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…

The internationalisation of the national interest has been a worldwide phenomenon, but it reached its intellectual, practical, and rhetorical apogee in this country during the Blair years. In his famous 1999 Chicago speech the then Prime Minister told his audience that globalisation…

…is not just economic – it is also a political and security phenomenon. We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist. By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nations…We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not…We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure.

Blair believed, in his typical morally certain way, that there were only two options in foreign policy: “isolationism” and “internationalism”. He also felt that the security of the British people was bound up with the suffering of others in lands about which we knew little. Simple strategic questions like who, what, where, and why were not so important.

British foreign policy lost its Blairite drive after Gordon Brown came to power, but it continued to be undermined by the internationalisation of the national interest. The great Hew Strachan has said of the 2008 National Security Strategy: “[It] essentially confronts us with a range of problems such as climate change, migration, the ills of the world in general and the threats that might face the world in future, as though those are specifically the issues of the United Kingdom in relation to its national interests.”

The national interest, a phrase which the Tory Party has always tried to monopolise, has been a key theme of David Cameron’s – especially since the creation of the coalition government in May 2010. He told Party members in October of that year:

It is a simple truth: at its best this party always puts country first. We’ll leave the vested interests to others. And no, we’re not about self-interest either. This is the party of the national interest and with this coalition that’s exactly what we’re showing today.

With regard to foreign policy, our new Prime Minister promised to reverse the drift of the Labour years by ‘re-nationalising’ the national interest. “Our foreign policy is more hard-headed”, Mr. Cameron asserted in his first Mansion House speech, as “it will focus like a laser on defending and advancing Britain’s national interest.”

Over the last year, there has been a welcome trend against the internationalisation of the national interest. Germany’s, and, to a lesser extent, America’s, position on Libya is an example of a country recognising that not all the world’s problems are its own and it does not have a direct responsibility in sorting them out. There are others with a bigger stake in the problem and who also have the will and resources to sort it out by themselves.

Last night, lying awake in bed, I asked myself whether David Cameron’s veto last Friday can be considered another example of this trend. It is possible. He told the BBC that day: “You’re in a room with twenty-six other people who’re saying, ‘Put aside your national interests. Go along with the crowd. Do what will make life easy and comfortable for you there in that room.’ But you say, no. It’s important that we get the things that Britain needs, and so I decided not to sign that treaty.”

Has he successfully re-nationalised the national interest as a result of his decision?

No.

The Prime Minister has begun to reverse the ‘Europeanization’ of the national interest, which is not necessarily the same thing as its internationalisation. Mr. Cameron had to reverse it because it is what his Party and the country wanted: both the former and the latter are uniformly Eurosceptic. When it comes to the wider world he has more of a freehand because neither the Conservative Party nor the country cares enough about foreign affairs to press him on his talk of re-nationalising the national interest.

In his first Mansion House speech, David Cameron talked the language of both re-nationalisation and internationalisation. He touched on the importance of prioritisation in foreign policy, which Labour had ignored. “In recent years, we’ve made too many commitments without the resources to back them up. And we failed to think properly, across Government, about what we were getting ourselves into and how we would see it through to success.” But he also repeated the views of Tony Blair without adding where our interests specifically are in the world, which of them need to be prioritised, and what our limits are in pursuing them. “Britain’s interests depend on the interests of others and…we need to maintain a global foreign policy, because our national interests are affected more than ever by events well beyond our shores.”

This same contradiction – simultaneously re-nationalisation and internationalisation – is repeated in the 2010 National Security Strategy, the response of the British government to the Arab Spring, and our involvement in Libya. David Cameron’s foreign policy is more Blairite than he acknowledges.

If the veto was part of the trend against the internationalisation of the national interest, then there is a lot further to go as far as the United Kingdom is concerned.

The British (and American) solution to geopolitics seems to be democratic politics, but it has a major flaw: Pakistan’s support for terrorist groups in the region is due to its rivalry with India, not the nature of its government in Islamabad or the power of the military in Rawalpindi.

In the public statements of David Cameron and William Hague, in both opposition and government, there is a false dichotomy between a democratic Pakistan which is a peaceful actor in the region and an autocratic, terrorist-supporting Pakistan. “We want to see a strong and a stable and a democratic Pakistan,” the Prime Minister said in Bangalore last July, “but we cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that [they are] allowed to look both ways” (my emphasis). There is no recognition that democracy and state sponsorship of terrorism can coexist, even though they have in the country before.

Zulfikar Bhutto waged a clandestine proxy war against Afghanistan in 1975 using Afghan exiles. The late Benazir Bhutto acquiesced to ISI-backing of the extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the Afghan civil war and also supported the rise of the Taliban. In the late 1990s, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif shielded the Taliban from American pressure to hand over Osama bin Laden because of his help in Kashmir. And President Zardari is supposed to have told high-ranking Taliban prisoners last spring: “You are our people, we are friends, and after your release we will of course support you to do your operations.”

Mr. Cameron is not the only one to buy into this false dichotomy. It seems to have been the basis of the recent “memogate” scandal in Pakistan. Hussain Haqqani, the now ex-Ambassador to the United States, is alleged to have passed on a memo to Admiral Mike Mullen from the Pakistani president in which he said he would fire the Army top brass and reign in terrorist groups if the Americans protected him from a military coup. C. Christine Fair, a much respected South Asia expert, concluded a recent Foreign Affairs article with the claim that ‘the most likely path toward a stable country involves empowering Pakistan’s civilians to exert control over security and foreign policy.’

I am sceptical because it is not the nature of the Pakistani government which determines its support for terrorism, but its geopolitical rivalries, which have also been a catalyst for changes from military rule to democracy and back again. Promoting “values” and the rule of law may bring about a change in Pakistan’s official mindset eventually, but Western policymakers don’t have that kind of time.

Both Gideon Rachman and Julian Lindley-French have written good critiques of Britain’s “isolation”; I have tried to fuse these pieces with my other reading and have come up with the following:

I believe the United Kingdom is in a strong diplomatic position, not a weak one. Since Friday, British Europhiles, who are considerably more hysterical than some pundits claim Eurosceptics to be, have been “talking Britain down”. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the pro-European Liberal Democrats, called his own country a “pygmy” just the other day. The goal of such abuse is to scare us into submission by making us think a country as irrelevant as ours should be grateful the European Union is good to us at all! (It is a trick Europhiles seem to have picked up from wife-beaters…).

The reality is quite different. We are the third largest economy in Europe, as well as the fifth or sixth largest in the world. Hamish McRae of The Independent explains here why Europe needs us as much as we need them in terms of trade. The United Kingdom is also a key member of NATO and the only European country that the French could plausibly cooperate with on defence. The realities of power politics dictate that Great Britain can’t be isolated from Europe: we are too big, too rich, and too powerful for them to exclude us.

Our decision not to participate in the ‘Brussels Botch’ has accentuated the ‘realities’ behind our diplomacy in two ways. Julian points out that ‘Britain has preserved the strategic room of manouevre worthy of one of Europe’s Big Three and which Germany and France last week tried to deny it. When Berlin emerges from its funk it will realise it has to deal with Britain.’ There is also no guarantee that the agreement will be ratified. Gideon Rachman writes that as economies worsen, voters in Europe are likely to revolt against the measures their leaders have signed them up to. ‘As ratification problems mount, against a background of economic stagnation or worse, last week’s clear picture of an isolated Britain and a Europe pushing towards unity will become much more blurred.’ There is still everything to play for.

Europe’s problems will be decided by the Big Three, not the Middling Twenty-Four. The dominant media narrative since Friday has been that Europe is divided between the United Kingdom on one side and the rest of the European Union on the other. Actually, the divide is between us and the other two most important countries in Europe: France and Germany. Like always, Europe’s problems will be decided by the Big Three in tandem or two of the three against the third. Sarkozy succeeded at last week’s summit because he won German support, but such support is not guaranteed forever. Angela Merkel now faces the prospect of ‘a structural relationship with France which simply sucks Germany ever deeper into a protectionist, statist, indebted Europe which sooner or later will be overrun by the very forces of globalisation enshrined in the City of London.’ This provides an opportunity for David Cameron to realign the Big Three. ‘A more sober Berlin will realise that a deal with Britain is much more likely to promote the kind of economic reforms and disciplines Germany knows full well Europe needs to compete in this world’, Julian argues.

By breaking the ‘veto taboo’, the United Kingdom can play the ‘crazy country’ strategy. There is some confusion about whether David Cameron used the veto last Friday: to veto something is to stop it, which the Prime Minister obviously did not do. One former Labour minister described Mr. Cameron’s decision as a “phantom veto” yesterday. Phantom or not it has broken a taboo in our relations with Europe, and the appearance of having vetoed an important treaty should give credence to Mr. Cameron’s threats of vetoing other things. This furnishes us with an opportunity to play the ‘crazy country’ strategy should the French and Germans be unwilling to make a deal. “Unless you give us x, y, and z, we will block this, this, and this.” It is a strategy which works for Israel and Pakistan vis-à-vis the United States and it worked for Bismarck in the 1850s as Prussian ambassador to the German Confederation. This is not my preferred strategy: it is a deterrent to further Franco-German intransigence and a last resort should it not deter Paris and Berlin from “isolating” us.

Whether David Cameron can be so Bismarckian is seriously in doubt, unfortunately…

This blog has been a purposively Euro-free zone: I simply don’t know enough about the ins-and-outs of the European Union to write intelligently on it (assuming I write intelligently on other stuff…). But after reading a lot of the commentary surrounding today’s events, I think there are a number of hard truths to face.

1. David Cameron did not veto anything; he and a few other countries simply refused to participate in a (bad) deal.
2. The Prime Minister was decisively outmanoeuvred by Nicholas Sarkozy, the most theatrically inept French statesman since Napoleon III, who also had the odd diplomatic success.
3. Given that France, Germany, and the United Kingdom fundamentally disagree about the problems of, and solutions for Europe, the first two truths were inevitable.
4. Given the third truth, David Cameron chose the least bad option, as it seems the only way this country can gain “influence” in Europe is if it gave up pursuing its own interests and devoted all our energies to pursuing those of France and Germany (which is what The Economist‘s Bagehot and Charlemange seem to be recommending).
5. Today, then, was a victory for Nicholas Sarkozy, not David Cameron, but it will be a short-term one: the deal agreed to by twenty-odd countries does not solve the fundamentals of the financial crisis in Europe, and, like the many deals of the last few months, it will probably fall apart as quickly as it was reached.
6. The great Julian Lindley-French believes that the United Kingdom needs to begin to separate solving the European financial crisis (which matters to us) from the survival of the Euro (which is partially important) and our membership of the European Union (which looks less and less attractive by the hour).
7. If Julian Lindley-French believes we should leave the EU, then maybe we should…

As galling as it is for any patriotic Briton to see a portrait of Her Majesty being manhandled by Johnny Foreigner, I think it is important to keep in mind that we are hurting Tehran way more than they are hurting us with this stunt. We have recently applied sanctions that go further than those of the United States, and we are probably aiding and abetting the covert campaign against Iran’s nuclear scientists.

I also think that before we get too caught up in our harsh measures against the regime in Tehran, it should be explained how we will both isolate it economically and diplomatically but also bring them into a regional settlement on Afghanistan. Both the United Kingdom and the United States need to prioritise these two problems if they are to achieve success with either.

The best way to handle the embassy storming is to criticise the regime for acquiescing to it, clean up the mess in the compound, and move on publicly while continuing to fuck Iran over every day through sanctions and covert actions.

I believe talk of an identity crisis is overblown, that Western decline is exaggerated, and I think those who feel sorry about themselves should go to the kitchen and drink a glass of man up!

We need to take a step back from the day-to-day crises of the West and look at the bigger picture. Professor Julian Lindley-French does this in the passage below, displaying his typical common sense:

Whilst it is certainly the case that the emergence of China, India and others on the world stage is leading to a new balance of power, neither the West nor Britain are in terminal decline. However, unless the despond of defeatism that seems to affect and afflict much of Europe is overcome decline could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy…[T]he zero sum game and with it the idea that if power rises on one part of the planet it must by definition decline elsewhere, is a compelling and neat academic treatise. Unfortunately, it is wrong. There is no automatic reason why an increase in the power of China, India et al should automatically lead to a loss of Western power. Power and its wielding are subject to many factors.

Furthermore, we should take comfort in the fact that there is no alternative to the postwar order and that the institutions which were created to sustain that order are simply in need of reform, not abolition. Instead of succumbing to malaise, and dismissing the Western world order as finished, we should embrace the theme of Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: if things are to stay the same, some things have to change.

There are challenges to the Western Alliance, obviously, but there are things it can do to overcome them:

1. There has to be a fundamental change in the way the United States leads the Alliance. American hegemony is a Good Thing, but it has also had two harmful effects on Western cohesion. The almost universal power of the U.S. military is a disincentive for the British and Europeans to spend enough money on defence, as their security is guaranteed. Dan Trombly explained this point in more depth some months ago. Because of its hegemony, Washington also excludes NATO governments from its policy-making; the U.S. decides on a policy –after bitter bureaucratic struggles – and then informs its allies of the decision.[1] This process wastes NATO governments’ expertise, leads to un-coordination and prevents British and European “ownership” of American policies. President Obama has begun to remedy the first problem with his decision to “lead from behind” in Libya, but Afghanistan and the New START negotiations are perfect examples of the second one. A more inclusive policy making process will help the Western Alliance overcome the challenges of this century.
2. There needs to be clearly defined national interests which are separated from Allied ones. Allied malaise is partly caused by an acute sense of overstretch, which was partly caused by what I call the “internationalisation of the national interest”. It is the belief that the world is so globalised and interconnected that every crisis is a threat to our security and it is vital we are involved in sorting out the problem. Try having a coherent foreign policy with this belief as your framework! If the Alliance is to be strong and united on the issues that matter to all its members then one also has to appreciate that there are issues where Allied interests are not at stake and cooperation must be more ad hoc. Germany’s position on Libya, and, to a lesser extent, America’s, is a perfect example of this much needed change in action.
3. Give up on utopian dreams. This is a dream itself, unfortunately, but I thought I would pitch it anyway…

It is said that self-pity destroys everything except itself. The self-pity of many in the West about our supposed decline is certainly destroying its chances of being relevant in the 21^st Century.

We need to cure the malaise in our societies, regain our confidence and do what needs to be done to ensure Western power and Western values are as dominant as possible in the multipolar world.

We need to go to the kitchen and drink a glass of man up!

Since then, I have been thinking about which books a young analyst like me needs to read to better understand the world, its problems, their roots, and how best to solve them – without having to be a wunderkind in the Yale Grand Strategy Program.

Below is a list of books that I feel I need to read to achieve the above aims. They are mostly chosen because of a gut instinct about their value, rather than an objective assessment of their merits and flaws. Other suggestions are welcome, obviously.

If you want to see my weekly book recommendations, either follow me on Twitter or Like my Facebook page (or both!).

** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **

Asmus, Ronald, Opening NATO’s Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (2004)

Bickers, Robert, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire 1832-1914 (2011)

Burke, Jason, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (2007)

Burke, Jason, The 9/11 Wars (2011)

Cohrs, Patrick, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe 1919-1932 (2008)

Dalacoura, Katerina, Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East (2011)

Darwin, John, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires (2008)

Darwin, John, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830-1970 (2009)

Davies, Norman, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011)

Evans, Richard, The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany (2004)

Fenby, Jonathan, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved (2010)

Friedburg, Aaron, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (2011)

Gaddis, John Lewis, The Cold War (2007)

Gartenstein-Ross, Daveed, Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror (2011)

Giustozzi, Antonio, Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan (2009)

Gua, Ramachandra, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2008)

Haslam, Jonathan, Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (2011)

Hegghammer, Thomas, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (2010)

Hennessy, Peter, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010 (2010)

Herring, George C., From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (2011)

Hoffman, David, The Dead Hand: Reagan, Gorbachev, and the Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race (2011)

Immerman, Richard, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (2010)

Jeffery, Keith, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 (2011)

Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2010)

Judt, Tony, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2009)

Kissinger, Henry, On China (2011)

MacGregor, Richard, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (2010)

Mango, Andrew, Ataturk (2004)

Martin, Bradley K., Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (2006)

Milani, Abbas, The Shah (2011)

Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Jerusalem: A Biography (2011)

Omand, David, Securing the State (2010)

Perdue, Peter, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (2010)

Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of Athens (1973)

Scruton, Roger, The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (2010)

Service, Robert, The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century (2009)

Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

Soldatov, Andrei, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (2010)

Thomas, Evan, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire 1898 (2010)

Trenin, Dmitri, Post-Imperium: Russia and Its Neighbors (2010)

Trevor-Roper, Hugh, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (2001)

Wilson, Peter, Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War (2010)

Yergin, Daniel, The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World (2011)

Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (2009)

Yoshihara, Toshi, Red Star Over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (2010)

Zenko, Micah, Between Threats and War: U.S. Discrete Military Operations in the Post-Cold War World (2010)

Zubok, Vladislav, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Krushchev (1997)

I believe it is more correct to call the 21^st Century the ‘Pacific’, rather than the ‘Asian’ century, as the United States will continue to play a dominant role. And the strategy to play that role is relatively simple for them: continue what they’ve been doing in the region since 1945, only with greater resources and more adroitness. The United Kingdom is not blessed with such strategic clarity, however, which poses a challenge to the British political class, as they are used to taking their ideas about foreign policy from America.

We need to come up with an answer to The Question fast because it will influence everything else this country does from its relationship with the United States to its approach towards Europe to the composition of the armed forces.

Sir Christopher said that the UK and France were “absolutely right” to lead the intervention in Libya, because “had Benghazi gone the way of Srebrenica we could never have lived with ourselves”. Three points: first, the ‘massacre’ of Benghazi is not a fact, it was conjecture based on a worse-case scenario; second, it would have taken Colonel Gaddafi a long time to successfully besiege the city; third, we live with Srebrenicas in Syria every single day, therefore we could have lived with one in Libya.

The second thing I would have taken issue with is Sir Christopher’s belief that we should not “get enmeshed in the civil affairs of another country”. Leave Libya to the Libyans, in effect. I agree with the sentiment, but the level of our involvement makes it impossible, in my view. We didn’t simply enable the intervention, like the United States; we took ownership of it and actively expanded the mission way beyond the original mandate. Even now, when the war has been “won”, we’re helping the TNC to defeat what’s left of the regime, which mightn’t be as easy as it seems. There are reports that Gaddafi loyalists are regrouping in the south of the country, possibly laying the groundwork for an insurgency.

If the UK had kept to the diplomatic side of things and left the military operation to, say, France, then we could have plausibly walked away. But we rushed in, out of a well-intentioned-but-ridiculous desire to prevent a hypothetical massacre – only for that sentiment to be undermined by actual massacres in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen.

Libya was the most pointless war since the last one; and no matter how successful it appears to be going, the reasons for intervening continue to be bogus.

It is easy to dismiss SEN Graham as someone who has yet to meet a war he didn’t like: indeed, many in the foreign policy racket did so. The last thing we want to do is escalate the conflict in Afghanistan into an all out war, even if Pakistan has chosen to wage a more brazen covert campaign against the United States. Aside from the mess of that truckload of shit hitting that aeroplane turbine, there is a bigger grand strategic question: why bother? Manish Thakur, a defence analyst, rightly noted: ‘We want to leave [Afghanistan], conserve resources, rebuild [our] economy, face China.’ Is the pleasure of blowing up stuff in Islamabad and Rawalpindi really worth the bother of the day after?

My own reaction to Graham’s remarks was less derisive. Striking Pakistan is the last thing the United States wants to do, but, like with Iran, may find itself in a situation where it is the best least-worst option. The consequences need not be dire, either. I’m a believer in what the great Thomas Schelling calls ‘compellence’, using force (or the threat of force) to persuade others to do what you want. As he puts it in Arms and Influence (1966), in his brutally honest way: ‘The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy – vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.’ If any military strike was part of a coherent strategy then it may pay dividends, but what would such a strategy look like?

To begin with, the political objective behind using force would need to be water-tight. Ron Tira, the Israeli strategic thinker, has written that the point of attacking Iran is not to damage its nuclear sites, rather in provoking enough international pressure on Tehran to stop its nuclear programme. It is difficult to find as tight a political objective as this one when it comes to Pakistan. Stop supporting international terrorism? Okay, but how do you monitor that the way de-proliferation can be with a strict inspection regime? If the United States does ever decide to risk the consequences of striking Pakistan, its reasons need to go beyond the purely punitive.

If the point of a strike is managing the politics of the post-strike phase then Washington would need to do considerable diplomatic footwork beforehand, which would also be necessary for containing any blowback. They would need the acquiescence of China, Iran and Russia, which would be very hard to get, but not impossible given they all have an interest in stopping Pakistan from “wining” the war in Afghanistan. Indian support would be guaranteed, but if it wanted to do more than on the diplomatic side of things, it would be crucial for that support to be covert to avoid a general war. The United States must be seen to be The Lone Sword of Justice.

Finally, the U.S. Afghanistan policy would need to be completely remade. They would need to leave southern Afghanistan, re-arm and empower the Northern Alliance and conduct the kind of ‘counter-terror’ campaign pushed for by Vice-President Biden in the early days of the Obama administration. If Washington really wanted to deliver a further blow to the Pakistani military, it would play on anti-Pakistan feelings amongst the Quetta Shura Taliban and split them from the Haqqani network. You would need a diplomat with the genius of a Talleyrand to pull it off, but as a particular Afghanistan expert likes to justify fanciful policy proposals: it’s something we haven’t tried yet…

As prudent as this preparation to any strike would be, I think the risks of an all out war aren’t as high as people worry. Pakistan has never actually won a war to start with, and the country depends on the United States both economically and militarily. If they already have limited war-fighting capabilities, going to the mattresses with the world’s only superpower would fuck them right up. As well as deciding to not turn on the Haqqanis, the Pakistani military leadership also agreed that it would not be wise to escalate tensions with the Americans.

One cannot avoid war, Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, in his own brutally honest way: ‘it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.’ I don’t believe this dictum should be thought of as an iron rule, but as a reminder that maintaining a bad peace is not always better than fighting. We aren’t in that situation with Pakistan yet, and, as I say above, any strike would need to be a last resort. But it is important to emphasise to Islamabad and Rawalpindi that “all options” are on the table. ‘Violence is most purposive and most successful when it is threatened and not used’, Schelling continues. ‘Successful threats are those that do not have to be carried out.’ The one time the United States had Pakistan’s full cooperation was on September 13^th 2001, when Richard Armitage, the deputy Secretary of State, threatened to bomb the country back into the Stone Age…

The Libyan intervention is many things – indeed, I have called it all kinds of things – but it is not neo-colonialism. It is absurd to think Britain and France have the resources, will and the required mindset to take over the country and start shipping in its missionaries, businessmen and soldier-adventurers to remake it in their own image. One can argue our goal is informal empire, but if you are going to argue that, use the proper fucking phrase, no matter how incongruous it would be. Libya does not meet the criteria laid down by historians Gregory Barton and Brett Bennett to qualify as part of any Anglo-French informal empire; indeed, it would be a stretch to argue that Iraq and Afghanistan fulfil the criteria:

[A] willing and successful attempt by commercial and political elites to control a foreign region, resource, or people. The means of control included the enforcement of extra-territorial privileges and the threat of economic and political sanctions, often coupled with the attempt to keep other would-be imperial powers at bay. For the term informal empire to be applicable, we argue, historians have to show that one nation’s elite or government exerted extraterritorial legal control, de facto economic domination, and was able to strongly influence policies in a foreign country critical to the more powerful country’s interests.