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Foreign Policy

My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, for initiating this far-reaching debate. I am also grateful for the emphasis he laid on the importance of taking seriously both history and ideas if we are to develop an effective foreign policy for the future. Today we have the opportunity to discuss foreign policy in the round and examine the principles and thrust of our response to its new challenges. I was particularly grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, for raising nuclear weaponry and its future within our world and our own policy. I want to concentrate on two areas: the need to refresh the post-1945 world order at a time of economic challenge and, in so doing, to take full account of differences in ideology and religious perception across our world. In his seminal July 2007 lecture, ““New Diplomacy: Challenges for Foreign Policy””, the Foreign Secretary spoke of the need for today’s foreign policy to reflect the new distribution of power. We have already had references in this debate to the growing strength of China and India as being key to the need to innovate and modernise existing international bodies and structures. Over the past few months this need has been amply illustrated by the complete inability of existing international financial institutions to provide collective action on a global scale. I was particularly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, for weaving together foreign and economic policy when discussing the situation in Africa, for the two are deeply dependent on each other. Therefore, I am encouraged that the Government have made reform of the international financial institutions a key element of the package of proposals to be considered by the G20 when it meets in London on 2 April. If such reforms are to be sustainable, the financial institutions need to be publicly and transparently accountable. One way to go some way in this direction would be to ensure that developing and developed countries had equality of voice and of vote. For this reason, many from this Bench will support the ““Put People First”” rally in London on 28 March. Secondly, and still more crucially, we need to tackle the battle of ideas and we need to do that thoroughly. Sometimes it seems that every newcomer on taking up their role with regard to foreign affairs makes a promise to tackle that battle of ideas; George W Bush spoke in September 2001 of ““waging a war on ideas””, but then actually failed to do any such thing. The Foreign Secretary in his 2007 speech spoke of the ways that winning the battle of ideas was fundamental to securing Britain’s foreign policy priorities. Yet I am far from convinced that the foreign policy establishment understands sufficiently the interaction of politics and religion in global politics, whether that be in Gaza or Iran. Too often we are taken away from the important by the urgent. We make necessary and right responses to particular foreign policy issues without taking seriously the background to them. So, James Jones, an American religious psychologist and academic of comparative religion, notes in his informative study, Blood that Cries Out from the Earth, that liberal democracies based on the values of individual rights and government by negotiation and compromise have not yet begun to find a way to respond to those who are convinced that God has given them the single master plan for how society should be organised and governed. That view is held widely across the world. That understanding of the divine mandate is shared by Christian reconstructionists in America, by Muslim jihadi around the world, by ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel and by groups such as the Japanese Buddhist group Aum Shinrikyo and the Hindu nationalist party India. I agree with and stress James Jones’s analysis that whether such a divine mission can coexist with liberal democracy remains one of the major religious and political issues of the beginning of the 21st century. I suggest that policymakers need to pay far greater attention to this than they have done hitherto. All too often, foreign policymakers here in Europe and in America display a propensity to rely on the advice of social scientists who employ rational choice models or game theory in attempts to comprehend sacred values that are deeply held for non-instrumental reasons. I do not think that it takes a bishop to recognise that such sacred values are not open to the instrumental calculus of statistically based social sciences. It is not my intention here to rehearse the well established thesis that religion is among the missing dimensions of statecraft. Rather, it is to suggest that meeting many of the foreign challenges of the present and the future will depend on a better understanding of how religion and politics are mixed together in our world. Counterterrorism policies that appeal to the self-interest of religiously motivated terrorists are unlikely to succeed. Threatening Iran with a further tightening of sanctions is unlikely to succeed when the regime’s description of the US as the ““great Satan”” is to do not with the religious foundation of America, but far more with its materialist values. We stand little chance of winning the battle of ideas if we speak all the time of United Nations resolutions, unilateralism, multilateralism, weapons inspectors, coercion and non-coercion. We need a new language and a new vision for dealing with this battle of ideas, and that remains one of the most pressing foreign policy challengers for our Government and for our generation.