Foreign policy

Peter Oborne is back in his David-Cameron-is-not-Disraeli-he’s-mad mode this week. He accuses the Prime Minister of losing the plot over Syria. As always, the ghosts of Iraq stalk this debate even though the two problems are scarcely comparable. For that matter, I’m not sure it is fair on Cameron to suggest that, after Libya, the Prime Minister has become war-crazy. Yet I was also struck by something the estimable Tim Shipman reports today: Mr Hammond was recently present when backbenchers suggested that the Tory leadership could do with ‘a small war’ to distract attention from party discontent over Europe and gay marriage. ‘It had better be a very small war,’

The Prime Minister is visiting Algeria today to pay his respects to the victims of the hostage crisis. He will also hold talks with Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal, and The Sun reports that he will ask Sellal’s permission for MI6 to hunt down the attack’s mastermind, Mokhtar Belmokhtar. This will mark the next move in the ‘generational struggle’ he described in his Commons statement. One of the first big steps in this struggle took place yesterday, with Downing Street confirming the deployment of more than 330 troops to North Africa to help the French action in Mali. None of those troops will be in combat roles, with the majority

David Cameron’s Commons statement on Algeria just now was the most interventionist speech he has made since the one he delivered at the Foreign Policy Centre during his 2005 leadership bid. But this speech is far more important than that one because it is what he actually believes; the 2005 speech was written by Michael Gove and was given more to tick the leadership contest’s foreign policy box than anything else. Listening to Cameron today, it is clear that the events of recent days have led him to redouble his commitment to interventionism. Indeed, in his talk of the ‘generational challenge’ and the need to ‘beat them [the terrorists] militarily’

In his latest statement on the Algerian hostage crisis this morning, the Prime Minister built on the interventionist language that James spotted in his Commons address on Friday. Cameron said: ‘This is a global threat and it will require a global response; it will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months, and it requires a response that is patient, that is painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent, but above all has an absolutely iron resolve and that is what we deliver over these coming years.’ listen to ‘David Cameron on the Algerian hostage crisis’ on Audioboo

Good grief. Are we supposed to be surprised that senior officials at the US State Department take the view that Britain should, all things considered, remain a member of the European Union? Of course not. Are, however, we supposed to be shocked by Foggy Bottom’s impertinence in saying so? Apparently so. Of course, if the Obama administration were to say that it’s in America’s interests for Britain to leave the EU then I hazard many of those pretending – for surely it must only be a pretence? – to be outraged by this damned interference in our own affairs would instead welcome the Americans’ intervention in the debate and use

No matter the result of today’s Presidential election, it will not be Morning in America tomorrow. Of course the successful candidate will talk of America’s essential greatness. He will promise a fresh era of co-operation and respect in Washington (this time for real). Hope will be on the agenda and perhaps, if the final polls of this poll-driven election are mistaken, change will be too. But neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are well-positioned to deliver either hope or change. This has not been a happy campaign in a happy country and, regardless of the result, there will be no fresh political dawn tomorrow. The path ahead is tough and

For an Englishman, Nile Gardner is an unusually reliable mouthpiece for the more reactionary elements of reactionary American conservative foreign policy preferences. His latest epistle to the Daily Telegraph demonstrates this quite nicely. There is, you see, a meeting of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement next week and this meeting will be held in Tehran. Worse still, Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations will attend this conference. I am not at all convinced that this is a useful use of the Secretary-General’s time. I suspect this meeting is bound to be little more than a festival of anti-American and anti-Israeli prejudice. I would want no part of it myself.

The supporters of that exhibitionist monkey Julian Assange are becoming ever more bizarre. George Galloway MP, for example, has been sounding like a High Court judge in 1973: those women were not ‘raped’, he says of the accusations against Assange; calling that sort of thing rape diminishes the concept of rape — it was just “bad sexual etiquette”. So, there are — as Ken Clarke once pointed out before he was eviscerated by the liberal hate mob – different gradations of rape and some things which are called rape are not rape at all. As it happens, I think Galloway has a point. But as far as George is concerned

There is a quiet revolution taking place at the Foreign Office under William Hague’s stewardship. This morning’s headlines focus on the announcement of ‘greatly increased’ support for Syrian rebels including £5 million ‘of non-lethal practical assistance’ for the Free Syrian Army. In straightforward terms this means communications equipment, medical supplies, and body armour. Critics have understandable concerns. Who is the Free Syrian Army? What do they want? Will sectarian bloodshed follow the fall of Assad? Lessons from the Afghan-Soviet war counsel against the promiscuous embrace of rebels whose immediate aims appear to chime with ours. This is the challenge facing Whitehall mandarins. A humanitarian crisis looms in Syria where more