For 500 years, our little island,
Britain, has punched above its weight around the world,
Getting Our Way.
The means to our success?
Not just gunboats and commerce, but ruthless power broking,
Machiavellian manoeuvring,
and plenty of charm.
Diplomacy.
Diplomats are the people you don't often get to hear about,
it's the kings and queens, the politicians and the generals
who dominate the history books.
But this series is about my predecessors
who championed Britain's interests abroad -
ambassadors and envoys, power brokers and negotiators.
You must never forget
that it's British interests which you're there to promote and protect.
You're constantly having to talk to, make deals with, make concessions to,
people who in other ways are doing things
which you thoroughly dislike and disapprove of.
You have to be a bit of a schemer,
otherwise you can't do the job properly.
As our man in Washington, I saw history in the making.
Now I'm putting myself in the shoes
of different diplomats over the last five centuries,
who ensured Britain's rise to greatness
and who managed our decline.
No-one doubts that Security and Prosperity
are the twin pillars of the National Interest.
But what has always been much more controversial
is the question of Values. The idea that, maybe,
there should be an ethical dimension to foreign policy.
History has had too many examples of us standing by
and then saying, "Never again."
And then we find ourselves a few years down the road saying,
"Never again." Again. And where will it be the next time?
MUEZZIN CALLS TO PRAYER
Istanbul - where Asia meets Europe, Islam meets Christendom.
The only city in the world to span two continents.
For much of the last 500 years, Constantinople,
as it was then called, was the top ambassadorial post for Britain.
# Istanbul
# Istanbul was Constantinople
# Now it's Istanbul
# Not Constantinople
# Been a long time gone Old Constantinople
# Still has Turkish Delight on a moonlit night. #
In 1876, this was the epicentre of the first great controversy
in our history about ethics and foreign policy.
# So if you've a date in Constantinople
# She'll be waiting in Istanbul. #
Our man on the ground was Sir Henry Elliot.
His official title was "Ambassador to the Sublime Porte",
named after this monumental gateway which led into the offices
of the Grand Vizier of Ottoman Turkey.
The Ottoman Empire was an important strategic ally for Britain,
and Henry Elliot was tasked
with maintaining this "special relationship".
He did so diligently - he was a rather conventional diplomat,
but one experienced and trusted for his quiet firmness.
Eliot conducted most of his business from here, Pera House,
today Britain's Consulate-General.
Dealing with our Ottoman allies was never entirely straightforward.
There was something to the popular view of sultans and viziers,
harems and eunuchs, and layer upon layer of court intrigue.
And of course, from time to time,
the Ottomans behaved pretty outrageously.
The Ottoman Empire was vast.
In Europe, it reached far into the Balkans,
where its Christian subjects were increasingly restless for independence.
The Ottomans suppressed a series of rebellions
with savage and exemplary brutality.
Worst of all was the treatment meted out to the Bulgarians in April 1876.
The news came through to Henry Elliot in a trickle of reports.
Some 15,000 Bulgarians massacred,
dozens of villages completely destroyed by the Bashi-bazouks,
Muslim irregulars in the pay of the Sultan, the 19th-century equivalent,
if you like, of the Janjaweed, wreaking havoc in Darfur.
Funded by the state and notoriously ferocious.
Henry Elliot was appalled.
Unarmed men, women and children were slaughtered indiscriminately,
sometimes burned alive in the schools and churches
where they had sought refuge.
A British consular official, sent to investigate,
reported from the small Bulgarian town of Batak.
"I visited this valley of the shadow of death,
"the stench was so overpowering.
"The whole of the main street was a mass of human remains.
"But the most fearful spectacle was the church and its enceinte.
"Here the corpses lay so thick
"that one could hardly avoid treading on them.
"Altogether I can hardly describe the horror of the scene".
1876 still lives strong in local memory.
The news from Bulgaria posed a classic foreign policy dilemma.
A regime important to Britain violates human rights
within its own sovereign frontiers. The world is aghast.
What is Britain going to do about it?
Sir Henry Elliot did what most ambassadors would have done.
He lodged a strong protest with the Ottoman Grand Vizier
and reported back to headquarters in London. After that,
as far as Elliot was concerned and until London told him otherwise,
it was business as usual.
Nothing could have prepared him for the reaction from home.
While the government was hearing the news from our man in Constantinople,
the public were gripped by reports
wired from the killing fields of Bulgaria direct to Fleet Street.
The cry went up, from Parliament and people alike,
"Something must be done!"
The Bulgarian cause was taken up by the Grand Old Man himself,
Liberal statesman William Gladstone, now on the back benches.
Incensed by Turkish villainy, he published a lengthy pamphlet,
which proposed a whole new values-based foreign policy.
It was the nation's moral duty
to intervene to prevent further atrocities.
"There have been perpetrated crimes and outrages
"so vast in scale as to exceed all modern example.
"These are the Bulgarian horrors, and the question is,
"What can and should be done,
"either to punish, or to brand, or to prevent?"
Gladstone's idealistic call to arms was a sensation.
200,000 copies of his pamphlet were sold within a month,
spawning a national moral crusade
against the Government's traditional policy of alliance with the Turk.
I think Gladstone was right about the Turkish massacres.
The importance of Britain trying to stand up for oppressed populations
and recognising what had become,
since the time of the Congress of Vienna,
the much stronger pressure for nationality to be recognised.
For people to be able to determine their own future.
And I think Gladstone picked up that and rode on that wave
of a world which gave greater recognition to people
being able to decide more of their own affairs.
Over the next few months,
hundreds of demonstrations took place throughout the land
expressing their support for an ethical foreign policy.
There's a tendency to think that 24 hour wall-to-wall television
has somehow created a completely new world. People have been
under pressure from the media over foreign policy all through history.
It's just a different type of pressure, and,
"Something must be done," is the consistent cry, and sadly,
quite often big mistakes are taken in order to respond to this.
Press and public opinion have an enormous influence
on foreign policy these days.
The trouble is that their view of foreign policy is...
tends to be rather emotional and rather over-simplified.
If you get shocking pictures in the press,
screaming headlines saying, "Something must be done",
it's not a very good basis for policy.
The popular clamour for intervening in Bulgaria took scant account
of the strategic interests,
which underlay Britain's long alliance with the Ottoman Empire.
The key is geography.
That way, down through the Straits of the Dardanelles
through the Suez Canal, is India.
That way, just over the Black Sea, is Russia. You've got to remember
that sometimes diplomacy is about choosing the least worst option,
and it was an absolute axiom of British foreign policy
to prop up the Ottoman Empire against the Russian Bear.
After all, we'd fought the Crimean War on that principle.
So the pragmatic Henry Elliot
knew there was good reason to keep the Ottomans onside.
And Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's government
demanded of Elliot a hard-headed pro-Turkish line.
Gladstone versus Disraeli -
idealism versus realism.
It's the classic dichotomy in foreign policy.
To his horror,
Henry Elliot found himself ensnared in the controversy,
with the idealists taking direct aim at him.
It was shoot the messenger time, with a vengeance.
He sat down and wrote to London.
"To the accusation of being a blind partisan of the Turks,
"I will only answer that my conduct has never been guided
"by any sentimental affection for them,
"but by a firm determination to uphold the interests of Great Britain
"to the utmost of my power
"and that those interests are deeply engaged in preventing the destruction of the Turkish Empire
"is a conviction which I share in common
"with the most eminent statesmen who have directed our foreign policy,
"but which appears now to be abandoned by shallow politicians
"or persons who have allowed their feelings of revolted humanity,
"to make them forget the capital interests involved in the question."
I could not have put that better myself, Sir Henry.
It's not that you were an amoral diplomat,
but that you believed in a higher interest,
and abandoning it would not have saved a single Bulgarian life.
The diplomat isn't there to do the bleeding heart humanitarian stuff - that's not what we're trained to do,
we are there to analyse the geo-political situation
not today or tomorrow, but in the long term.
There is a standard debate
between idealists and realists
and idealists are good and realists are bad,
though I've never understood why the perceptive understanding of reality should be a sinful thing.
My view is that there is and should be
a moral part of British foreign policy.
But that in deciding in what to do,
you have to take account of reality.
Gladstone was wrong in that respect when he said you must,
"Push the Turks bag and baggage out of the provinces that they've desolated and profane."
Something like that anyway.
Great stuff, but actually doing that, of course, he couldn't have done it if he'd been Prime Minister
and when he became Prime Minister, he made no attempt to do it.
The crisis intensified in 1877,
when the Russians used the plight of their oppressed Christian brethren in the Balkans,
to declare war on Turkey and grab some of its territory.
Without hesitation,
Disraeli sent a fleet to the Dardanelles
to show support for the Turks.
It worked. The Bear backed down
without Britons having to go to war.
The fickle pendulum of public opinion
swung right back to support the Government.
An anti-Russian song,
composed in patriotic celebration, swept the land.
# The misdeeds of the Turks
# Have been spouted through our lands
# But how about the Russians
# Can they show spotless hands?
# They slaughtered well at Khiva
# In Siberia icy cold
# How many subjects done to death
# Will never perhaps be told... #
Bulgaria was forgotten, Turkey our chum again.
It just goes to show that public opinion is as much there to be led as followed.
# While prayers for "Freedom and Revenge"
# Go up into the air
# We don't want to fight
# But by jingo if we do... #
This song, with its "by jingo", gave us the word jingoism.
# We've fought the Bear before
# And while we're Britons true
# The Russians shall not have Constantinople. #
But the turnaround in opinion had come too late for the scapegoat,
Henry Elliot. However unjustly,
his reputation had suffered
and he was transferred to the lesser post of Vienna.
Over a century later,
the ethical questions raised by the Bulgarian crisis still resonate.
'Can the world simply stand by
'when a rogue state brutally abuses the rights of those it governs?
'Gladstone's answer in 1876 was clear.
'And so is mine today.
'Then, as now, it would have been easy to look the other way -
'easy to argue that bigger strategic issues were at stake
'than the fate of a few hundred thousand people in the Balkans.
'They were wrong in 1876 over Bulgaria
'and they are wrong in 1999 over Kosovo.'
The Eastern Crisis of 1876 shows how hard it can sometimes be
to reconcile human rights with the national interest.
The irony is that less than 40 years later, in the First World War,
Turkey was our enemy and Russia our ally,
so demonstrating the truth of Lord Palmerston's famous saying
when he was foreign secretary in 1848,
that Britain had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies,
but only interests that were eternal and perpetual.
In 1977, I was working in the Foreign Office planning staff.
The job - to stand back from the daily cut and thrust,
and think strategically.
The new Foreign Secretary, young David Owen,
wanted us to integrate human rights systematically into foreign policy.
So, we planners devised a grid.
Every nation in the world was given points
against a series of benchmarks, like freedom of the press
and the independence of the judiciary.
Add all the points up
and you have a numerical score for each country,
a kind of human rights league table.
Of course we put Britain at the top
and Uganda under Idi Amin at the bottom
and we took some pleasure in marking the French relatively low.
But, from the start, the grid didn't work.
Yes, it told us something about a country's human rights record.
But what about our strategic, political and military interests?
Arms sales to a third world despot?
Sounds bad... But hang on.
What if the contract guarantees the jobs
of thousands of British workers?
Isn't it the government's first duty to those who put them in power?
One thing's for sure,
answering these kind of questions is never simple.
On the 1st of December 1925,
Europe's statesmen gathered at the Foreign Office in London,
for what was perhaps the only diplomatic assembly in history
over which statesmen waxed lyrical
and journalists went into raptures.
They convened in the heart of the building,
in the grandest of its grand rooms.
The Locarno Suite is named after a diplomatic triumph
that seemed to promise a new era
of altruistic, international cooperation.
A new ethical dimension to foreign policy, you might say.
The signing in the Foreign Office of treaties previously negotiated at Locarno in Switzerland
seemed to herald a new age following the horrors of the First World War.
The "Spirit of Locarno" became synonymous with peace,
multilateral collaboration and what was hailed as the New Diplomacy.
The stiff formality of the pre-war days gave way to a more relaxed,
more open and more accountable way of doing things.
Old fashioned notions like the balance of power,
secret alliances and back channel negotiation were to be thrown out.
Henceforth international relations would be governed by values,
by the principles of human rights, of fairness
and of self-determination for small countries,
policed by a League of Nations.
Through the new League of Nations,
the world's countries would gather in Geneva
to make and enforce international laws,
acting together to keep the peace through collective security.
The idealism at the end of the First World War
was based on the idea of a new world order, if you like.
A world order in which
there would be over-arching, suped-up national institutions,
taken up by a Europe which was sick of war,
which was heartily sick of war.
The League of Nations had been President Woodrow Wilson's brainchild,
but he couldn't get it past Congress, so America never joined.
A decade later, the world was looking a more dangerous place.
Germany and Japan had both quit the League in 1933.
But the first really big test for the high-minded idealists of the League
was the crisis brewing in 1935.
The Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini,
decided to create a new Roman Empire
starting with the one nation in Africa
still left for imperial conquest -
Abyssinia - now Ethiopia.
HE SHOUTS IN ITALIAN
From February till summer,
Mussolini massed his troops on the Abyssinian border.
an outrageous contravention of the spirit of the New Diplomacy
and of the League of Nations,
to which both Italy and Abyssinia belonged.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: The eyes of all the world are on Abyssinia...
Parades and general preparation are in full swing in case the war,
which the neutral world hopes to avoid, breaks out.
Emperor Haile Selassie,
legendary descendent of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,
appealed to the international community to come to his aid.
What were Britain and the League going to do?
Of course the idealists of the New Diplomacy felt such aggression could not go unheeded.
Collective security meant intervention,
but then again, nobody wanted war.
The man who had to guide Britain through this minefield was the top dog in the diplomatic service -
the Permanent Undersecretary of State,
or as the diplomats call him, the PUS.
Sir Robert Vansittart, Van to his friends,
was an unorthodox diplomat, a playwright on the side,
known for expressing his strong opinions loudly and often.
Vansittart treated the New Diplomacy with caution.
He was, fundamentally, an old fashioned realist,
and he felt that the greatest threat to world peace was not Mussolini,
but Adolf Hitler.
So in Van's eyes, the strategic goal of keeping Italy onside against Germany
outweighed the sympathy that he felt for the Ethiopians.
He made his thinking clear in this minute of June 1935.
"The position is as plain as a pikestaff.
"Italy will have to be bought off -
"let us use and face ugly words -
"in some form or other."
Van believed the only way to keep Mussolini
from jumping into bed with Hitler
was to give parts of Ethiopia to Italy.
But buying countries off at the expense of others -
a hard-headed, strategic approach -
was scarcely in the spirit of the New Diplomacy.
And popular opinion in the 1930s had an even stronger voice
than at the time of the Bulgarian atrocities.
The public was resolutely pro-League and anti-war.
When there's a quarrel between two people, the police are called in to settle it.
Why can't the League of Nations be strong enough to settle disputes between two nations?
I've no quarrel with Frenchmen, or Germans or Russians
or anybody else for that matter,
so let's be sensible and work together for peace by reason.
As the crisis in Abyssinia gathered momentum,
a mass peace movement in Britain, the League of Nations Union,
conducted a remarkable poll.
The peace ballot was an unprecedented survey of public opinion.
Over 11 million people,
that's nearly 40% of the adult population,
voted in a door-to-door ballot
on five broad questions on foreign policy.
That's an extraordinary response!
The sheer weight of turnout
gave the ballot a powerful moral and political force.
Ordinary people, so it seemed,
were utterly wedded to the ideals of the New Diplomacy.
Looking through this stuff, what positively leaps from the page
is the strength of public feeling in favour of peace over war.
If only it were that simple.
The vast majority voted "yes" to comprehensive disarmament
and to banning the arms trade.
Yet most also conceded that military intervention
might be needed in the last resort to resist aggression.
So the public wanted the League to stand up for Abyssinia.
But it didn't want war
or to give Abyssinia the arms to defend itself.
It's a bit like saying,
"Are you against illegal wars?" "Yes!"
"Do you want to be wiped out in 45 minutes?" "No!"
Vansittart, with his typical pith,
called the ballot, "A free excursion into the inane,"
and I have to say, as a fellow diplomat, I could not agree more.
But it's tougher for the politicians, who have to respond to public feeling.
I think it's the job of the Prime Minister
and the Foreign Secretary in this country
and leaders in every country, nowadays,
to explain and explain and explain again.
The efforts to do that in the '30s were pretty puerile, really.
Public opinion can get easily led astray.
I think the peace ballot in the 1930s was a good example of that,
as was the famous Oxford Union debate
on whether we would fight for king and country,
it all sounded frightfully goodie goodie and desirable
and of course it was - nobody is against peace
but peace on what terms? Peace on what conditions?
Peace is something you have to be prepared to fight for.
Unlike Vansittart, the newly appointed Foreign Secretary,
Sir Samuel Hoare, did have to heed the public
and he seemed fully, even extravagantly,
signed up to the New Diplomacy in this speech on Abyssinia.
The attitude of His Majesty's Government
has always been one of unswerving fidelity to the League
and all that it stands for -
the steady and collective resistance
to all acts of unprovoked aggression.
Fine words indeed, but they didn't put off Mussolini,
who began his invasion of Abyssinia on October the 3rd.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: The radio station at Addis Ababa continues
to send out appeals to the world from the emperor, Haile Selassie.
What will the League of Nations do?
Will the League support the black emperor,
or will Mussolini have his way, his whole way and nothing but his way?
After much discussion,
the League applied economic sanctions for the first time.
This was the League of Nation's only weapon.
But it was a half-hearted one. And France and Britain,
still anxious not to antagonise Mussolini,
wouldn't impose sanctions where they might have hurt most - on oil.
So what more could the League have done?
The sad truth is not very much.
The drive for peace had been accompanied by a drive for disarmament.
And having rejected the military alliances
which were part of the old discredited diplomacy,
the League had no way of enforcing its will.
It had no military teeth.
And without the credible threat of force, fine diplomatic communiques
and words about a more ethical harmonious world
weren't worth the paper they were written on.
The history of sanctions, on the whole, has not been happy.
We see it in our period with respect to Iran and North Korea.
It is very hard to agree on sanctions.
And then it becomes even more difficult to enforce the sanctions.
And the notion of the League of Nations and of the United Nations -
that all countries would see issues identically
and therefore would act in unity -
it's just not true.
Sanctions should be a very tough,
short, sharp shock.
If they don't work, then you have to probably use other means.
If they are a short, sharp shock they can sometimes avoid the use
of military power, but sanctions creeping,
being ignored, gesture politics,
introduced just to keep people quiet because "something must be done",
are deeply damaging to the whole concept of sanctions.
Collective security is only as strong as its weakest link,
and in 1935, the weakest link was France.
With Hitler and Mussolini on its doorstep,
Vansittart knew full well vulnerable France effectively rendered New Diplomacy toothless.
In December 1935,
Van and Samuel Hoare arrived in Paris for secret talks -
for an old diplomacy compromise deal
that might end the bloodshed in Abyssinia.
Driving on the way to the French Foreign Ministry before the talks,
Vansittart leaned over and asked the big question.
"Foreign Secretary,
"will the Government fight Italy over Abyssinia?"
"No," said Hoare.
"Then you will have to compromise," retorted Van.
"That will be unpopular, but there is no third way."
The real decisions are not what they teach in the academy,
which is...
good versus evil, black versus white,
they are 50.5 against 49.5.
They are very narrow decisions.
Over two days of discussions at the Quai d'Orsay,
Van, Hoare and the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval,
hammered out a proposal for "buying Italy off".
Mussolini was kept in the loop by telephone.
Haile Selassie was never consulted.
The Hoare-Laval Pact
would give Italy a substantial chunk of Ethiopia
and a large zone exclusively for Italian economic development.
The price of peace was that Haile Selassie would lose about half his country.
But before the plan could be put to the League,
it was leaked to the press
and to the idealists back home, it stank to high heaven.
The Hoare-Laval pact looked, to the outraged public, like a classic deal of the old diplomacy -
Europeans carving up slices of Africa, against all the tenets of self determination and justice
that the League and the New Diplomacy were supposed to stand for.
The public reaction was so hostile that, within days, the British government did a U-turn,
as did the French, and renounced the deal.
The pact was dead even before arrival
and with it, perhaps any last vestige of a prospect
of keeping Italy from alliance with Hitler.
Sir Samuel Hoare was forced to resign as Foreign Secretary
and Vansittart found his career and reputation in tatters.
I have quite a bleak view of diplomacy
in the sense that I think it's largely made up of failures.
You are you are given a Sisyphean task,
you are pushing your boulder uphill,
and while you're desperately trying to push your boulder uphill,
you're watching ten others going downhill
and your own boulder may well go in that direction before you've got to the top.
It is...
a profoundly frustrating career,
because there is never a moment when you,
I think, can clearly say, "Well, we've sorted that out."
The rest, as they say, is history.
With the deal off, and the League impotent,
Mussolini pushed his war to its conclusion.
2,000 years of Abyssinian independence came to an end.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: To Geneva on the 30th of June 1936
came the man without a country.
Abandoned by his international friends,
Emperor Haile Selassie addressed the League in person.
Monsieur le President.
TRANSLATED: I am here today, to claim that justice which is due to my people
and the assistance promised to it eight months ago,
when 50 nations asserted that aggression had been committed
in violation of international treaties.
What have become of the promises made to me?
It is collective security,
it is the very existence of the League of Nations,
it is international morality that is at stake.
The New Diplomacy had failed.
The League of Nations had lost all credibility.
Maybe, that in 1935,
public opinion was too idealistic about the prospects of peace.
But you can argue that if the emphasis on peace negotiations
had carried the full weight and authority of the League Of Nations,
then they would have challenged Mussolini
and they would have challenged Hitler.
A League of Nations or similar institutions are attractive
cos they're idealistic and ideals are very fine things to have,
but you've then got to relate them to the real world
and to the real world composed of individual nation states with their own sovereignty,
who don't want to be told by others what to do.
They may sign up to cooperate, to talk and so on,
but at the end of the day, they're not going to let that override their national interests.
The Hoare-Laval Pact has gone down in history
as an act of diplomatic infamy,
leaving the indelible stain of appeasement on the Foreign Office.
But the worst mistake of all was to do the deal and then to pull out of it.
Might the compromise agreement have been better than the wholesale sacrifice of Ethiopia,
which was the tragic consequence of the League's inability
to match action with its idealistic aspirations?
The values of the age, of peace and of international cooperation,
were admirable.
But what every good diplomat has to learn,
like the prudent realist Vansittart,
is that you've got to take the world as you find it, not as you might wish it to be.
In 1999, I found myself cruising the streets of Chicago
in a limo with Tony Blair.
He was anxiously preparing for one of his most important speeches on foreign policy.
That afternoon, over two years before 9/11,
he laid out a new doctrine of international community.
Delivered in his eloquent, evangelical style,
Blair was Gladstone reborn.
And although the speech was about the crisis of the moment in Kosovo,
it was couched in the language of universal values.
In Blair's brave new world, the humanitarian imperative
would trump the traditional sovereignty of nations.
And if this meant invading other countries to save their people from despots,
then so be it.
We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand.
We must not rest until it is reversed.
We have learnt twice before in this century
that appeasement does not work.
That word "appeasement" is loaded.
He wanted his audience and the White House
to put Milosevic of Serbia in the same box as Hitler and Mussolini.
To avoid repeating the tragic mistakes of the 1930s,
Britain and America should stand shoulder to shoulder
to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
And after all, our recent record in the Balkans was less than glorious.
In the early 1990s, more than a century after Henry Elliot,
British foreign policy was once more dominated by the Eastern question,
as the Balkans exploded yet again.
The collapse of Yugoslavia
led to the kind of brutal and organised violence
that Europe hoped it would never see again -
killings, mass rape, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps.
Bosnia saw the worst of the fighting.
All sides targeted civilians.
THEY SCREAM
The capital, Sarajevo, became an ethnic battleground,
with Serbs, who didn't want to live under a Muslim majority,
bombarding it from the hills.
This was not the peaceful "end of history"
that was supposed to follow the demise of the Cold War.
In Britain, once again the cry went up, "Something must be done".
Was diplomacy completely bankrupt for failing to stop these horrors on Europe's doorstep?
Had we learned nothing from history?
As in Elliot's day, the House of Commons was divided between the realists,
who didn't want to get involved in a Balkan quagmire,
and those who felt that it was Britain's moral duty to stop the bloodshed.
But unlike the 1870s,
there was no obvious national interest at stake for Britain.
The Balkans were, quite simply,
no longer an area of strategic importance.
SCREAMING AND SHOUTING
Don't, don't, don't live under this dream
that the West is going to come in and sort this problem out.
Don't dream dreams.
There will be no unilateral use,
unilateral use of United States force.
As we have said before,
we are not and we cannot be the world's policeman.
For all our reluctance to get involved in the conflict,
to stand aloof completely was not an option.
If the international community had felt that it had responsibilities in the 1920s and '30s,
how much more powerful was the cry "never again" after the Holocaust?
Following the Second World War, the United Nations had been born
out of the wreckage of the League of Nations,
designed to keep its ideals but avoid its weaknesses.
Member states were asked to provide troops for a United Nations peacekeeping force.
As Yugoslavia fell apart, the blue helmets went in.
People forget the UN went in very reluctantly
into the former Yugoslavia
and we went in particularly in 1992 in the autumn,
because we were afraid of a humanitarian disaster -
we weren't able to get food convoys through.
We went in to escort food convoys.
The international response was far from ideal,
typical of the lowest common denominator politics of the UN.
Neutral peacekeepers,
tasked with protecting humanitarian aid and creating safe areas,
were not there to intervene and stop the killing,
but just to put a plaster on its effects.
In the absence of real force, it was down to diplomacy.
The European Community assumed responsibility for the crisis in its own backyard,
proclaiming grandly that this was the "hour of Europe".
David Owen was appointed as Europe's Peace Envoy.
He represented a new breed of European ambassador.
If the politicians are refusing to use force
and if there isn't the structures available to use force,
then diplomats are sent in to play for time
and I was part of that diplomatic thing.
No deal would be possible
without the say so of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic,
who had been the driving force behind much of the violence.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Both the Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and the European Union negotiator David Owen
decided that Slobodan Milosevic was not only the problem,
but he was probably also the solution to the problem
and they therefore said to me in a nutshell, "Get inside his head.
"How can we put pressure on him to bring an end to the war?"
At the time, he was being described in the British media
as the most dangerous man in Europe.
But in negotiations, you see a different side to someone.
He was in a diplomatic...
..duel with me, if you like.
He had to show his best face.
He had to come over as someone with whom one could do business.
Diplomats have a bad reputation for talking to bad men.
But sometimes this is unavoidable, even desirable.
You can't manage the world's problems by talking just to your friends.
I spent half a career dealing with our ideological opponents in the Soviet Union,
some of whom had certainly been complicit in communism's crimes.
It mustn't be jaw-jaw for its own sake. It mustn't be appeasement.
The key thing is to have a clear, tough-minded objective.
I only met with those two war criminals, Radovan Karadzic,
and Ratko Mladic, once. Your European Union negotiators
regularly trekked up the hill from Sarajevo
to sit at their feet and empower them.
I thought that was a terrible mistake.
Talking to people is not absolving them.
A handshake is not an absolution.
Reaching agreement with them is the next step and a different matter.
Before you reach an agreement with somebody,
you really have to have confidence that they will keep their end of it.
We soon learned that agreements made with the states of the former Yugoslavia
weren't worth the paper they were written on.
Ceasefires were broken,
peace plans negotiated, rejected and then re-negotiated.
So it went on for three bloody years.
From 1994, I was John Major's press secretary and I used to work in that office there.
I had to fend off regular attacks on him
for what was seen as an ineffectual and tentative policy.
With news images of concentration camps in Europe once again,
diplomacy seemed utterly to have failed.
But hobbled by an unheroic United Nations mandate for the troops,
there was simply no grand solution to be had.
Major certainly couldn't look across the Atlantic for a grand solution.
America, seeing Yugoslavia as Europe's problem,
had not joined the United Nations peacekeeping force.
But as the war dragged on,
the Clinton Administration began calling for a new policy of air strikes,
which infuriated the European powers whose own troops on the ground would have been put at risk.
Well, you know, I began to feel that our problems with the Yugoslavs
were almost minor compared with the difficulties of dealing with our so-called allies.
It really was a very difficult relationship.
Constant carping, criticism
and it always seemed to me, absolutely bizarre
that the Americans believed that they should control the policy while contributing no troops at all.
Imagine if the roles had been reversed?
Imagine if the Americans had had 20,000 troops in Bosnia,
but the British and French Foreign ministers had decided
that they would dictate the policy.
The American failure to come in earlier was indeed a failure,
and there's no excuse for it,
but the Europeans share the blame.
The Europeans were dilatory, vague,
and they allowed the United Nations,
all the nations allowed the United Nations,
to go in without sufficient mandate.
What moved the United States to get involved,
belatedly and reluctantly,
was the slaughter at Srebrenica in July of 1995.
Srebrenica was a UN-designated safe area,
where people were supposed to be protected from the violence.
But Bosnian Serb forces took the town
and told its 20,000 people to leave.
These men and boys were separated from their families.
Some 8,000 were led to the slaughter.
It was the worst single atrocity in Europe since the Holocaust.
Several hundred lightly-armed UN Dutch peacekeepers
did nothing to prevent it.
The international community failed the victims of Srebrenica.
We had vowed to protect civilians,
but at the moment of truth, we cut and ran.
It was not the cowardice of the men in the field -
they were under strict orders from their political superiors, all the way to the top,
to avoid getting involved in the fighting.
The practical consequence of the "something must be done" mentality, when not backed by credible force,
was safe havens without safety - ignominious disaster.
I think this is the lesson of all these interventions,
whether it's economic sanctions or military intervention,
it should be done with full power and with very clear objectives
and that piecemeal, gradually,
a little bit here and a little bit there,
we all knew that this pledge to give safe havens in Yugoslavia,
the former Yugoslavia and particularly in Bosnia,
was unsupportable.
The UN generals told the military, they told the...
permanent representatives in the Security Council that they were not providing sufficient troops.
It was a disaster waiting to happen, Srebrenica.
Have we learned the lesson of Srebrenica? I doubt it.
I hope we have, but I doubt we have.
When Yugoslavia was being dismembered,
220,000 people in Bosnia were murdered.
People driven from their homes, villages burnt down,
children butchered, women raped
and Europe did bugger all,
and I think that was a terrible, terrible moment in, er...
..our history, in Europe's history.
It mattered much more whether the Americans were doing anything
than whether we were prepared to do anything,
it mattered much more what the Americans wouldn't do
than what we would do and that's...
That puts a terrible, terrible spotlight
on the difference between European rhetoric
and European reality and we've got,
if we want to be taken seriously in the world,
we've got to do something about that gap
and we must never, ever let something like that happen again.
This conspicuous failure of diplomacy
finally goaded the great powers into decisive action.
Just three weeks of sustained NATO - mainly American - air strikes
finally helped force Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs
to the negotiating table.
A deal struck in Dayton, Ohio,
ended more than three years of war.
So far, it has held.
Genocide had happened on our doorstep
in an era when we had said, "Never again."
# Things
# Can only get better
# Now I've found you... #
Truly, when it came to foreign policy,
it seemed things COULD only get better.
Today, enough of talking -
it is time now to do.
Our new prime minister aimed to bring ideals
back into foreign policy.
Tony Blair, like Gladstone before him, proclaimed a moral mission -
a desire to use power to do good.
This led him to a doctrine of liberal intervention
which at first served him well in Kosovo and Sierra Leone,
where crises were rapidly defused by decisive action.
But the moral high ground can be a dangerous place.
It's one thing to stop mass slaughter,
quite another to seek to create a whole new system of governance based on our values.
Something we have attempted to our peril, and I fear perhaps to our discredit,
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
CHEERING AND SHOUTING
These recent wars have not just been about humanitarian intervention.
They're a far grander attempt, post 9/11, to try to spread democracy.
The willingness to intervene in acute situations is a good thing
and I think Tony Blair's willingness to go into countries
like Sierra Leone was right. The trouble is you then
have to weigh up, well,
what about situations we're not going to go into,
which may be even worse.
Look at what happened in Rwanda, in Burundi,
we all stood by as over a million people were massacred.
It's very easy to do what Tony Blair did and President Clinton did -
to go and say, "Oh, these things will never happen again."
They WILL happen again and we won't always be able to intervene.
It won't always be sensible to intervene.
Sometimes by intervening, we will kill more people and postpone peace
instead of solving it.
You have to judge that case by case. It's extraordinarily difficult.
Because you will reach different answers in different cases.
We are not going to go to war with China to rescue Tibet.
I mean we're simply not.
But if you accept that there'll be different answers in different cases,
then you must be very careful about your speech making.
You must be very careful not to follow the Gladstone/Blair approach -
banging on as if there are universal rules which you're going to apply in all circumstances.
That is the way in which you deceive people including yourself.
And that is the way in which you can really land everybody,
including the people you're trying to help, in very grave trouble,
if you let rhetoric run ahead of the realities.
My reading of history, which may reflect my predilections,
is that a lot more people have been killed by prophets
than by statesmen and so...
the assertion of values and ideals
as the only criterion is not such a comforting lesson.
So do values have a place in foreign policy?
Of course they do.
But when values become detached from reality, and tip over into ideology
and messianism, the first casualty is the national interest.
Perhaps the hardest lesson of all is to recognise the limits of our power
and the danger of unintended consequences.
Who paused to think in March 2003, as America and Britain invaded Iraq,
that the strategic beneficiary would be Iran?
For the last 500 years, as an island nation,
we have been outward looking and engaged worldwide.
Diplomacy has not only been fundamental to our security and our prosperity,
it has shaped our history, our standing and our very identity.
Today, far from ending, history has resumed with a vengeance,
in a world of unusual turbulence and danger.
If ever there was a time for a clear-eyed, hard headed diplomacy,
rooted in our values as a nation, it is now.
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