POLITICS | JAMES FORSYTH
Security Adviser respectively, together with
the decline of Steve Bannon, suggest that the
Trump administration’s strategic approach
will not after all mark a radical departure
from previous US policy. ‘McMaster has had
a huge influence on Trump,’ I am told. As
one senior UK government figure observes,
the President’s behaviour shows he has
honoured his promise to be guided by his
generals.
Mattis and McMaster are likely to push
a foreign policy that maintains the alliances
that the US has created and deals sceptically
with Russia. Their ascendancy will make life
easier for the UK, because Trump now looks
much less likely to force Britain to choose
between the American and European
views of the world. As one cabinet ministerremarked to me a few days ago: ‘It looks like
we all panicked a bit prematurely.’
But not having to throw our lot in with
either the US or Europe doesn’t answer the
question of what Britain’s role should be.
The government’s aim should be to make
the country a nimble champion of free trade
and free markets, whose military and diplo-
matic presence can further the security of
the liberal democratic West.
Before this can be done, though, Britain
must show the world that Brexit was not
about this country retreating into not-so-
splendid isolation. That will mean demon-
strating that we remain open, keen to engage
with the world. Which demands a properly
resourced Foreign Office, something thatBritain has not enjoyed for some time. So
how to finance this in a continuing age of
austerity? One solution would be to fold
the Department for International Develop-
ment back into the Foreign Office. Britain’s
commitment, codified in law, to spending
0.7 per cent of gross national income on
development assistance means that DFID
has more money than it knows what to do
with. Putting it back in the Foreign Office
would ensure that the money was spent in a
strategic fashion.
It is hard, politically, to scrap the spend-
ing targets for foreign aid. But if DFID’s
budget is to remain so large, far better that it
be brought under the Foreign Office’s guid-
ance. Development experts may say that the
Foreign Office tends to define development
as supporting the ambassador wife’s favour-
ite charity. But it is indisputable that if the
Foreign Office were to take back control of
DFID and Liam Fox’s International Trade
department, it would bring greater coher-
ence to British policy.
Defence spending needs a boost, too.
Britain might be in the minority of Nato
members who meet the alliance’s commit-
ment to spend at least 2 per cent of GDP
on defence, but it has taken too much clev-
er accounting to achieve this — George
Osborne added war pensions to the list of
things that were counted towards the target.
Our defence spending, as a share of govern-
ment totals, remains at a historic low.
Britain is keen to make much of its securi-
ty contribution to Europe in the Brexit nego-
tiations. But this point would be more potent
if we were expanding our military capabilities,
rather than working out whether we need to
cut the Royal Marines or not. An increase
in defence spending would be a more sen-
sible use of taxpayers’ money than, for
example, the ‘triple lock’ on state pensions.
Debates about Britain’s role in the world
too often pretend that our only choice is to
be top dog or an irrelevance. It’s true that
we will never be the global hegemon again.
But we still have the capacity to shape the
world, rather than be shaped by it. We still
have money. We just need to spend it a little
more wisely.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/COFFEEHOUSE
Hourly updates from Parliament and beyond.G
reat Britain has lost an Empire and
not yet found a role’. Fifty-five years
on, Dean Acheson’s remark has not
lost its sting. British statecraft is, even now,
an attempt to lay claim to a place in the post-
imperial world. The events of the past few
months — Brexit, the election of the most
unlikely US president in history and the
debate over the Union — all raise the issue
of what kind of country Britain hopes to be.
The chemical weapons attack in the
rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in
Syria last week has prompted the first for-
eign policy crisis of this new era. Britain’s
role in the response has become a proxy for
the wider debate about our global stand-
ing. In just a couple of days Downing Street
moved from saying ‘no one is talking about
military action’ to backing Trump’s retalia-
tory strikes. Then Boris Johnson, the Foreign
Secretary, cancelled his trip to Moscow so as
to leave the way clear for Rex Tillerson, his
American counterpart. He also unsuccess-
fully pushed for sanctions at the G7 summit.
Criticism of the British role has been
unfair. Indeed, the eagerness of the Liberal
Democrats and the SNP to regurgitate the
Kremlin attack line on the Foreign Secre-
tary — that he is America’s ‘poodle’ — has
been rather revealing. After all, one of the
UK’s main aims since Trump won the presi-
dential election has been to discourage him
from working with the Russians in Syria. The
US air strikes and subsequent American
criticisms of Moscow’s role in the conflict
indicate that the Trump administration has
now come around to that view. I understand
that the White House will soon repeat in
public what they have been saying in private
— that the Assad family can have no future
role in running Syria. It is worth noting that
this is the line the Foreign Office has been
pushing for months.
It would be delusional to argue that
Britain has been the decisive factor in this
change of mind: it has far more to do with the
shifting balance of power within the Trump
administration. But Boris Johnson and
Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, have
built ties as well as anyone with those lead-
ing this change in direction in Washington.
The rise of James Mattis and H.R.
McMaster, the US generals who now hold
the posts of Defense Secretary and NationalIf Trump’s listening to his generals,
that’s great news for Britain
One of the UK’s main aims since
Trump won has been to discourage
him from working with the Russians‘