Britain’s retreat from the world is exhaustively chronicled, much lamented and non-existent. Despite not happening, it exercises foreign capitals and the summit circuit. It is the one thing about the UK under David Cameron’s Conservative leadership that every international person of affairs knows, even if it is not actually a thing and they do not really know it.
Numbers speak more plainly than diplomats. In 2013, Britain spent 0.7 per cent of its national income on foreign aid. This met an old UN target that all but a few countries honour in the breach.
In the same year the UK spent its customary 2 per cent on defence, continuing to match a Nato aspiration that most members of the alliance do not pretend to take seriously. No other country reached both expenditure benchmarks – totemic of the soft and hard modes of foreign policy – bar the United Arab Emirates, a non-Nato member blessed with mineral bounty.
Since then, Britain has kept hitting both targets and, bizarrely, codified the first in statute. Cameron has done this while cutting public services and welfare benefits for his own citizens to bring down a persistent budget deficit, despite the nativist pressures of a general election. In the coming years, he will also renew the nuclear deterrent at great expense.
Sociopathic
If British foreign policy is becoming “self-absorbed and insular” – as alleged by the LSE Diplomacy Commission, a panel of experts and former practitioners that reported yesterday – almost every other country in the world must be sociopathic. If the UK is shrinking into “little England”, as the current edition of the
Economist
suggests, that wheezing old cliché has lost its last drop of meaning.
Cameron will not be remembered for winding down his country’s global role but for something close to the opposite. He has maintained Britain as an international actor when the fiscal and political forces during his time in government argued for an inward turn.
Six months ago, 3.9 million people voted for the anti-EU UK Independence party, elevating it to third place in the general election. Before that, Ukip won the European Parliament elections.
Before that, MPs defeated Cameron's plans for military action in Syria. Before that, his intervention in Libya, amounting to regime change, turned to disarray.
Over an even longer period, public antipathy to the EU has grown with the euro crisis and immigration. There is also a glacial inquiry into the botched invasion of Iraq, Britain's most scarring experience abroad for half a century. And – the central fact of politics in the recent past and the immediate future – there is no money.
Further retreat
These are the circumstances in which Cameron has governed. The only wonder is that Britain is not retreating even further. When people accuse the prime minister of disengaging from the world, they mean he is engaging in a way they do not like.
His commercial approach to foreign policy, which some diplomats have taken to with all the enthusiasm of a country squire forced to invite the gardener to his daughter’s wedding, is a way of acting in the world.
His attempted revision of Britain's EU membership, which begins on Tuesday with a formal letter to the European Council president, Donald Tusk, is a major project, even if it goes nowhere. It envisions a nimbler, entrepreneurial Europe, not just narrow derogations for the British.
And if his preference for aid over diplomacy is misjudged, we should describe it as such – not as a species of isolationism.
Britain’s commitment to aid, defence and the EU costs about £60 billion (€84 billion) a year. There is more to engagement than money, but an authentically disengaged country does not foot this kind of bill, not while its health system splutters and its working poor get by with ever less income support.
As an international actor, Cameron is mildly revisionist. He wants to tweak, not leave, the EU, and to emulate the business-mindedness that already characterises the diplomacy of France, Germany and America.
Popular pressures
He took over a country at the intersection of Nato, the EU, the nuclear club and the leading aid-giving nations, and he will probably hand over the same to his successor. Given popular pressures, the prime minister could have got away with less.
It says something about the ossification of foreign policy that such a small break with convention causes such a rumpus among old hands.
“Little England” is a hopeless description of the country as it is and a plausible account of what it might have become under different leadership. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015