Darren Murphy's View of the World

The Blair doctrine

On Thursday morning UK time, Tony Blair delivered a speech in Chicago on his “doctrine of international community”. It is worth a read because it sets out precisely the basis for a genuine “ethical foreign policy” for the centre-Left: a policy based on the international community being prepared to intervene, including militarily, to defeat and remove regimes which attack and oppress their civilian population.

Too many on the traditional Left believe that it is better to excuse and explain away oppressive regimes that stand in opposition to the USA rather than to argue for intervention in the interests of their people. Their anti-Americanism outweighs their internationalism.

Too many on the traditional Right believe intervention should only be considered if it is in their own direct national interest or to safeguard a special interest with which they allign themselves.

So, for example, many on the British Conservative Right were lukewarm or hostile to intervention in Kosovo but are pretty John Bullish about intervention in Zimbabwe.

Too many liberals believe that intervention can only be supported if international institutions like the UN sanction it. This fails to recognise that the Security Council veto means that countries which do not accept, as a matter of stated policy, the notion of international action to overcome oppressive regimes because it represents “interference” in internal politics of a nation state will wield that veto come what may.

Worse, many on the liberal Left argue that it is wrong even to countenance action to deliver democracy and freedom for the population of Muslim fundamentalist countries in the mistaken belief that democracy and Islam are somehow incompatible.

So, the traditional Left, the liberal establishment and the traditional Right, all coalesce around opposition to action to safeguard the human rights and freedoms of oppressed peoples.

The Blair Doctrine – which the former prime minister reprised in his speech a decade after he first set it out in Chicago – is distinctly different. It calls for action against oppressive regimes based on the values of international solidarity with the oppressed rather than isolationism. It recognises that where action is not taken in the apparent short term narrow ‘national interest’ often, as with Afghanistan, the medium to long term consequences can be at best unpredictable and at worst, disasterous. And it argues for siding with the majority of Muslims against the extremists and fundamentalists and helping them defeat those who would pervert Islam to justify terrrorism.

Today, we rarely hear the case for military action to safeguard freedom. Tony Blair makes that case. It is worth a read.