Who killed interventionism?

Tony Blair’s recent speech to Bloomberg in London has reawakened the time-honoured debate about interventionism, and the extent to which Britain and other Western countries should involve ourselves in the affairs of other nations. This debate is so often presented as a black and white issue: pro-interventionists will use absurdly overblown rhetoric claiming that anyone who disagrees with them doesn’t care about those suffering the most appalling crimes against humanity; and anti-interventionists will use the rhetoric of war crimes and advocate sending Tony Blair to the Hague immediately.

I don’t fall into either of these categories. I think that I’m like a lot of people; I’m horrified when I see the images of chemical weapons attacks by the Assad regime in Syria, or the horrendous situation in places like South Sudan. But at the same time, I find myself questioning whether our intervention would do more harm than good. For every Rwanda, there is a Vietnam, and for every Kosovo, there is an Iraq. Intervention is a difficult and unpredictable business, and I understand why so many people have conflicting views about it.

There is no doubt that the British people have turned against interventionism in recent years. Whereas there was once widespread public support for military action in places like Afghanistan, the recent events in Syria proved that there is little public appetite for further military engagement. Many proclaim that “interventionism is dead”, and either deplore or celebrate its loss, but actually spend very little time to consider why interventionism is dead.

The uncomfortable truth for those who favour military intervention is that interventionists killed interventionism. It seems strange to me that I’ve never seen anyone make this argument. The death of interventionism is often presented as some sort of abstract event, as if a group of Trots came along and murdered it one night. But it’s clear to me that it was those that most fervently advocate interventionism that caused its demise.

Interventionism died when Tony Blair decided to join George Bush in his invasion of Iraq. That war, however much it may have been justified on humanitarian grounds, destroyed any prospect of the British people supporting a major military engagement for a generation. The fact that the Iraq War was predicated on justifications that, for whatever reason, turned out to be false, not only did serious damage to the reputation of Tony Blair and other politicians, but also killed interventionism stone dead. I don’t believe that Tony Blair is a war criminal, but I do believe the Iraq War was a disastrous miscalculation. There was no plan to deal with the aftermath, and the resulting descent into civil war fatally undermined our mission. The doctrine of interventionism that had been so triumphant following the events in Kosovo in 1999 became completely discredited. We have become very cautious, some would argue overly cautious, about projecting our military power, and the House of Commons rejecting the use of military force against Syria is the perfect example of this.

Some people have said to me that Iraq was over 10 years ago and we need to move on. I wish we could, because I believe we still have a role to play in the world. But we must remember that it took the Americans nearly 20 years to finally rid themselves of the “Vietnam syndrome”. It will take a long time before public opinion has moved on from Iraq, and we shouldn’t be surprised about that.

All this is why Tony Blair advocating further intervention makes me uncomfortable and, if I’m being honest, irritated. Not because I think he is necessarily wrong. I admire Tony Blair for many reasons, and I applaud him for having the courage of his convictions. But we can’t get away from the fact that he is the wrong man to lecture us on the death of interventionism, because he, possibly more than anyone else in Britain, was the one that killed it.