Hallucinogenic Optimism

The special relationship that squandered a noble cause

Martin Kettle in Washington
Saturday May 27, 2006
The Guardian

This may not be Blair's last visit to Washington as prime minister, but the sense that these visits still shape our times is dying. Blair still retains all the dignities of office. His command on his feet continues to impress Americans embarrassed by Bush's lack of fluency. And he was genuinely impressive at Thursday's White House press conference and again in his foreign-policy lecture yesterday morning. His talents will look more impressive in retrospect than they do at the moment. This week's Washington moments seemed more like occasions for the biographers than for the news reporters. Perhaps that's why the White House press conference on Thursday was scheduled for half past midnight in the UK.

Blair no longer sets the agenda as before. He can propose but he cannot dispose. It was not just the British media that framed this week's visit as a meeting of two weakened leaders. The Americans saw it that way too. Blair's support for American foreign policy guarantees him a large tranche of White House time, and Bush was headline-grabbingly generous in his tributes to Blair, as well he might be. But when the Bush administration looks to the future and seeks a bridge to Europe it now naturally turns to Angela Merkel, not Blair.

All of which is deeply ironic in the light of the defiantly optimistic speech that Blair delivered at Georgetown University yesterday morning. You have to hand it to the prime minister for his cool. Pummeled in parliament, undermined by his colleagues, slumping in the polls, Blair still had the resilience and the confidence to sit down on the flight across the Atlantic and draft a speech of high visionary optimism, honing once again the argument for a values-based interventionist foreign policy that, more than anything else, has brought him to this low stage in his career.

Morally, it is hard to argue with the way Blair depicts the world. His is a view shared by more people than would care to admit it. He sees a wrong that needs righting - be it Saddam's oppression, Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, the killing in Darfur or whatever - and he wants the world to join together to right it. And so it should. But what if the world chooses not to? Blair's answer at Georgetown yesterday is that either the global institutions must change so that they act - the solution he has always preferred - or that the wrong must be righted anyway by those with the power and commitment to do it, thus stirring the kind of controversy about legitimacy that has poisoned the whole Iraq episode.

But politically? It is possible that history may prove Blair right, both in the big interventionist picture painted at Georgetown and perhaps even in Iraq itself. But this is simply not where the politics of the Bush-Blair liberal-interventionist policy now stand. It is all very well to talk about reforming the UN, as Blair did yesterday, but it is simply not going to happen in the way that he advocates. It is a fantasy. China will not allow it, and China is not alone in preferring the comforts of the status quo.

Moreover, far from winning the argument at the popular level, the interventionists have lost there too, in too many parts of the globe, at least for now and at least for the immediate future, perhaps even for this generation. The political reality is that, not just in the Islamic world but elsewhere, Blair's preferred solution has become a rallying point for what he opposes. There is a connection between bombings in Baghdad, backbench revolts in the Commons and the elections in Bolivia. Interconnectedness works in many ways.

All this makes Blair both the best advocate of a value-based interventionist foreign policy and the worst. The unintended consequence of the entire Iraq episode has been to squander, not to enhance, the generally noble cause he supports. The effect of Iraq, as opposed to the intention, has been the collapsed authority of the governments that undertook the war - so vividly displayed in Washington this week. The legacy is that American and British governments, for the foreseeable future, will face much greater domestic and international scepticism and mistrust about seeking to pursue such policies, even in situations where the case for action is more clearcut than it was against Iraq.

Bush & Blair both live in fantasyland.