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North Africa and the Near and Middle East

This is fundamental because we live in a world in which there is not enough challenge in the system. There are not enough checks or balances. I have mentioned that our newspapers have fewer and fewer foreign correspondents. The quality of foreign reporting in Britain is not as good today as it was 20 years ago because we simply are not investing as much in foreign reporting. At the same time, the military is increasingly preponderant in the United States, and brings with it the inherent optimism and determination to say, ““We've inherited a dismal situation but we have the resources and the mission to deliver a decisive year,”” pushing aside the civilian advice. We are flattered by English-speaking, upper-class Afghans, Iraqis and Libyans who feed our fantasies and tell us what we want to hear. In that context, and in the context of the temptation across Europe and the United States to have more and more centralised power, we need our Foreign Office to act as a check and balance. We need it to challenge policy and to speak truth to power. Above all, we need it to say not just what the UK interest is, what our ethical limits are or what we are not prepared to do morally, but, most fundamentally of all, what we cannot do. When somebody comes forward and says, in country X, ““In this failed state, we will create governance, the rule of law and civil society,”” it should be the job of our Foreign Office to ask ““How?””, ““With whom?”” and ““With what money?”” It should ask, ““What possible reason have you to believe that you can achieve this grandiloquent objective you have established?”” We also need to explain matters to the public, because this entire rhetoric is the rhetoric of a poker game. It is the rhetoric, perpetually, of ““raise”” or ““fold””, and of driving people to ask, ““Have you met your $3 billion objective on trade this year?”” or ““Have you or have you not set up the rule of law and civil society?”” and if not, ““Why have we got an embassy in Mongolia? Why have we got to bother having any representation in Peru? Why don't we drag it all back to London and do it down the internet?”” The way to cease that is to be honest—not just internally but with the British public as well.