THE guiding philosophy of Sir Keir Starmer’s foreign policy has been described by Foreign Secretary David Lammy as “a clear-eyed approach to international relations: progressive realism.”

In a series of speeches, interviews, articles and pamphlets over the past year or so, Lammy has elaborated this apparently innovative outlook in British foreign policy.

The most substantial of these were an article for the influential US journal Foreign Affairs in May, The Case for Progressive Realism, Why Britain Must Chart a New Global Course later republished in The Guardian, and a 2023 pamphlet for the Fabian Society, Britain Reconnected A Foreign Policy for Security and Prosperity at Home.

“Progressive Realism” is designed to meet the challenge of a whole range of global issues, including, AI, climate change, international economic supply-chains and development.

However, since Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to commit 2.5 per cent of GDP to military spending and to conduct a thorough security and defence review, it’s essential to analyse the military and diplomatic aspects of what this new Labour government stands for on the international scene.

Lammy’s two oft-mentioned influences are interesting; former Labour foreign secretaries Ernest Bevin — a dyed-in-the-wool cold warrior — and Robin Cook, who resigned as leader of the House of Commons over New Labour’s illegal war in Iraq.

Lammy says that Labour in government must think and act “in the spirit of Bevin, it must be realistic about the state of the world and the country’s role in it. Yet, like Cook, the country should adopt a progressive belief in its capacity to champion multilateral causes, build institutions, defend democracy, stand up for the rule of law, combat poverty and fight climate change.”

However, just as many of Starmer’s criticisms of previous Tory governments’ domestic policies focus on differences in detail rather than fundamentals, Lammy is in general agreement with the contours of previous Tory foreign policy thinking.

“Much of the analysis in the [Tory] government's 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy was sound,” he writes.

When he did criticise the review on some details, for example not mentioning Taiwan or failing to predict the Russian-Ukraine war, the implication was that the Tories were too soft or too distracted to pay enough attention to these emerging threats.

Labour and multipolarity

Nonetheless Lammy stresses several new features of the world situation, often explicitly contrasting them with the Blairite era and claiming, selectively and with little substance, that today’s Labour right-wing leadership has learned the lessons from some of the notable debacles of Labour governments from 1997 to 2010.

In his Fabian pamphlet, Lammy conceded: “We no longer live in a unipolar world defined by the UK's most important bilateral ally the United States. Instead, the world has become multipolar.”

Lammy argues that the multipolar world is not due simply to China’s rise, although he notes that when Tony Blair entered No 10 in 1997, Britain’s GDP was twice that of China while today Chinese GDP is more than five times that of the UK. Lammy additionally mentions the greater autonomy and “increased leverage” of what he calls “middle powers.”

“Geo-political competition” is a recurring phrase, although Lammy presents this largely as a binary China-US contest.

Somewhat strangely, Lammy does not refer to the Brics+ grouping in either the Fabian pamphlet or the Foreign Affairs piece, although the anxiety over the gradual realignment of these middle powers and the global South behind a growing China is evident.

“China is not the world’s only rising power,” Lammy writes. “A broadening group of states — including Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have claimed seats at the table. They and others have the power to shape their regional environments, and they ignore the European Union, Britain and the US ever more frequently.In the 20th century, some of these states aligned with rival superpower-led blocs. But today, to maximise their autonomy, they strike deals with all the great powers.”

Although tentatively distancing “progressive realism” from the Blairite “liberal interventionism,” this approach seems to be based on the obvious results of the failures and defeats of Western policies rather than questioning the interests and delusions that fuelled the foreign policy crises of New Labour in the first place.

Specifically, the Western-led wars of the 21st century are seen as disastrous not because they were immoral, unjust, illegal or examples of imperialist arrogance but because they failed to achieve their desired outcomes and alienated formerly dependable allies.

Lammy is particularly concerned that many countries no longer automatically fall in line with Washington’s foreign policy. Lammy laments: “Their noted indifference to many US pleas is partly the result of the chaotic Western military interventions during the first decades of this century. The failures of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya undermined the idea that liberal interventionism was, as Blair remarked in 1999, ‘a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose.’ Instead, it came to be seen as a recipe for disorder.”

Chaos and disorder, not carnage and death, are the outcomes to be deplored. In fact, these past military debacles had the effect, in Lammy’s view, of inhibiting other, presumably more orderly, interventions elsewhere.

Lammy is more hawkish than both the Obama and Biden administrations, chiding them for failing to act more decisively inside Syria and over Ukraine.

“A British government that adheres to progressive realism will not repeat these errors,” Lammy argues. “That said, the last decade has made it clear that inaction has high costs, too. The fact that the US did not police its redline against the use of chemical weapons in Syria not only entrenched Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s monstrous regime; it also emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Noticeably, Lammy ignores New Labour’s prosecution of the 1999 Nato war against Yugoslavia, a war on European soil that has been conveniently forgotten — at least in the West.

However, look through the major speeches by Russian leader Vladimir Putin justifying his invasion of Ukraine and count how many times he refers to the Nato war over Kosovo both as an example of Nato’s early “out-of-theatre” operations and its push to the east, and as an example of Western hypocrisy over separatism and sovereignty.

China has certainly not forgotten nor forgiven the Nato bombing of its Belgrade embassy. Perhaps Robin Cook’s involvement in that war is a factor in Lammy’s memory lapse.

He’s certainly not alone. This collective amnesia also extends to Richard Thornton, author of Progressive Realist Peacemaking: A New Strategic Priority for UK Foreign Policy, published by the right-wing think tank Labour Together.

In a section ironically entitled Lessons of History, Thornton claimed:
“In 1995, the Dayton Agreement brought the bloody wars in Yugoslavia to an end.”

Thornton’s memory-wipe goes back further. Britain’s actual historical role over the past few centuries is scrubbed clean as is the record of previous Labour governments.

He says: “The UK’s security services and military are models of respect for human rights and the rule of law,” and “Britain’s hard-won reputation for competence, fair play and the rule of law has taken a severe hit over the last decade.”

Thornton even talks of a “decade of spectacularly costly failures in state-building” as if the Blair and Brown governments were wholly innocent and these disasters can be laid solely at the feet of the past 10 years or so of Tory rule.

This article is part one of a three-part series. Read the second part in tomorrow’s paper.