Creating a new international order: some principles

Whether the old international order is in decline or not, as we reassess our foreign policy there are some basic principles we should observe and absorb

I was watching the second episode of Dror Moreh’s gripping documentary Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World?, which deals with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the vicious ethnic conflicts which flared up in the process, and earlier today I had been discussing the ongoing conflict in Gaza, then more widely the role of Iran in the Middle East, with a friend. (Yes, I’m that much fun, even during the holidays.) Everything put me a little in mind of an essay I wrote recently about Francis Fukuyama and The End of History and the Last Man, but it also made me think about the number of think-pieces, op-eds and policy papers I’ve seen recently about the end of the old international order and the reasons for its decline.

(See this article by Andrew Latham in The Hill (September 2022), this opinion piece by Walter Russell Mead in The Washington Post (September 2023), this item by Arta Moeini for the Carnegie Council (October 2023), this article by Andreas Kluth for Bloomberg UK (February 2024) this leader from The Economist (May 2024), this editorial in The Financial Times (May 2024), this op-ed by Patrick Gathara for Al-Jazeera (May 2024) and this by The Elders in Common Dreams (June 2024). These are merely indicative and you will find dozens more.)

It is obvious that the “international order”, however we choose to define it, is changing, for many and disparate reasons. Vladimir Putin’s decision in February 2022 to embark on a full-scale, open war of conquest against a neighbouring sovereign state changed the calculus, Israel’s ongoing response to Hamas’s attacks on 7 October 2023 have certainly affected the global situation, the beginning of military strikes on maritime commerce by Houthi militants in Yemen is a major development (to which we are still not paying enough attention) and the outlook could change substantially again, in ways we cannot easily anticipate, if Donald Trump wins November’s presidential election and returns to the White House in January 2025.

I am not certain that the response of Western nations to all of these factors will, can or should be to attempt to create a theoretical and intellectual framework for international relations. The way in which states interact is often too complex, too messy and too idiosyncratic to be easily susceptible to rules or general principles and foreign policy thinkers can tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile their neat theories with the shambles of reality.

Nevertheless, governments around the world, and especially new leaders coming into their positions in the West will need to re-examine the global geopolitical situation and re-imagine their countries’ place and role in it. Some of these leaders have already taken office and some will do so in the next year or so: Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland, Simon Harris, Taoiseach of Ireland, President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan, Dick Schoof, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Sir Keir Starmer, our own Prime Minister, a new French prime minister as soon as one can be agreed between President Macron and the National Assembly, a new Japanese prime minister in September following Fumio Kishida’s decision to step down, Claudia Sheinbaum who will become President of Mexico in October, Mark Rutte, who takes over as Secretary General of NATO in October, Kaja Kallas, due to be confirmed as High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy in November, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as President of the United States in January 2025, perhaps a new chancellor of Germany and a new Australian prime minister in September 2025 and as things stand a new Canadian prime minister in October 2025. It is a time of great upheaval.

I have so far been critical of the new Labour government’s foreign policy here and here, insofar as it has an identifiable set of principles or priorities, and I resile from none of that criticism. Simply repeating that you want to “reset” relationships with other countries and international organisations is not a policy, merely a first step in terms of approach, and Starmer and his ministers have so far ignored inconsistencies like insisting that European security is the cornerstone of their foreign policy, that they want a very close and wide-ranging relationship with the European Union but also that they are absolutely committed to NATO, which does, after all, extend further than Europe.

On China, it is reported that David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, is planning to visit Beijing in September, ahead of which, in accordance with Labour’s manifesto commitment, the FCDO is carrying out an “audit” which is intended to “improve the UK’s capability to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities China poses”. (Some might think that is information already available to the Foreign Office and the Foreign Secretary.) In truth there is no clear indication of what this “audit” means, although pro-Chinese media has hoped earnestly that it will lead to less aggression and more engagement by the UK.

We will learn something about their intentions from the recently announced Strategic Defence Review, or, rather, from the government’s response to the SDR (which is, remember, being carried out by three independent figures, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Dr Fiona Hill and General Sir Richard Barrons). But the review will not be completed until the first half of 2025, and it is an open question how long the government will take to formulate a detailed and meaningful response to any recommendations it makes.

At some point, no doubt, the new government will meet reality head on: it will learn that saying things and doing things are not coterminous, that announcing “resets” do not constitute a clear policy direction, and, as I wrote some weeks ago in City AM, that the European Union, while mildly well-disposed to the new UK administration, will be as hard-headed and self-interested as it always had been. There will be no free lunches, nor garlands and gifts in sheer delight at the arrival of Starmer and his ministers.

I do not (yet) have a comprehensive vision of a new world order, an international system or a way of managing relations among the world’s 194-or-so countries. What I do want to do at this stage, prompted by the conversations, reading and viewing I mentioned earlier, is to set down a few general principles on which the United Kingdom’s approach the international relations must be based (though they apply to most countries, I think).

International law is not like domestic law

There has been a great deal of conversation about international law recently in connection with Israel’s operations in Gaza and the actions of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Here is not the place for a debate over the conduct of the Israeli Defence Forces, Hamas or the jurisdiction and purpose of the ICC and its prosecutors, but there is one very important fact that anyone interested in foreign policy must accept and absorb: international law is not merely a bigger version of domestic law.

It seems almost mad to have to say this, but consider: international law is not universally recognised or accepted, in practice if not in theory; there is no universally recognised or universally powerful mechanism of enforcement (no “police”); only 124 countries out of 195 or so are signatories to the Rome Statute and therefore subscribe to the ICC’s purpose and jurisdiction, and those who don’t include the United States, Russia, Israel, the People’s Republic of China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Those countries represent a population of more than three-and-a-half billion, so it is like having a national court which approaching half the population don’t even recognise.

International law is, therefore, to a huge extent a creature of politics. I wrote recently that the United Nations is founded on an impossible misconception that all member states can be equally moral, respected and exercising the same authority, but is actually a political forum in which strength, alliances and persuasion play an enormous part, and the truth is that international law is of the same nature. Margaret Thatcher discovered this when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, a clear breach of international law in terms of the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands government and the clear wish of the population of the islands, but which Argentina (then a military dictatorship with an appalling human rights record, it is worth remembering) justified by reference to a “transplanted population” who do not qualify for self-determination, the UN Convention on the Continental Shelf and various declarations on decolonisation.

This does not mean international law is worthless. It is a useful set of guidelines within which nations can and should act, and it draws attention to egregious breaches of what we might otherwise call shared expectations, protocol or etiquette. But no country should rely heavily on strict interpretations of international law in creating a foreign policy, not only because they cannot support the weight placed upon them, but also because national interest may, at some point, require actions which some deem to be in contravention of international law. No definitive judgement was ever reached, and the campaign to recover the islands and expel the invaders was successful, but one could imagine a scenario in which the United Nations Security Council would have supported Argentina’s position (of course the UK would have exercised its veto) and many would have regarded the UK as being on the “wrong” side of the law. So we must not fetishise something which does not really have the characteristic people often suppose.

Not everywhere is not the same as nowhere

This is a very straightforward observation but it can lost either in high-minded rhetoric or bad-faith accusations, and was very much a feature of the episode of Corridors of Power and the American approach to the horror which unfolded during the break-up of Yugoslavia. Liberal interventionism is not popular these days, somewhat tarnished by experience, but in the 1990s it was a central plank, and a respectable one, too, of Western foreign policy. It achieved some political and humanitarian goals in Bosnia-Herzegovina, at a modest military, financial and human cost to the West, and seemed unimpeachably well-intentioned. There are few cheerleaders now for Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.

Perhaps inevitably, it was Sir Tony Blair, then perhaps at the height of his powers, who enshrined liberal interventionism as “the Blair doctrine” in a speech to the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999 (though of course he called it “the Doctrine of the International Community”, with suitable, limelight-avoiding modesty). He said of the military action Kosovo that “this is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values”, that “we are all internationalists now” and that crimes and abuses abroad were inextricably linked to each nation’s domestic security: the international community “cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure”.

Whether you agree with Blair or not, and I am aware many do not, what is important here is the objection which he and other Western leaders faced again and again to their intervention in the former Yugoslavia: “why here and not there?” Why did the West intervene to stop genocide in Bosnia, yet it did nothing about the Rwandan genocide in 1994, or the mass killing of Hutus in Zaire in 1996/97, in the same way it had done little (or at least too little) about Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurds in the late 1980s or his sustained murderous campaign against the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq. Equally, if Western governments prize ethical standards so highly, how can they justify maintaining business and military alliances with régimes like Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or treating in any way with China?

Superficially, or rather theoretically, this is a valid criticism. The decision to intervene in Bosnia and in Kosovo was inconsistent with other elements of Western foreign policy. But the world is inconsistent, and humans are inconsistent. In practical terms, it is an obvious nonsense to suggest that because we cannot intervene everywhere, we should intervene nowhere. It would make, by analogy, individual charitable giving pointless: one person’s donation to Oxfam or Amnesty International or Cancer Research is not going to end poverty and hunger, or bring about universal human rights, or cure cancer, so there is no point in giving anything. It is plainly an absurd proposition.

We come, yet again, to that balance between idealism and realism. Countries could choose to withdraw almost entirely from international relations, tend their own affairs and avoid any bilateral or multilateral activities, and they would cause no active harm. But it is much better than, on occasion, a crisis is met with a co-ordinated international response, yes, of intervention if necessary, which is intended to alleviate human suffering. There must always be stringent tests of the good it will do measured against the possible harms, and the costs for all parties. Certainly we cannot look to the interventions in this century in Afghanistan and Iraq as shining successes. And context will always be important. But to rule out intervention anywhere on principle is midwittery. Just because we cannot do everything does not mean we should not do anything.

Trust exists but needs to be maintained

It’s very easy to assume the pose of an absolute believer in realpolitik who thinks there is no morality nor ethics in international relations. There is an element of truth in that, and we should never underestimate the extent to which other countries will act in their own interests, no matter what other conditions apply.

(Equally, by the way, one should not assume that acting in brutal and naked self-interest is the best course of action: a striking example is the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior by France’s Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE) in Auckland harbour in July 1985. While Greenpeace had led protests against nuclear testing in French Polynesia, and had no doubt caused considerable irritation to senior French politicians and officials, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and the death of photographer Fernando Pereira caused an international scandal which was far more damaging to French interests than the original protests had been. Although the French conducted further nuclear tests until abandoning the practice in 1996, the government of France was widely condemned: it paid $8.16 million in damages to Greenpeace, more than two million francs to Pereira’s family and $6.5 million to the government of New Zealand. In addition, the defence minister Charles Hernu resigned and the head of the DGSE, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, was dismissed.)

Nevertheless, international agreements matter, and they can engender a sense of trust and mutual reliance between nations. The North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 which created NATO has endured and not only maintained broadly good relations between its original 12 signatories but seen another 20 countries join the alliance. The UK’s alliance with Portugal, while not at the forefront of our geopolitical stance, extends back to the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373 and represents our oldest enduring diplomatic relationship. It has even borne valuable fruit from time to time, for example in keeping Portugal neutral during the Second World War (but allowing Britain to use air and maritime facilities in the Azores to combat the U-boat threat), and in securing British use of the same facilities in the Azores during the Falklands War in 1982 to support the logistical hub at Ascension Island. These were not necessarily strategically necessary or beneficial gestures by Portugal, but built on centuries of alliance.

International treaties and agreements, however, have to be maintained and nurtured if they are not to become dead letters. The most dangerous illustration of this would be if Donald Trump were to win November’s presidential election and effectively disengage the United States from NATO. The president cannot unilaterally withdraw from the alliance, thanks to the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 which require a two-thirds majority or an act of Congress for such a step; equally, however, it is widely accepted that Trump could, if he wished, all but withdraw from NATO by reducing or stopping the United States’ military and financial contributions. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which deals with collective defence, does indeed commit all members to the assistance of any member state which is attacked, but the letter of the treaty only requires each country to take “such action as [the member state] deems necessary”, and Trump could, if he chose, make it known that he would deem nothing necessary.

Another example of a treaty not being taken seriously was the Northern Ireland Protocol to the Agreement on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community (the Brexit withdrawal agreement). The protocol was a best effort to address a near-impossible situation: how could the United Kingdom as a polity leave the European Union while maintaining an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland? It was negotiated by Boris Johnson’s government, but if he understood it, he was happy to lie freely about its provisions, saying at a press conference in December 2019 “there will be no checks on goods going from GB to NI, and from NI to GB”. This was simply not true, nor could it have been true. In 2020, the government brought forward a United Kingdom Internal Market Bill to make changes to the withdrawal agreement in respect of Northern Ireland: it would have allowed ministers to break international law and the terms of the withdrawal agreement in what Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis called, to general incredulity, a “specific and limited way”. It caused the official head of the Government Legal Department, Sir Jonathan Jones, to resign in protest, and the offending provisions were dropped before the bill became law. By late 2021, Johnson and his EU amanuensis, Lord Frost, wanted to renegotiate the protocol again, but foundered (and prompted Frost’s resignation) because the EU would not negotiate in the way the UK Government wanted. One can hardly be surprised, given our explicit intention to act in bad faith the previous year.

When making foreign policy, then, a government must have regard to its existing treaty obligations and alliances, and determine if it wishes to make new agreements (the United Kingdom recently concluded a Joint Declaration on Enhanced Defence Cooperation between Germany and the United Kingdom, but, as I have written in The Spectator, it is almost entirely devoid of content and is mainly a warm jumble of vague aspirations. It has been contracted, moreover, with a partner which is likely to reduce its proposed defence spending significantly, to the fury of the defence minister, Boris Pistorius and making a nonsense of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s famous Zeitenwende speech to the Bundestag three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. All parties to an international agreement must be reasonably certain that each will honour its terms when required, and that requires ongoing reassurance. If I were the government of Taiwan, listening to Donald Trump’s recent rhetoric on US-Taiwan relations, I would be having some anxieties about the solidity and reliability of the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 and its provisions that “the United States will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability”.

The short version: when you are policy-making, rigorously audit and analyse your existing international commitments, check that they still fulfil the purposes you require and reinforce those that are most important to you, while also examining the prevailing strategic context to see where new agreements or treaties might be beneficial.

Get real!

While I don’t propose that brutally transactional realpolitik is always the correct attitude (see above), I am sometimes astonished at what astonishes other people in terms of foreign policy. A striking example is the surprise when the European Union, or any of its individual member states, act in pure self-interest, despite the fact that they are of course going to do so, and should do so. But we have also climbed on to our high horses about Chinese espionage in government, Parliament and elsewhere, which I find odd. We may object to it, and there is nothing wrong with the Foreign Secretary having a blunt conversation—what the British Army calls a “meeting without coffee”— with the Chinese ambassador to express our displeasure, but we should be aware, firstly, that the ambassador will take this as part of the routine of diplomacy. Moreover, though, of course China is spying on us. They see us correctly as an adversary but more importantly as an ally of their principal adversary, the United States, and they will inevitably seek any way to gain advantage over us and the US, up to and including engaging in espionage.

There was a similar incident last week, when The Times reported that Russian intelligence services could be attempting to spy on the UK’s training of Ukrainian soldiers at various locations around the country. As I wrote in The Spectator, I’m sure the Russians are doing just that, and why wouldn’t they? We may not be at war with Russia, but we are training, supplying and assisting a country with which they are at war, and that makes us at least fair game for a régime which has no compunction in operating covertly in Britain, up to and including carrying out assassinations. It should have been a mildly interesting story, mainly for its insight into the contents of the Field Army Threat Handbook, but it should certainly not have told us anything which we did not already in general terms know. We learned through leaked classified documents last April that the United States undertakes surveillance even against some of its allies, including Egypt, South Korea, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates, and if we do not spy on the United States or they on us, then that is a very rare exception.

In general, most countries, from democracies to dictatorships, from central America to central Asia, from the richest to the most impoverished will generally do what they perceive to be in their national interests. They may sometimes refrain, for reasons of fear of detection or retribution, or because of international obligations, or through misjudgement, and they may not always correctly perceive what their national interests are. But we should take as a basic working assumption that this is the criterion by which other states will measure their own actions, and we should not clutch our pearls in horror and surprise when that is proven (unless, of course, clutching our pearls is in the national interest).

Boots on the ground and skin in the game

If you commit combat troops to a foreign country, under any circumstances and in any role, you cannot expect to sustain zero casualties. You might by chance manage a bloodless deployment, but the odds are stacked against you. This is important because the public in the United Kingdom, and in the United States, has become almost completely intolerant of the deaths of armed forces personnel. It is true that casualty levels are generally much lower than, say, 50 years ago: the United States lost 58,281 personnel killed during its presence in Vietnam, which is literally unimaginable today.

Even so, the United Kingdom lost 457 service personnel in Afghanistan between 2011 and 2021, while 179 died as a result of our deployment to Iraq. Fifty-nine British personnel were killed in the former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 2019, though many died in road accidents. Even the minor deployment to Sierra Leone in 2000 saw one death, while the Falklands conflict in 1982 witnessed 255 fatalities. We also lose something like 70 armed forces personnel every year, most of whom die from illnesses or in accidents.

The equation is simple: if you decide to commit military forces to an international situation, you will have to explain why some of them died and in support of what cause they lost their lives. This is not to say it should never be an option, but rather than it should be very carefully considered and justified.

Conclusion

These are not the skeleton of a foreign policy, much less an attempt to sketch out a new international order, rules-based or not. They are principles which are, in my view, essential to be understood and observed before we try to re-imagine the geopolitical landscape and create any form of international framework. Of course we should observe the usual caveat that the United Kingdom is only one country, and while some for political reasons seek to downplay our significant standing in the world (permanent UNSC member, nuclear power, member of NATO, the Commonwealth, the G7, Five Eyes and AUKUS, sixth-largest economy in the world by gross domestic product), it is equally true that we need to be clear-eyed and honest about our standing as, for want of a better descriptor, one of the leading second-tier nations (the first tier being very small, probably only the United States and China). I confess that I cringed slightly at the headlines concerning Sir Keir Starmer’s telephone call with President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran and his encouragement to Iran not to escalate the situation in the Middle East; I do not think Starmer’s, or the UK’s, is the critical voice.

Let us say that these observations are preparatory. They are pre-requisite for a new global approach or foreign policy, or perhaps I should say a new emphasis or framing, as I am not at all sure, as I said, that it is helpful either to declare some kind of “international order” dead and attempt to create a new one. The government would do well to reflect on them (don’t worry, I am under no illusions) and, in the fulness of time, I will no doubt reiterate them to anyone in the Conservative Party who will listen as we try to reconstruct the party as a practical electoral proposition over the next few years: though foreign policy, being heavily context-dependent, will rightly be one of the later areas which is addressed in detail. But they may be a useful contribution to debates which will be had for many years yet.