Foreign policy starts and ends at home
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 Ian’s Substack
Donald Trump has just suffered a heavy defeat in the US midterms. Democrats have taken both houses. Some British media are calling it an earthquake. It was nothing of the sort. It was predictable from the moment the latest phase of the Iran war began in February.
Foreign policy starts and ends at home. Most citizens are completely uninterested in foreign policy until it directly hurts their interests. Trump has made Americans poorer and feel less safe. His foreign policy has come home to roost and it was always obvious that it would.
Trump faced a simple choice. Finish the Iran war early and look weak, or keep going and look incompetent. I’ve been saying it from the start. He chose the second option.
The Iranian state is still standing. Years of sanctions had already forced it to build a resistance economy. Its main response was to shut the Strait of Hormuz and, with the Houthis, disrupt the Bab al-Mandab and hit Saudi oil production. The result was a global economic shock that hit American gasoline prices and inflation across the board. Ordinary Americans could feel it in their wallets, and they saw no end in sight. Trump carried on talking about winning.
Most people barely think about foreign policy. They only notice it when it starts to hurt their prosperity or their sense of safety. This year, enough Americans made that connection to rout the Republican Party at the midterms. The Democrats campaigned mainly on the economy and that was enough.
Trump tried tariffs, sanctions, deals and threats. None of it fixed the basic problem created by the war. He is now a lame duck.
Foreign policy must serve a country’s core interests, or it fails. Those interests are always the same.
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Is your border secure?
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Are your people safe?
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Is your country growing more prosperous?
Everything else is incidental. Values, feeling bad about Ukraine, in the final analysis, voters are uninterested.
Iran is thousands of miles from the United States. It does not threaten American territory. The idea that it poses an existential threat to ordinary Americans has never been credible. The war made Americans poorer. That is why it failed.
The same lesson applies in Europe. For nearly five years the mainstream parties have treated the war in Ukraine as a moral crusade that ordinary people must simply pay for. Most Europeans know little about Ukraine or Russia and care even less.
For a while governments managed consent with the daily carpet bombing of propaganda. That is now wearing thin.
Europeans do not feel safer because of the war. They feel poorer. Energy costs are high, industrial jobs are disappearing in Germany, debt is rising in Britain, and public services are strained in France.
When German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said she did not care what her voters thought and would put Ukrainians first, she epitomised where Europe has gone badly wrong; it lost sight of its core strategic interests.
Values and being kind to Ukraine aren’t core strategic interests.
The globalists got away for it for a few years but voters have now noticed.
Support across Western Europe is shifting toward parties that prioritise domestic priorities and interests. Germany has seen cost-of-living protests. France has protests over schools and services while money continues to flow to Ukraine. Britain has just sent another £10 billion to Ukraine while debt interest approaches £109 billion a year. Poland’s government is already nervous about the next elections and Tusk’s government tried to orchestrate a constitutional coup.
Ukraine is not a war of necessity for Britain, France, Germany or the rest of the EU. A war of necessity is one fought in self-defence when the country itself is attacked.
The Ukraine war is a war of choice.
The longer it continues without clear benefit to ordinary citizens, the harder it becomes to justify.
The European Commission, which faces no elections, makes the problem worse. National governments have handed key decisions to an unelected body in Brussels, then asked their own voters to pay the bill. That widens the democratic deficit.
Russia and China have handled their situations differently. Russians largely see the Ukraine war as a war of necessity. That makes political mobilisation easier, even though the human and economic costs are real.
Russia has also shielded its population from the worst economic effects better than Europe has. Unemployment is low, wages have risen, and the state has not faced the same fiscal strain. China has avoided major wars altogether. It has focused on long-term economic growth, industrial capacity and technological progress. It has not risked that progress to launch an invasion of Taiwan. China is playing the long game.
The difference is straightforward. Americans are getting poorer because of the Iran war. Europeans are getting poorer because of the Ukraine war (and the added pressure from the Iran war). Russians are not facing the same economic squeeze. Chinese leaders have so far refused to gamble their economic gains on war.
That is why the global centre of gravity continues to shift east.European mainstream parties now face a series of elections over the next three years. France, Poland, Germany and Britain are all on the calendar. Voters who link their falling living standards to foreign policy choices will punish the parties responsible just as American voters have punished Trump and the Republicans.
There is still time for mainstream parties in Europe to change course and put domestic conditions first. I see little sign that they will.
They are badly advised, reluctant to admit failure, and, in Europe’s case, structurally unable to coordinate a coherent strategy across 27 governments plus the Commission.
Wars are not won by committee (as I have pointed out countless times already).
Foreign policy always starts and ends at home. Trump has just learned that lesson the hard way. European leaders will learn the lesson next time their voters get to choose who they want in charge.
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