Why ditch Blairite foreign policy?

There is much to admire about David Cameron: the hair, the skin, the sticking to the task when the going was hard, the job-creation schemes for John Redwood and Boris Johnson. I attend gatherings full of Labour nervousness or Tory optimism and note that, among the trendies at any rate, shares in Brown are at Northern Rock levels and Cameron, in bright Bermudas, surfs the political rollers.

Mr Cameron has done well. And insofar as we may discern a Cameroonian ideology, it could be said to be Blairism sans Blair. This is sensible, because the former Prime Minister, while outstaying the patience of the political classes, was always located by voters as the politician whose instincts were closest to their own. So Mr Cameron is big on academies, big on choice, big on tolerance, big on “leadership”. He has done well.

It has been interesting, then, to see the most obvious aspect of Tony Blair's leadership legacy — his foreign policy — subtly disowned by the Tory leader. Three weeks ago, visiting Germany, Mr Cameron gave a speech outlining his new principles of conservative action abroad. His first principle was that “to help protect international security, any state must put its own national security first”. “Every good military commander,” Mr Cameron opined, authoritatively, “understands that no campaign will succeed unless you secure your home base first.” The 7/7 bombers, he declared by way of evidence, were British citizens, not Iraqi agents.

Consequently we had to beef up the “four types” of domestic security — institutional, cultural, economic and physical. We had to have a clearer and more confident national identity like, er, India (his choice, not mine, though China would have been a more honest example), we had to promote national cohesion, bear down on those who threaten said cohesion and strengthen our border protection.

Mr Cameron's second principle was to dump Mr Blair's doctrine of liberal interventionism, and replace it with “conservative interventionism”, which would be distinguished by taking a more “sceptical attitude towards the ability of states to create Utopias”, which while “morally correct” was sadly unrealistic, since democracy alone is not a panacea. The intervention bit would come from such initiatives as a “Partnership for Open Societies” in the Middle East, “helping to support political, economic and social reform in the region”, short, presumably, of democracy. I think this means lots of conferences with the rulers of the Gulf states.

Doesn't this sound attractive? And aren't we exhausted, materially and spiritually, by all that liberal interventionism? Mr Blair wanted to intervene in everything. He wanted to be allied with America, he wanted to be at the heart of Europe, he sought a massive programme in Africa, he pressed George Bush hard for a more activist Middle East peace process, he sent troops to Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and would have sent them to Darfur too, given a glimmer of encouragement. He was the exhausting apostle of interdependence, the politician of No Man is an Island, the busybody king. It was expensive and tiring.

But what, one wonders, is it exactly that Mr Cameron wishes that Mr Blair had never done? Where was that Utopia that the last PM erroneously attempted to construct? Could stopping the hand-choppers of Sierra Leone be consistent with “conservative interventionism”, or would Mr Cameron have set up a Partnership for Assisted Amputations with the West Side Boys? Might it have been less utopian to replace the Taleban with a federated warlordship in which Islamic fundamentalists could impose their enjoyment of their own cultural security on their womenfolk, Buddhists and men without beards? What would have been the conservative interventionist approach to Slobodan Milosevic? And perhaps, the invasion finished, we should have handed Iraq over to a Sunni strongman and scarpered so that the ensuing civil war had nothing to do with us.

Nor does Mr Cameron's example of the 7/7 bombers lead to us to the conclusions he suggests. Mohammad Sidique Khan and friends weren't radicalised because of social incohesion in Britain, but through contacts with Kashmiri militants in Pakistan. The 21/7 bombers had their origins, for the most part, in the chaos of the Horn of Africa. There is no border force, no internal fix that can protect us for long from the consequences of what happens in far-off countries.

This is something that the old Right, with its denial of change, cannot wrap its mind around. “Get a grip on migrants,” demanded a Daily Telegraph editorial yesterday, which featured not a single idea on how this might be accomplished. One wonders how conservative interventionism, which sounds like no interventionism at all, would cope with Third World nuclear proliferation.

It's understandable, this desire to draw back. Our efforts abroad are attended by such disappointment and difficulties. In Afghanistan the fight looks to be almost eternal. Even in Kosovo there is talk once more of conflict. Meanwhile a large swath of opinion here seems to consider any vigorous attempt to forestall an Iranian nuclear weapon as being counterproductive.

But I wonder whether the problem was not our interventionism, but our unwillingness to pay the full price for it. Suppose General Petraeus had been there in Baghdad in surge numbers in 2003. Or suppose that, from the start, all our Nato partners had provided the promised support — without conditions — in Afghanistan. Suppose, too, that we had spent the years since 1989 building up our military and civil interventionist capacities rather than running them down.

One of our politicians, at least, does seem to understand that, contrary to the Cameron doctrine, security begins abroad. “The old distinction,” he said the other night, “between ‘over there' and ‘over here' does not make sense of this interdependent world.” There is no securing the home base, and nor can you think that tyranny and chaos abroad will stay on the other side of our island waters. In his view Britain, with its links to the US and Europe, its international past and internationalist present, is well placed to argue for the reform of global institutions, and for continued effort to help in the building of the democracy and human rights, without which any security — even for a Fortress Britain — will be short-lived.

It was Gordon Brown. On this, at least, the British statesman most offering leadership.