Freedom and democracy must be defended

Times' columnist Oliver Kamm backs Tony Blair's call for Britain to maintain an interventionist foreign policy.

The greatest threat from US policy towards the world is not an excess of intervention but that there is too little of it, too late. There are few issues in international affairs that would not benefit from greater US involvement. In a BBC interview I tried to give some background to the PM's views, in particular citing his Chicago speech of 1999. The belated international response to the aggression of Slobodan Milosevic was a warning of how indifference can encourage atavistic and genocidal forces. In that speech, the PM was already indicating, when George W. Bush was a presidential hopeful advocating traditional conservative realism, the need to confront Saddam Hussein.

As this comment makes clear, the frequent denunciation of Tony Blair as a tame sidekick for George Bush is completely inaccurate. Tony Blair was advocating, and indeed acting upon, a policy of liberal interventionism when the writ of George W. Bush did not run outside Texas. What this demonstrates is that the concept that freedom and democracy may need to be actively defended and promoted in the world is not an invention of an extremist cabal of "neocons", but part of a tradition in American and British history which pre-dates even Tony Blair by a long way. Antecedents in the United States include Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and John Quincy Adams. In the United Kingdom we might think of Churchill, Palmerston and George Canning.

Progressive Liberals stand firmly in this tradition. This does not mean advocating military intervention as the answer to every problem, but is does mean a proactive foreign policy, and one which will prioritise democracy and human rights over cynical realpolitik, and which will refuse to ignore problems and threats for the sake of a quiet life. As Kamm indicates above, citing the aggression of Milosevic, those who seek a quiet life in world affairs rarely find it.