All zones of public discourse have their excesses and irrationalities, but none like foreign policy. In our golden age of data, this is one area that remains resiliently unmeasurable. So anyone can say anything as long as they say it sonorously and use the word “strategy” a lot.
And so the idea has taken hold that Britain is withdrawing from the world. The charge is built on topical grievances against Prime Minister David Cameron: his euroscepticism, his implied cuts to the defence budget in the coming years, his absence from the Franco-German diplomatic front against Russia. These observations are each true, to a point, but they add up to a partial reading.
Here is a rounder account. Since 2010, Britain has co-led a military operation in Libya that amounted to regime change, and come within a parliamentary vote of a strike against Syria. It has bombed jihadis in Iraq and declared that there is “no legal barrier” to an extension of those raids into Syrian territory. It has tried to deepen relations with China and other Asian powers, even at the cost of American umbrage. It has not just stuck to a target for foreign aid that has little grounding in logic and even less in electoral self-interest, it has codified it in statute.