Written By: Ian Williams

Published: September 27, 2015 Last modified: September 22, 2015

As Robin Cook said, foreign policy must have an ethical dimension. He was cannily aware that
nations have interests and that rules are, shall we say, guidelines. If Jeremy Corbyn is in Number
10 in the future, he too will have to confront real life ethical conundrums and dare one commit
thoughtcrime in this new age? Tony Blair was sometimes right. His action outside the United
Nations chain of command in Sierra Leone was beneficial and effective in relieving the misery.
He was also right over Kosovo where faced with unreasonable vetoes in the UN Security
Council, it was right for Nato to threaten to invade and if Bill Clinton had not disclaimed that
option early, Slobodan Milosevic would have folded without the messy diversion of high level
bombing designed to minimise American casualties. Without Blairs efforts, the ethnically
cleansed Kosovars would probably still be in refugee camps across the Balkans.
Iraq was different. The last invasion was disastrous for Iraq, the region and for international
law. As the Chilcot Inquiry should show, even through the layers of whitewash it has been
accumulating over the years, it was an unnecessary and illegal war. Blair did serious damage to
the growing concept of Responsibility to Protect by invoking humanitarian intervention as an
excuse for Iraq, when he realised that the nebulous weapons of mass destruction were not going
to solidify.
As an MP with an internationalist outlook, who has show deep concern for human rights and
violations of international law, one would hope that a Corbyn administration would actively
support moves to implement R2P, perhaps Kofi Annans greatest achievement, which is actively
supported by Ban Ki-moon.
Annan got the 2005 summit of world leaders to declare that the UNs enforcement clause,
Chapter VII, is not restricted to conflicts between states, but also applies to mass violations of
humanitarian law within states. That creates obligations on all members of the UN, and even
more so on permanent members, to be able and ready to answer such calls for assistance. That
should be taken into consideration as we correctly question the size, cost and purpose of the
armed forces.
There might be pragmatic limits, but the United States veto on behalf of Israel in the Security
Council should not inhibit a Labour government from taking action to deal with trade and aid for
illegal settlements to implement existing resolutions.
Fulfilling Britains full potential in the United Nations might also involve a much more active
role in the European Union. For a start, a joint declaration by Britain and France renouncing or
limiting the conditions under which they use the veto could send an ethical signal to other
existing or potential permanent members. On many issues, especially in the Middle East, the EU
members collectively return resounding abstentions, and one reason cited has been Britains
deference to American positions of unconditional support for Israel. More active British
diplomacy would actually have a leveraged result in the general assembly and send the clear
signals that Benjamin Netanyahu is currently not getting.

Which brings us to relations with the US. Pragmatically, when people talk about the special
relationship in Washington it is the one with Israel, not with Britain. There is no British lobby in
Congress to threaten electoral defeats.
However, it is also true that US administrations do genuinely want to have Britain onside for
parlous initiatives. It is likely that British resistance to Iraq would have headed off the war
instead of egging it on as Blair did.
The fervent ineptitude of Washington against Cuba and Venezuela, or indeed Putins Russia,
should not blind us to the genuine authoritarian cast of those regimes. The 1945 Labour
Governments attitude to Russia was moulded by Moscows treatment of socialists in Eastern
Europe and none of these icons of the far left have shown much more tolerance for dissent. A
Labour prime minister has to steer between fostering delusions of grandeur of Britains reflected
power from the so-called special relationship, and a Chomskyite world view that not a sparrow
falls without the CIA targeting it. Geopolitics calls for nuance, not slogans.