Choose Your Weapons

Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary: 200 Years of Arguments, Successes and Failures
By Douglas Hurd and Edward Young
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25 398 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Is there a tradition of British foreign policy? A favourite theme for sermons by old-fashioned public school headmasters was the tradition of the school – a phenomenon so porous that almost everything could be assimilated into it. Can such very different foreign secretaries as Castlereagh, Canning, Salisbury, Grey, Bevin and Eden, be understood as part of a continuing tradition?

Douglas Hurd, a former foreign secretary, and his research assistant Edward Young believe that there are, in fact, two contrasting traditions which they set out to describe in Choose Your Weapons – an odd title perhaps for a book about foreign secretaries, whose prime concern, Hurd and Young rightly believe, is to maintain the peace. The two traditions can be summed up crudely as those of realism and liberal interventionism.

In the United States, they can be seen in the contrasting stances of Nixon and Kissinger, on the one hand, and Woodrow Wilson and the younger Bush on the other. In Britain, Hurd and Young argue, they stem from two foreign secretaries of the era of the Napoleonic wars – Castlereagh and Canning. The one emphasised the balance of power and quiet diplomacy through the Concert of Europe but failed to comprehend the rising forces of liberalism and nationality; the other was the prototype of the liberal interventionist whose rhetoric often soared ahead of reality. The conflict between the two traditions has surfaced repeatedly in British history, most recently in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Iraq war. The ideal foreign secretary would synthesise the virtues of both while avoiding their deficiencies. Such a figure, so Hurd and Young confess, has never quite existed.

Their argument is constructed through a series of potted essays on 11 foreign secretaries from Castlereagh to Eden. The material is culled from standard biographies, making little pretence to originality. There is some reference to private archives but the appearance of scholarship is mainly window-dressing. This is primarily a book from which the reader will find out what is in other books.

The history in any case gets shakier as it reaches the 20th century. It is simply not true, for instance, that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader, was, like Lloyd George, opposed in principle to the Boer war. He criticised the negotiating tactics of the Conservative government but believed that the Boer ultimatum made war inevitable, and that Britain had to win it.

Few historians would share the view of Hurd and Young that it was Ernest Bevin who persuaded the Americans in the 1940s of the Soviet Union’s aggressive intentions. The Americans were perfectly able to find that out for themselves and, indeed, were quicker than Bevin to do so. Bevin, as one of his junior ministers complained, hoped for a détente with the Soviets until 1948 and wrongly blamed himself for not securing it.

Hurd and Young praise Bevin as a strategist but it is doubtful if he succeeded in his aim of preserving British influence in the immediate postwar years. His imperial strategy in the Mediterranean and Middle East was perceived, rightly, by Attlee as irrelevant in a world of nuclear weapons and air warfare. Meanwhile, Bevin’s prejudice against “federalism”, shared by most men of influence of his era, had the effect of surrendering British leadership on the continent to France and Germany who proceeded inexorably towards a European Community from which Britain was wilfully to exclude itself.

Anthony Eden, by contrast, whom the authors dismiss as a mere tactician, did at least appreciate the need to withdraw from untenable imperial positions in Egypt and the Sudan in the hope that nationalist leaders would stabilise the region. Sadly, that strategy collapsed when, in 1956, Egypt’s President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company, repudiating an agreement he had made with Britain just two years earlier.

Choose Your Weapons is punctured with regular sideswipes at Tony Blair, whose Iraq policy failed to display the mature wisdom of Victorian foreign secretaries such as Lord Aberdeen and the 15th Earl of Derby. Blair could no doubt retaliate with sideswipes at Hurd’s feeble stance in Bosnia in the face of the ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Are the sins of commission worse than those of omission?

But attempts to draw “lessons” for the 21st century from foreign policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries are fundamentally misconceived because they are anachronistic. There is, surely, a striking discontinuity between the foreign policy of an aristocratic era, and that of the world in which we live, a world of failed states and international terrorism, of ethnic cleansers and suicide bombers.

The epilogue to the book discusses intervention. It occupies just seven pages. One would have preferred from a former British foreign secretary more first-hand reflection and less second-hand history.

Vernon Bogdanor is professor of government at Oxford University. He is editor of ‘New Jerusalem to New Labour: British Prime Ministers from Attlee to Blair’ (Palgrave)