Transcript: Q&A
Challenges and Choices for the UK: Foreign Affairs
Anne Applebaum
Director, Transitions Forum, Legatum Institute
Timothy Garton Ash
Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Director, Chatham House
James Rubin
Columnist, The Sunday Times; Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief Spokesman for Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright (1997-2000)
Chair: Ritula Shah
Presenter, The World Tonight, BBC Radio 4
16 April 2015
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2 Challenges and Choices for the UK: Foreign Affairs: Q&A
Question 1
Is it absolutely necessary to renew Trident, with either a like-for-like system or a slightly minimized system, to remain, if we still are, a leading power?
Robin Niblett
Thank you so much for that question to be first. There are different views within Chatham House actually on the topic. I suppose I have to put my cards on the table on this one. I don't think it's a matter of whether we are a great power or not in today's world. I think, as we've heard already around the table, what defines a great power – certainly what defines influence – is changing in today's world. In fact, we didn't have time to get into it enough. I think to be fair to this government, it is grappling around – and the next will have to as well – with ways of influence that don't look like they did 20 years ago. Who's in which military conflict and who's in another.
We are at a stage where Britain is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, one of the legitimate nuclear power states. Given the state of world affairs today, which it strikes me is going through a very risky rebalancing of power and influence – the rise of China, a very nervous Russia not enjoying where it's ending up on the power balance – that for a country like the UK to say, hey, we'll take the lead and pull back from being a credible nuclear power at this time, in my opinion, isn't the job of a British government.
So then you go to the like-for-like – sorry, your question wasn't just about being a nuclear power. Like- for-like, I understand that – and I'm really not enough of an expert on it – that actually this is the best option that is most credible. Whether you need four boats or three boats to have continuous at-sea deterrence, I don't know. To be frank, there are others who know better than I do. But it's interesting that the Lib Dems, the Conservatives and Labour all seem to be sitting around roughly that position.
So my point would be, if that is the most credible deterrent – and a huge amount of study has gone into it, and £4 billion have been spent already, by the way, into this option – I think this wouldn't be the time to change the course we're on. Very dangerous time in international affairs.
Anne Applebaum
I don't think it's actually important which form it takes, but it is extremely important that Britain remain a credible nuclear power. By which I mean it has nuclear weapons, it's willing to use them, and the one real nuclear threat on the European continent – namely, Russia – is aware of that. However you do it, however you invest the money, it is extremely important that that remains.
Question 2
It is often said that British foreign policy gives rise to Islamophobia in this country, and in return Islamophobia causes radicalization and causes a lot of trouble for the Muslim community, old and new. The youth actually is disenchanted, disillusioned, disconnected. Sometimes they are actually not following their parents' advice as well. So how are you going to prevent Islamophobia in this country?
Question 3
I'm from the Mexican chamber of commerce. Every time I come to Chatham House, it's amazing how we can talk about the whole world and Latin America never gets mentioned. In the year where Mexico and 3 Challenges and Choices for the UK: Foreign Affairs: Q&A
the UK are supposedly having a special relationship this year, and the energy sector is opening up, I find it baffling that it always happens. So could you say something about that?
Ritula Shah
James Rubin, I'm going to come to you first on that Latin America question. If you're the United States, you're so much more aware of everything that goes on south of your border. Is it rather far away for us? Is it understandable to you?
James Rubin
When I was in the government, I had this job as a spokesman, and the last question I always came to, which I wished had never come up, which used to torture us, was Cuba. It would be, why do we have an embargo on Cuba and we don't have one on China? This and that, all the inconsistencies that applied to Cuba. We developed very elaborate and seemingly sensible answers. But those days are over. I think that's good news for Latin America, because it can avoid this situation where Latin American countries, in my opinion, exaggerate their interest in the Cuba issue in order to find something to beat up the United States, and the United States has to persuade Latin American countries to support our embargo. It's a big waste of time because nothing gets done, nobody ever changes their position. Now we'll have a chance to see who was right about what will promote change in Cuba, if change happens. We may discover that neither policy will work, integration or isolation. But the bottom line is that Latin America will no longer have this obsession with debating Cuba. I think both our Mexican and American governments will be pleased by that.
Ritula Shah
Timothy Garton Ash, we also heard about this idea that foreign policy may perhaps lead to Islamophobia and that in turn leads to radicalization. Even that chain of events is very contentious. How do you view the connection between those things?
Timothy Garton Ash
I think that we don't fully understand the phenomenon of radicalization, and we should not pretend we do understand how it can be that a 16-year-old schoolgirl from a reasonably comfortable background, growing up in Britain, decides to go off and be a 'jihadi bride' in Syria. I think that's the first thing to say. We need to understand it.
Clearly what happened in Iraq, what happened in Bosnia before that, what happens in Palestine, what happens in Syria, as related through various extremist websites and media, has an impact. But it's only one of the factors that I believe radicalizes people. What is really important for us constantly to insist is that the vast majority of British and European Muslims are Brits, Europeans, fellow citizens, going about their lives, abiding by the law, along with all the rest of us, and not to generalize about a whole community. I think that is very important to hang onto, and then to understand what really leads to radicalization.
Robin Niblett
The only comment I would make is I think Arab governments have a lot to answer for on where radicalization has come from. We spend a lot of time beating ourselves up and undoubtedly bad choices 4 Challenges and Choices for the UK: Foreign Affairs: Q&A
have been made historically as well as recently by European governments, amongst others. But ultimately, this is something that has to be resolved as well internally. We don't see Indonesia and other Islamic parts of the world going up in flames in the same way we do in the Middle East.
Question 4
Given that the United States and the United Kingdom guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine, shouldn't they at least be willing to supply arms to the Ukraine government? Isn't the parallel with the Sudetan crisis quite striking?
Question 5
The elephant in the room on the Middle East, which none of you have referred to so far, seems to me to be Israel. One of the reasons perhaps for the radicalization of some of the younger members of the Muslim community may lie in the fact that there's been a totally inadequate response to the trampling of Palestinian rights and capabilities by the present Israel regime, and the trampling on UN resolutions that have forbidden settlements which keep on spreading. Should it not be possible to consider that sanctions with American support – and only America can really influence this, particularly the Jewish community in America – sanctions against Israel, if even threatened, might bring about the possibility of a peaceful solution?
Question 6
Anne Applebaum, could I make a comment perhaps on the Libya action, where America was pleased perhaps to take a backward step, given that they wanted Europe to do more, and what the French and British did was good. But I don't think the government or the country would have tolerated forces being put on the ground, given Afghanistan and the experience of that. They really would not have accepted that. Again, going on to the Syria vote, probably that was mishandled by the government. Had it done more care and attention in bringing people back, they might well have won the Syria vote. After all, it led President Obama not taking retribution for having crossed the red line. And to all of you perhaps: would Cameron have been more robust had he not been in a coalition, therefore unable to take action on many of these points because his coalition partners won't let him?
Question 7
My question is specifically about Russia and what can be done today to either contain or manage the situation with sanctions, and with the increasingly anti-Western rhetoric.
James Rubin
First of all, with regard to Ukraine, I do recall very well when the Budapest memorandum was signed by the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia and Ukraine. It was considered quite a big victory to get Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, and yes indeed, the implication was that – not a security guarantee but a view that we should care about its territorial integrity. My impression is that the European governments and the United States haven't really cared that much about Ukraine's territorial integrity, and that is a terrible shame, that in this day and age Russia was able to not only do what it did but have a rather, in my opinion, slow and modest reaction. 5 Challenges and Choices for the UK: Foreign Affairs: Q&A
With regard to your specific question, the truth is that in Washington and perhaps to a lesser degree in London, they are afraid of escalation. Putin's nuclear rhetoric works. Every time someone suggests doing something a little bit more robust, they go through this calculation in their head and they worry about where this is all going. The result of that is the opposite of what they want, which is that Putin then imagines he might be able to do something in the Baltic states, where we would be required to respond and I think we would respond, even though Putin may not. That's the worst outcome: predictability between two nuclear-armed states is the most important thing to prevent a war, a terrible war.
So I believe that we can raise the cost to Russia of its aggression without risk of global thermonuclear war, but I think too many people in Washington seem afraid of that. That guides them in more of their Russia policy than you would think. Joe Biden and Obama consider themselves arms controllers. They think they had a lot of experience dealing with these questions and I think they've gone through the process we call self-deterrence. They're deterring themselves by worrying about what comes next.
Let me briefly go through the two other points. Israel – that's never going to happen, what you suggested. The United States is not going to sanction Israel. What I think is surprising is that you've heard this discussion go on about the Middle East and all of the Islamophobia, and this is all taking place in the context of the Arab Spring. In fact, the Palestinian issue has not been what has emboldened so many Arab countries and what drove bin Laden and what is driving the Islamic State. The Palestinian issue is very low on the agenda for many of these extremist groups. It's there, I'm not going to say they don't know about it.
Finally, with respect to Syria, Cameron obviously mishandled the vote. There's no question about that. In a perfect world, when the British and French governments cared about what was going on in Libya, an American president wouldn't have been so concerned about not engaging again that he invented a new doctrine called backseat driving or leading from behind or whatever it is. The NATO alliance, which has been led by the United States militarily through its entire 50 years, could have gotten together with American leadership. I am speculating now, but I believe this: had we gone with a traditional coalition and an American diplomat had gone to Libya before the bombing, they could have extracted commitments that would have been followed by Libyan rebel groups about what they would and wouldn't do after Qaddafi fell. Had that happened, I think we could have seen a more successful outcome.
Timothy Garton Ash
Thank you for reminding us of the wording of the Budapest memorandum of 1994, which is quite shaming. I think it would be entirely legitimate to supply arms to the legitimate army of the sovereign independent state. This cannot be compared with Russian arms supplies to the separatists in the east. For saying that, one is denounced as a warmonger, not least in comment threads on the Guardian, which is perhaps not surprising.
I thought sometimes six months ago, a year ago, if we'd done what the Carnegie study suggested and very carefully and selectively built up the Ukrainian defensive capability that might have helped the Ukrainian forces to hold the line. They didn't. We're in a different place where post Minsk II, ceasefire violations are now increasing. The question is, will they at some point go for Mariupol? What we have to do is change the calculus in the mind of one man: Vladimir Putin. We're back to the elementary behavioural psychology of deterrence.
So the question is, not would it be legitimate, but would it be effective? What is the credible deterrent? In my view, the credible deterrent would be an EU which says if you go to Mariupol, we will treble the level 6 Challenges and Choices for the UK: Foreign Affairs: Q&A
of economic sanctions we have at the moment. You will come out of the SWIFT system. We will throw the kitchen sink at you. That, I think, would be a deterrent, added with the possibility that these crazy Americans like John McCain might also start supplying weapons. So I'm very much for a credible deterrence which stops Putin thinking he can go for Mariupol. If that involves the threat of the possibility of the use of military force, then why not.
Anne Applebaum
I think the failure to back up the Budapest memorandum is more than what Jamie described as a terrible shame – it's really been a disaster, not only for Ukraine but for nuclear negotiations around the world. What state will now voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for a piece of paper signed by the president of the United States and the prime minister of Britain? It's really one of the great foreign policy disasters of the last two decades.
My problem with the arming Ukraine argument, which I will just say briefly, is I have no problem giving Ukraine anti-tank weapons or radar or whatever. There are some very specific things that they say that they need. The trouble is that that's not a strategy, that's a tactic. If we want to think tactically about Ukraine and about really defending Ukraine and making sure that Ukraine remains a sovereign country, that it has a stable government, that it's integrated with the rest of the world, that it's not subject to constant undermining by Russian provocations and Russian propaganda, we would really focus our efforts on rebuilding the Ukrainian state and helping it. I don't yet feel that as a policy coming out of Washington or London. As Tim said, the real weapons that we could throw at Russia, that the UK could lead in designing, are also financial and economic. There's many that we haven't tried yet. If we're serious about stopping the further invasion of Ukraine and serious about creating a sovereign and stable Ukraine, then we're not just six months, we're a year late in talking about it. But we could begin now.
Robin Niblett
I think these are two topics that are going to be on the docket of whoever wins the next election. Really urgent foreign policy questions, they deserve some focus. In my opinion, sanctions, which will come up for renewal in July, should be maintained as they are if the Minsk II agreement is not implemented. We can go into the details. If there is a breakout not just to Mariupol but to some other part – because we keep saying Mariupol but it could go somewhere else – but if there is a breakout from the line, not only should economic sanctions be threatened but ultimately I think it's up to EU and NATO members to decide if they arm or not, and others should not stand in the way. Not because it will work, but because there has to be a calculus of escalation for deterrence. I think the key point – we had the Ukrainian finance minister here a couple of weeks ago – this is a country that has to survive first. It needs money, it needs trade capacity. There's a whole range of stuff where really if it doesn't survive financially and economically, everything else is moot.
The second thing the next government will not be able to escape is the growing realization that maybe the Arab-Israeli issue has become not a two-state but a one-state problem. If it becomes a one-state issue, this is a huge problem for everyone, supporters of Israel as well as those who want to see a two-state solution or some other way. So the UK is going to have to be involved one way or another, because that is a crisis that we were in at the beginning. 7 Challenges and Choices for the UK: Foreign Affairs: Q&A
Ritula Shah
Thank you very much. Thank you all for those great questions. I look forward to seeing you again. Thank you very much.