My Lords, with a new Government in place and at a time of severe international tension, it must be right to start looking for a new foreign policy, as whatever passed for one before stopped working a long time ago—no more so than in that traditional cauldron of the Middle East. After years of drift, of reacting to events and of sheltering in the afterburn of the United States, the time has come for a new foreign policy based on genuine strategic forward thinking. For the first time in years, we should seek a vision and a strategy of our own.
To begin with, we should formally eschew the use of targeted assassination as an instrument of foreign policy. What happened in Baghdad last week was ethically unacceptable. This was no strategic military act. This was a foolhardy act of policy, which historical precedent teaches can lead to dramatic and dangerously unpredictable consequences. It was wrong and we should be no part of it.
We are already living with the consequences of a generation of misjudged and mismanaged adventures in the Middle East. Afghanistan 15 years on is still in bloody turmoil. After 14 years Iraq is still rocked by the aftershocks of violent civil war. After nine years, Libya is still racked by lethal division. Syria’s insurgency is still suffering from ill-judged western interventions, including almost complicity with terrorists, and the Middle East peace process is inexorably sinking into the sand. It has been a litany of failure.
In nearly every case, we chose military intervention over dialogue, despite the fact that in Northern Ireland, after a quarter of a century of armed conflict and against very strong political opposition, we decided to try dialogue with our enemies instead. I was part of those initial tentative exploratory steps towards dialogue, and I saw it beginning to work. Yet genuine exploratory dialogue has been the absent component in nearly all the expensive failures of policy since then.
We need rapidly to change this. We should begin swiftly in Iran to seek again the common ground on which understanding might be built—we already have something to build on from the JCPOA negotiations of recent years—and if the US continues with its confrontational policy towards Iran, we should again have no part in it. From now on we must make our own judgments and take our own course. Our shared values will mean that more often than not we will be together, but that shall no longer be taken for granted, and I think that that is right. As our relative military clout regrettably continues to diminish, we should equip ourselves to be masters of dialogue, always prepared to explore, even with terrorists, the options for peace before supporting military action. A serious and much respected elderly Israeli statesman once told me that at his age he had learned that it was a better use of his time to talk to his enemies than to his friends. I hope that it is not too late for us to learn that lesson.
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