and to stay updated on our progress, visit us at www.walshex.org, or find us on Facebook or Twitter.

The perennial debate over the Falklands, like the one over Iran, is typically distorted by a mix of scaremongering, ulterior motives, and simple prejudices. In the last few days, retired military figures have warned that the Islands could not be retaken if they were invaded again, which led to pundits like Nile Gardiner warning that the only way to protect them is to reverse all the defence cuts. That it is virtually impossible for Argentina to retake the Falklands by force is neither here nor there.

As welcome as a rethink of the SDSR would be, there is a less costly way for the Prime Minister to deter Argentine aggression in the South Atlantic, which would also be more precise in achieving its goals than the naïve belief that overwhelming military might guarantees deterrence. The best way to avoid war is to prepare for one and Mr. Cameron should let both Buenos Aires and Washington know that we are. Dispatching HMS Dauntless to the region should be viewed as just the start of things.

If Argentina ever made another attempt at invading the Falklands, stopping it from happening a third time must be one of our key objectives. Given that dislodging them from the Islands in 1982 was not enough to deter them, Britain should expand the war to the Argentine mainland; striking both military and government targets. The point of such an escalation would be to convey to the Argentines that with each invasion attempt they make, our response will be more and more severe.

We should be prepared not only to expand any war with Argentina to the mainland but also to leak that we are prepared to do so. The leak should be that some British military planners are looking at potential targets for us to strike in the event of a conflict. In the subsequent media furore, someone known to have the ear of the Prime Minister should give an interview defending the Ministry of Defence for considering such actions. The implication would be that Mr. Cameron is also seriously considering it.

The interviewee should also use the opportunity to state what would be our main argument in a war with Argentina: that the Falkland Islands are British; that the people are British; and that taking them by force in order to exploit their mineral wealth is just naked colonialism on Buenos Aires’s part.

It is unfortunate but necessary that we will also have to blackmail other countries in the region, as well as our most important ally: the United States. But the point of such blackmail would be to put further pressure on Argentina and so avoid war.

With regard to Latin America, we must convey the message to Argentina’s neighbours “that acceptance of Argentina’s claims to the Falklands is not a risk-free strategy”, as Matt Ince of RUSI has written. If Brazil or Uruguay were anything other than cautiously neutral in any Anglo-Argentine spat then their relationships with the United Kingdom would suffer. As one of the largest investors in the region, we are “not without options and economic clout”. One hopes that this message would result in behind-the-scenes pressure on Buenos Aires to ratchet down its rhetoric over “Las Malvinas”.

The United States has always been wary about British claims to the Falkland Islands and the attitude of the Obama administration seems to be no different from that of the Reagan one thirty years ago. In 1982, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig pushed hard for a negotiated solution to the conflict. Mr. Haig’s efforts failed because, as he told President Reagan, Margaret Thatcher “has the bit in her teeth, owing to the politics of a unified nation and an angry Parliament, as well as her own convictions about the principles at stake.”

David Cameron is in both a more difficult and a more favourable position vis-à-vis the United States than Mrs. Thatcher was in 1982. He will have to deal with a considerably more capable Secretary of State than Al Haig, but Britain has leverage over the Americans. We should make it clear to the Obama administration that any Argentine attack on the Falklands would result in a unilateral British withdrawal from Afghanistan. This should also be quietly said by a junior minister like Nick Harvey in the House of Commons in response to a planted question.

By pressuring Washington on one of its key security concerns, we will hopefully pressure them into pressuring Buenos Aires to refrain from attacking the Falklands.

I do not believe that war between Argentina and the United Kingdom is likely (I still have some faith in Democratic Peace Theory, despite my reservations), but we can make one even less likely by preparing for it. This does not require ripping up the defence budget, but rather the clever use of hard and soft power to persuade Argentina that the Falklands simply aren’t worth the bother of our crushing response.

Of course, this approach also relies on David Cameron being Otto von Bismarck, which, alas, he isn’t.

Europhile ‘cosmopolitanism’ has also been exposed as a lie in recent weeks, as their understanding of the world is actually quite parochial. A good example of this parochialism is an article (£) in The Times today by David Aaronovitch, in which he gives up on the Europhile cause and says we should just become America’s 51^st state instead. ‘Of course, the loss of [the] Union Flag, [the] national anthem, the words “Great Britain” and “United Kingdom”, the crest on our passports, the pound, the diminution of our Parliament and a binning of distinctive emblems would all be regretted. Ironically, we would have kept all of those inside Europe. But their absence can be overcome.’ (Homer Simpson suggests here how best to understand the article…).

As with most Europhiles, Mr. Aaronovitch only sees two options for the United Kingdom: either we can be in the heart of Europe or we can be an American province. There is no third way, unless you count isolationism and decline as one of them. His worldview, like his VHS reference, is terribly dated however. In a globalised, multipolar world, what is the point of regionalism? Why must we be part of a continental bloc or a transatlantic one, not one made up of powers dotted around the world?

If Eurosceptics live in the 1880s, with its “splendid isolation”, then Europhiles are stuck somewhere in the mid-to-late 20^th Century, with its bipolar world politics.

Speaking of Iraq, Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome, wrote a blistering attack on President Obama in The Times last week, criticising his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the country. Tim seems to have copy-and-pasted his article from dumb neocon op-eds in America, as he covers the same bases they do. President Bush was a wise and farsighted statesman, whereas Mr. Obama is a populist with no foreign policy vision beyond ‘cultivating adoring crowds’. He has ignored ‘commanders on the ground’, and betrayed the achievements of the greatest of his commanders, General Petraeus. The president mishandled negotiations for maintaining American forces in Iraq, both because of his inexperience and his craven desire to see them back home in time for his re-election bid. A ‘massive gift’ has been handed to Tehran as a result, and so Mr. Obama can add Iraq to his ‘long list of foreign policy failures’.

The article reinforces two prejudices of mine: that it should be illegal for domestic pundits to write about foreign affairs, and that the definition of a neoconservative is someone who knows nothing about war and strategy but lectures others about them anyway.

I wrote a critique of Tim’s piece for Egremont yesterday, in which I argue that President Obama has a better claim to the soubriquet ‘wise and farsighted statesman’ than his predecessor does because the former appreciates where the interests of the United States lie: Asia-Pacific. With the war in Iraq, President Bush distracted his country from this grand strategic fact. This is something beyond the grasp of neocons like Tim because their understanding of the world is stuck in the early 2000s. Iraq seems to be the centre of their geopolitical universe: Tim doesn’t mention Asia once. (I suspect this is also because it is the region where Mr. Obama has had his greatest foreign policy successes, as I explain in my Egremont column).

There are other things wrong with Tim’s op-ed, which, in my view, is one of the most worthless opinion pieces ever published in a British broadsheet newspaper. He contrasts Bush’s courageous decision to surge troops in Iraq in 2007 with Obama’s decision to withdraw them in 2011, as opposed to contrasting it with Bush’s decision to withdraw them in the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement. He blames the president for the failure of the troop negotiations, but fails to mention that no leading Iraqi politician was willing to publicly ask for American forces to stay. Andrew Exum explains that unless they did this then the United States’ presence in the country ‘would be perceived as a continued occupation, exposing remaining U.S. troops to continued violent attacks.’

Curiously, Tim doesn’t mention President Obama’s foreign policy successes like the killing of Osama bin Laden or the brinkmanship against Pyongyang last November when the Korean peninsula was perilously close to war. Tim also doesn’t mention that the Libyan intervention, which he supported, would not have happened had Mr. Obama not backed it.

If Iraq is to be added to anyone’s list of foreign policy failures, it should be Tim Montgomerie’s…