David Cameron’s journey from innocence to experience has been brutally short. A week ago Britain’s prime minister was touring the Gulf selling arms to autocrats. Muammer Gaddafi’s violent repression put paid to that. Mr Cameron is now rehearsing the language of human dignity and political pluralism.
He has some way to go to show the shift is more than superficial. Bromides about democracy are one thing. The ferment in the Middle East demands a serious foreign policy. In Britain’s case, it requires the casting off of shibboleths about what constitutes the national interest and about collaboration in Europe. Mr Cameron has yet to show the aptitude for such an enterprise.
The prime ministerial notion that foreign policy could be reinvented as trade promotion was always naive. So too was a self-styled “realism” that said post Iraq and Afghanistan Britain should avoid all overseas entanglements. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya are a reminder of how often foreign policy is shaped by someone else.