What Ed Miliband lacks in charisma, he is attempting to make up for in polemic. Tragically for the UK’s future, this represents an ‘Americanization‘ of British electoral politics. In all likelihood, its origins are David Axelrod cynically taking a page out of the Republicans’ playbook. Fortunately, repeated screaming of ‘Benghazi’ as if it were a primordial voodoo incantation, is unlikely to work on this side of the Atlantic.
Speaking at Chatham House on Friday, Miliband sought to pre-empt his critics by laying out a cohesive vision for foreign affairs – usually considered his weakest policy area. He preached multilateralism in quite compelling terms, shrewdly articulated the dangers of an in-or-out EU referendum, and summed up the primary threats facing the world into three elegant categories. Professorial in tone, the focus was entirely backward-looking. Clearly grasping at straws for how to attack his opponent, he indirectly criticised David Cameron’s handling of Libya in the wake of Qadhafi’s ouster in 2011. He failed, however, to present any concrete proposal on how to address the current humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean or how to use Western influence to halt Libya’s ongoing civil war.
Miliband is right to point out that Libya would have fared better had the Western world been able to administer more capacity-building assistance after the fall of the Qadhafi regime.
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