Foreign Policy Hogwash

As a general rule any time you read an article asking that foreign policy be recalibrated to take greater account of the “national interest” you can be sure that you’re dealing with blather and hokum and platitudes and a deliberate misrepresentation of whatever the other mob got up to when they were in power. Sadly Dominic Raab’s contribution to a new book, presumptiously titled After the Coalition, proves all this all too well.

I say sadly because Raab, a freshman Tory MP, is sound on a good number of issues I care about, civil liberties most especially. Nevertheless, his piece, reprinted by the Telegraph, is rotten. Let’s count the ways. Mr Raab begins with this:

After the hollow realpolitik that tolerated genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica, the pendulum of British foreign policy swung to the ill-focused exuberance of the Blair-Brown era. From military overreach to implausible environmental targets, Britain has fallen short of many of her dizzying international ambitions.