The Blair/Bush doctrine is coming full-circle

By Luke Bozier / @lukebozier

Everywhere you look right now, there are signs that the bold & confident (if sometimes poorly executed) doctrine espoused by Tony Blair and George Bush between 1997 & 2008, and central to their respective strategies on foreign affairs, is coming to fruition. Skimming the surface, we can pick a number of things to point to in support of this; Iraq is relatively peaceful and moving toward prosperity, democracy has taken hold in Egypt & Tunisia and threatens to soon do the same in Libya, Afghanistan is calmer than it ever has been and is moving toward being able to look after its own security.

And a final, rather important, point to add to that list. Osama Bin Laden is now dead.

I’m under no illusion that Bin Laden’s death, ten years too late and a few billion dollars too expensive, is going to bring about the end of the ‘war on terror’, but you would have to be naïve or stupid to think that it won’t have an important psychological if not tactical impact. The all-too-famous Chicago speech made by Tony Blair in 1998, outlining his vision of a Western foreign policy centred around intervening in the name of human rights and stopping oppression, led to a number of interventions with mixed results. Nobody can argue that Sierra Leone & Kosovo are not safer today thanks to the actions of Britain and allies. Nobody can deny either that many thousands of people died needlessly in bringing an end to Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Iraq war was something of a previous age; a full-scale ground & air invasion is simply not necessary in the 21st century in order to bring down a brutal regime – let that lesson be learned.

But the principle Tony Blair outlined in that fabled Chicago speech still holds true today. Were it not for the extensive ‘mission creep’ and the ensuing blood bath borne out of a misunderstanding of Iraq and the inability to foresee the results of the invasion, liberal interventionism wouldn’t have the tarnished name that it has today. I hope that Britain, France & America’s actions in Libya can start to turn the tide a little and demonstrate just how important it is to use your military assets to stand up for people when they can’t stand up for themselves, at least that is when there is a clear and well-defined framework for doing so. France’s actions in removing former Ivorian dictator Laurent Gbabgo are to be congratulated and it is important to build special forces capacity going forward so that full-scale invasions are not necessary to bring about desired change.

Just think about how the world would be without the interventions in Sierra Leone, Kosovo & Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya today. Sierra Leone would be run by a marauding gang of thugs, with sectarian bloodlust their main preoccupation. Kosovans would have been slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands or even millions by Serbs hell-bent on ethnic cleansing. Little girls in Afghanistan would still not have the chance at an education and their mothers would still be lashed in the streets for wearing ‘innapropriate’ clothing. Saddam Hussein may by now have developed serious capability to harm Iraq’s neighbours or even targets further afield, or Iraq may have been handed over to one of his murderous sons. Innocent civilians by the hundreds of thousands in Misurata and Benghazi would have been slaughtered by the power-crazed ‘Colonel’ Ghaddafi.

It’s easy to laugh at and mock George Bush for his rather simple style, and in fact he did make a number of very large mistakes which many, many people have paid for with their lives. But in his lack of equivocation you had a President willing to vocally and without hesitation, stand up for democracy for all people. Obama mistakenly cancelled a number of ‘soft power’ projects which Bush funded which were aimed at helping people in countries just like Tunisia and Egypt to bring about democratic change for themselves; Obama cancelled the programmes out of a sense of spite and wanting to distance himself from George Bush. Would it not be best to, despite his shortcomings, learn from Bush rather than ridicule him? Equally, Tony Blair was called Bush’s poodle or lap-dog, an erroneous and shallow analysis if you consider that Blair’s Chicago speech which led the way on making liberal interventionism real, was made before George Bush was even elected president.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and we ought to take stock now and learn lessons for the coming decades. The Western world still faces serious security challenges going forward. There are still too many countries living with crackpot dictators whose removal is long overdue. But, there is no clear single successor to Osama Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda will have been struck a pretty strong blow mentally. There are many other terrorist organisations out there intent on harming innocent people on the streets of London, New York and Marrakesh, but the death of the key architect and leader of the world’s largest such group is a key turning point in this quasi-war which has cost so many lives and pounds. Dictators can no longer feel safe in their compounds and palaces. Values which are universal, but sadly seemed Western for too long, are on the march and the world is becoming a safer place thanks to that.

A Labour Prime Minister is in large part responsible for the start of this positive trend, and I’m proud that the Labour Party has been at the forefront of effective and successful values-led foreign policy. I hope that we can take the highlights and positive lessons from Blair’s liberal interventionism and try to learn the negative lessons too. But we shouldn’t be afraid of continuing to place our values, and our willingness to support those values with all the tools at our disposal, whenever we are in government in the future.