The politics of the revolving door: why our foreign policy is in a mess

One reason why British and American foreign policy is in such a mess is rarely mentioned. The Prime Minister or President usually takes the blame; failing that, the Foreign Secretary or Secretary of State are easy targets. It all gets very personal, very quickly, as we have seen with Biden and Raab over Afghanistan. 

But there is one obvious structural problem which gets overlooked. Britain has had six ministers of state for the Middle East and North Africa in eleven years. Even more astonishing, Britain has had eight foreign secretaries in twenty years. Only three foreign secretaries (Jack Straw, Douglas Hurd and Geoffrey Howe) have been in office for more than five years since 1960.

The turnover is just as dramatic with prime ministers. Since Tony Blair resigned in 2007, Britain has had four PMs. In that time, only David Cameron has lasted more than three years. Since 1970, only Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have had a distinctive British foreign policy; apart from John Major, they are the only prime ministers since the 1970s who have been in power for over seven years. 

In the United States, over the last 40 years, several presidents have served the full two terms in office allowed: Reagan (1981-1989), Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Obama (2009-2017). But secretaries of state have come and gone. Since Trump became president in 2017 there have been six secretaries of state (including acting ones) in four years. Trump’s reign was volatile in many ways, but if you look back to 1980, there have been 26 secretaries of state in barely 40 years. A few served for three or four years (Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry) but only one in the last 40 years, since Reagan was elected, has served more than four years (George Schultz, 1982-1989). 

This constant turnover of personnel in charge of foreign policy, both in Britain and in America, has not made for consistency. On the two central issues facing the West over the past 40 years – the Middle East and the rise of Muslim extremism, on the one hand, and the related question of humanitarian interventionism, on the other – both countries have failed to establish a consistent and steady policy. The failure to intervene effectively in Rwanda or the Balkans arguably led to Blair’s Chicago doctrine. 

Blair’s 1999 speech in Chicago was in response to Kosovo. As he said in his speech, “While we meet here in Chicago this evening, unspeakable things are happening in Europe. Awful crimes that we never thought we would see again have reappeared — ethnic cleansing. systematic rape, mass murder.” It was a passionate and ambitious speech. He spoke of just wars, punishing war crimes, the political and security dimensions of globalisation, “a new world”. “We are all internationalists now,” he said. But the most famous part of Blair’s speech was summed up in one sentence: “The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts” and the five criteria he set out for judging whether it was right or not to intervene in another country. The decade that followed defined Blair’s premiership and Bush’s presidency. The consequences of the War on Terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, in turn, led to inaction in Libya and Syria and now the ill-fated withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Contrast this with Russia and China. First, the continuity in the Kremlin. Sergey Lavrov has been the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs for 17 years since February 2004. Since the fall of Soviet Communism Russia has had four foreign ministers in 30 years. Putin has been in power, either as President or Prime Minister, for more than twenty years. In China, it’s the same story. Wang Yi has been foreign minister and Xi Jinping has been president for eight years, since March 2013. 

There hasn’t just been continuity in personnel. The policies have remained remarkably consistent as well. No interest in humanitarianism. No talk of just wars. No hand-wringing as the bodies pile up from Damascus to Kabul. Cynical pragmatism has been the governing principle of Russian and Chinese foreign policy, from Syria to Afghanistan. 

If you are in Riga or Kiev, in Baghdad or Kabul, would you trust Britain’s foreign secretary or America’s secretary of state? The western media think it is a question of personalities, partly because they think everything is a question of personalities. But is it? What do we know of the personalities of Wang Yi or Sergey Lavrov? All I know of either is that they believe in realpolitik and have both been around longer than Dominic Raab or Anthony Blinken have, or will be, longer too than Johnson or Biden are likely to be in office. 

In London and Washington, heads of government and foreign secretaries come and go with remarkable speed. Are we sure that Biden will last even one full term? Will Raab still be Foreign Secretary by the next election? So when the Israeli Prime Minister met the US President last week (a meeting hardly even covered in Britain), how seriously will Naftali Bennett take what Biden has to say? If he meets with Lavrov or Xi Jinping, at least he can be fairly sure they will still be in office next time they meet and their foreign policies will be the same. 

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