Pessimists v optimists

There is no doubt which of these exemplars Lord Hurd prefers in his assessment of a succession of foreign secretaries. He is sympathetic to the gloomy Earl of Aberdeen,who,despite multiple personal tragedies,worked diligently to avoid another great European conflict only to stumble,as prime minister,into the miserable farce of the Crimean war. Lord Palmerston,an enthusiastic liberal interventionist who never saw a scrap he did not want to join and who revelled in whipping up the patriotic fervour of the public,is a particular bête noire. Although Lord Hurd allows 8220;Pam8221; some successes,not least the suppression of the slave trade,he concludes: 8220;Palmerston8217;s crime was not his doctrine of interference,but the thoughtless way in which it was deployed.8221;

Far more to Lord Hurd8217;s taste is Lord Salisbury,the arch-conservative,pessimist and cynic who dominated British foreign policy for the last quarter of the 19th century,but who misjudged the instabilities that led to the first world war. If the test of a statesman8217;s legacy is indeed the quality and endurance of the structures he leaves behind,few can match the record of one of Britain8217;s least probable foreign secretaries,Ernest Bevin. The portly,sometimes truculent trade unionist occupied the post for the five dangerous years after the second world war. It was during this relatively short period that the United Nations,the Marshall Plan and NATO all came to fruition. Bevin8217;s particular insight,drawn very much from the period through which he had lived himself,was that Britain could achieve its objectives in the world by acting as the junior,though in his view never supine,partner of America.

Lord Hurd favours 8220;realist8221; foreign policy,practised by hard-headed professionals such as himself who know the value of quiet diplomacy,who want to make the world a safer rather than a better place and who prefer dogged pursuit of the national interest to grand gestures and worthy causes. He deplores the tendency of modern prime ministers and presidents to want to be their own foreign ministers and to believe themselves capable of cutting through diplomatic fuddle with charm and dash.

Much on his mind,though he makes only fleeting reference to them,are two recent episodes. Most obvious is his revulsion for the cavalier way in which Tony Blair involved Britain in the Iraq war,an entanglement he believes was foolish and avoidable. The second is Britain8217;s less than glorious response,on Lord Hurd8217;s watch,to the break-up of Yugoslavia. As Bosnia burned,Lord Hurd8217;s view was similar to that of Otto von Bismarck8217;s more than a century earlier when he declared that the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Lord Hurd maintains that his policy of non-intervention was broadly right,but in a recent interview he regretted the arms embargo which left the Bosnian Muslims without the means to defend themselves. This is an entertaining book,enriched by the insights of an experienced practitioner. But there is a troubling subtext: the author8217;s attempts to exculpate himself.

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