Cameron’s outdated foreign policy

David Cameron’s speech in Berlin today on foreign policy advocated a cautious, liberal conservative approach to foreign policy. It is very different, at least in tone, from the foreign policy vision that he set out when running for leader. 

The sound bite from today’s speech is ‘national security first.’ Leaving aside the unpleasant historical associations that the phrase has, it is so intellectually outdated as to be meaningless. We can’t have national security—even in the very narrowest sense of the word—in this country, while foreign-funded religious institutions try to convert young British Muslims to a perverted form of faith that sees opposition to the British state as a religious duty and British citizens are being given terrorist training in Pakistan. In the modern world, for good or ill, a country simply can’t turn inwards to address its own problems.

Tim has more thoughts here.