We should ditch global leadership delusions and reinvest in real diplomacy
Ian Proud was a member of His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. He recently published his memoir, “A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019,” and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute.
Cross-posted from Ian’s Substack
Photo- Fair USA
This was a week of national disgrace for the United Kingdom.
It was the week in which Great Britain and Northern Ireland was revealed to have non-existent diplomacy and a completely toothless military, not even able to guard UK shores.
Our posture on Iran has been symptomatic of a much deeper mailaise.
We have talked big on the Iran war, in a parody of Yes Minister.
We have said this is America’s war not ours, precisely because the UK has no leverage over Donald Trump to influence his warmongering behaviour. So, rather than taking a more principled public position, that the US and Israel must back down, we have blamed Iran for being attacked, like a Metropolitan police officer, blaming a rape victim for looking too attractive and tempting their attacker.
We have tried to position Britain as a country with magnificent military capabilities to bring stability to the region, while being singularly unable to deploy even one warship, revealing ourselves as militarily toothless and irrelevant. HMS Dragon’s deployment to the Mediterranean has been such a ridiculous catalogue of errors, ending with that ship being hospitalised because its toilets didn’t work, or maybe because it was hit by a Hezbollah missile.
We have tried to position Britain as a credible diplomatic player to resolve the conflict, Yvette Cooper holding pointless zoom meetings in which, with no hint of irony or self-reflection, she calls on Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz from a position of having no leverage over Iran to make this happen. And yet the truth is that Cooper is just yet another in a long line of clueless cardboard cutout Foreign Secretary’s who have rotated rapidly in and out of King Charles Street over the past twelve years, barely spending enough time to warm the seat or, critically, develop their own ideas.
So instead, foreign policy is decided by the Whitehall expert class, when it is entirely clear that that the term ‘expert’ and ‘Whitehall’ are mutually exclusive terms. For the truth is that we have not understood or tried to understand Iran at all since the downfall of the Shah, since which time we have colluded ham-fistedly with the Americans to see a downfall of the Iranian theorcracy with progressively less and less ability to do so.
We haven’t needed to understand Iran, because to understand Iran might have drawn us inexorably into talking to the Iranian government, and engaging in actual diplomacy. Much like Russia, Iran has simply because the enemy other that we needed to defeat, rendering diplomacy completely redundant and subordinate to this task.
Rather, our expert class reassures our moronic ministers that there’s always ‘more we can do’ to achieve success. That a bit more pressure, a few more sanctions, an extra demand or two, will make Iran backdown eventually and that America’s, and by implication, Israel’s, actions are completely unimpeachable. Except that Iran never does back down but instead tightens its grip on the world economy through the simply expedient of shutting a shipping lane. Yet the walls of the Whitehall echo chamber are so thick and impenetrable that our officials and ministers continue to reassure themselves that the Iranians surely one day will see things our way and do as they are told.
And our sold out mainstream journalists go along with the charade that success is assured with no challenge to this narrative brooked in the slightest way. And this has reduced Britain – in fact long ago – to the role of talking with a loud and assertive voice on the world stage.
And when the Iran war finally ends, as it surely will, with a peace deal that is likely better than the JCPOA deal that Donald Trump trashed in his first term in office, Britain’s diplomatic role in the world will have been reduced to that of a the fat and stupid kid in the playground, who through bombast and bullying tries to give the impression of being in charge, while in fact being completely ignored by the other smarter and better looking kids.
I say stupid purposefully, because Britain stopped training its diplomats in diplomacy or understanding the countries in which we operate – most countries of the world in fact – a very long time ago. Why should we try to understand other countries when our role is simply to tell them what to do? Understanding other countries would simply mean that we had to talk to the people in those countries. Talking to foreigners summons up the terrifying prospect of negotiating with them to agree some modus vivendi over those areas where we disagree, in circumstances where we cannot strong arm them to follow our directed path.
Because, for as much as we talk about diversity, equality and inclusion, the British elites hate foreigners. Foreigners are people that we used to dominate and steal from during the days of empire. Foreigners have different coloured skin and speak in unintelligible languages. We occupy Foreigners’ countries, we don’t want them coming to our green and pleasant land.
So, through Brexit, we have discouraged foreigners from studying in our world class universities, shattering a £42 billion per year revenue stream because we don’t like darkies and yellow skins, tipping our world class universities into financial crisis that the government is completely clueless in finding a way out of. When quite obviously, the only way out is to embrace foreigners and not worry whether Ahmed brings his wife and kids when he studies or Liu brings her mother, so long as they leave the country when their student visas expire.
No, instead, we have put a big sign over British Universities saying FUCK OFF FOREIGNERS
And having broken our Universities financially, we can no longer afford to run degree courses for young people to understand foreign languages or how foreign people think and act. Which has created a vicious cycle in which our expert class in Whitehall is topped up each year with clueless young people out of Universities who understand that the only way to get on in their careers is to crowd around the ever shrinking Overton window that the experts already in the system have created.
Britain has become a joke on the world stage, and the cruel truth is that we don’t realise how utterly stupid we look and in fact, think we are brilliant. In the global foreign policy Olympics, our Ministers and officials truly believe Britain is Usain Bolt, when in reality, we make Eddie the Eagle look like a gold medallist.
Yet, that is not what makes the week the most embarrassing. I feel ashamed that at this time of national irrelevance, our Prime Minister Keir Starmer is parading around the Middle East like some sort of conqueror, posting heavily produced videos trying to suggest that he is a global statesman, which he is not. Had the video been from Rochdale or Glasgow, visiting cities in a bid to improve their hospitals, schools and roads, I might mind less.
Yet relentless government propaganda appears aimed solely at confecting and underpinning a misguided belief that somehow the UK is a mover and shaker on the global stage, when we are not. Because of decisions taken by both the previous conservative government and the current labour government, the UK has plunged itself into obscurity. Wrapped up in a strat comms comfort blanket knitted from our own hubris and complete inability to see how we have weakened ourselves.
Firing out at an accelerating rate, meaningless publicity videos to convince our increasingly sceptical voters that Britain is important in the world when, increasingly, it isn’t because of decisions successive governments have taken. Our obsession with spin, dating right back to Alistair Campbell’s time in 10 Down Street is killing us. Until now, it has killed us figuratively and metaphorically. But what is now clear is that our self-congratulating suffocating propaganda may actually and literally kill us.
And the most shameful thing is that, despite our having fallen to such a low state the Ministry of Defence has shifted seamlessly into an information campaign to suggest that Britain needs to ready itself for war. This is both manifestly absurd, morally repugnant and, most of all, dangerous.
The Chief of the Defence Staff, who looks and sounds like a duty manager at Asda, was talking about a radical new version of a plan to give Britain the resilience for eventual war. Sky News interviewed a pseudo academic and former MoD civil servant working at an Oxford University think thank which receives funding from the MoD speaking gravely about Russia having 95-97% of the capabilities ready to launch an attack on a European NATO country. This is wet dream territory for mainstream media hacks who love the lie of Russia’s imminent attack, while crowing about Russia having only occupied 2% of Ukrainian territory in the past two years.
This is just a shaping operation to soften up the public for a big increase in defence spending, which they will have to fund through more tax and less public services.
I’m not necessarily against spending more on defence if that money is well spent. Because Britain right now couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag. Our army at its smallest since 1823, when our population was four times smaller, our navy as small as it was at the end of the English civil war in the seventeenth century.
When so called Russian shadow tankers sailed through the English channel this past week, our magnificent royal navy could only deploy an auxiliary tanker to follow it, along with a forty-foot fishing vessel manned by a Daily Telegraph journalist. If you saw this in Monty Python you might laugh, and yet it was very real.
So, the argument goes, we need to spend the next decade spending billions to renew our armed forces against the threat of a Russian invasion next week. I say a decade, because many of the weapons systems we are building today won’t be ready until the thirties, including the Challenger 3 tank, which isn’t even a new tank, the AUKUS submarines, to replace Astute class attack submarines that we haven’t finished building. A new nuclear warhead, because the 250 we already have clearly aren’t enough.
In ten years from now, all these projects will be complete and new ones will be well underway, no doubt. Because, aha, a new Defence Investment Plan is on its way to fix all our problems. And yet, hold on a minute, the government is refusing to publish the Defence Investment Plan and the MoD hasn’t reported on its military project spending since 2022.
Yet the obvious truth is that, we can and most likely have already produced a defence investment plan. That plan, I venture, building on the last published Defence Equipment Report of 2022, will tell us that many of the projects we already have, like Ajax armoured vehicles and AUKUS, are so off track that we might need to think about abandoning them. That our other zombie projects cost much more than they did the last time the MoD reported that they were costing too much. That we’ll need to prioritise if we want to do anything genuinely new and innovative, like a sixth generation fighter or a twenty first century type 83 destroyer.
And that, when it comes down to it, we just have too many ideas, too many contractors clamouring to suck on the massive bloated tit of defence procurement, but not nearly enough money to pay for it all, especially if the government seriously wants to fix its creaking public services and maybe build something new, like a railway that travels further than Birmingham, or another runway at Heathrow, for example. That in any case low cost technology has rewritten the modern day battlespace.
But notwithstanding all this, it is crystal clear that the Defence Investment Plan will offer more bad news than good news, and that, because of that, best not to publish it before the May local elections where the labour party is already looking to get a seriously humping, because it is even more shit as a government than the also shit conservative governments that came before them.
So, to distract people from the fact that we can’t even send Captain Pugwash to interdict Russian tankers in the English channel and that it would be quicker to resurrect the Mary Rose and sail her to Cyprus than using HMS Dragon, and to deflect attention from the gaping hole in the debate caused by the worst kept secret of the Defence Investment Plan, we need to create a big idea.
That big idea is we should prepare for a war, with an enemy that doesn’t obviously want to attack us, with equipment and troops we don’t possess and which we cannot in any case afford without pouring misery on our own citizens, who should hope to be forced into military uniforms to help them feel better about our country’s decline. As, let’s face it, the number of meaningful jobs in the British economy is on the decline because we are so desperate to sustain a forever proxy war in Ukraine and embrace the chubby loveliness of super high energy costs, ordinary British people will be almost grateful to put on a military uniform, as at least they’ll be able to earn a wage from doing something, even dying, if they are a woman and get felt up by their superiors.
We need to spend the next decade preparing for the fight against Russia in the hopes that Russia will reduce its armed forces after the Ukraine war concludes, whenever it concludes. Rather than continuing to militarise against an ever more hostile British and European threat and keeping the fight in Ukraine dribbling along to continue the bleed British and Europeans dry of funds and sow internal political chaos.
Never mind the complete absence of evidence that Russia has any intention of attacking up and that the war in Ukraine is and has always been about reasserting its sovereignty against the ever eastward expansion of NATO.
Nor the abundant evidence that Russia is willing to enter into diplomatic dialogue, so long as that is on the basis of sovereign equality rather than zero sum demands. Yet, diplomacy with Russia is a term you will almost never hear in the mainstream media and, if you do, it will be to reassure readers that we should absolutely not pursue it with the dastardly Putin.
And yet, and as we know, Britain has turned its back on diplomatic dialogue for well over a decade. Having disinvested in diplomatic skills in our country. Having stripped our Universities of programmes that help a new generation of students to understand the world better and become diplomats.
We have failed to build a military that can even defend our shores despite having wasted billions and billions of pounds that never deliver what we want, when we want it, at a cost that was agreed. The British government has completely lost control of its armed forces, such that we can’t even produce a defence investment plan.
Britain today has its smallest army for two hundred years, according to data published by the Ministry of Defence. That isn’t spin – it’s a fact. We can’t defend ourselves, so let’s wheel our Dad’s army and put our kids in uniform to fight for Keir Starmer. What a complete and utter buffoon that man is.
But, there is an alternative.
Rather than trying to save the world one war at a time, we need to focus our national energies on restoring our greatness at home, rebuilding our industries, fixing our transport infrastructure, regenerating our hospitals, schools and universities, yes, aided by money that foreigners spend by studying here.
We need to ditch aspirations of military greatness, throwing out our zombie defence projects, building a bigger army and navy perhaps to protect our shores.
The United Kingdom needs to reinvest in its diplomacy again and step back from trying to play a role as a foreign policy titan which it is not. We need to reestablish a culture of diplomacy in which we seek to understand the countries with which we engage across the world, not as a neo-imperial power, but as equal partners, pursuing peaceful co-existence rather than confrontation and conflict.
Britain is an island, albeit a great one, yet leaders from the main political parties have reduced us to a pitiful state today. The challenge of rebuilding our stature as a nation state is immense, and the work to do so must start today. Not through scaremongering, but through hard work and a relentless focus on the needs of ordinary working class people who have been ignored and patronised by the mainstream for far too long. Keir Starmer is not the person to lead that charge. Indeed, there appears no serious political leaders in Britain today able to do so.
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