The Old English First Foreign Policy

Part four of a guest essay by Owen Edwards

There is not a Moslem heart in Asia, from Pekin to Constantinople, which will not vibrate, when reflecting upon the fact that the European ladies, and other females attached to the troops at Cabul, were made over to the tender mercies of the Moslem chief, who had with his own hand murdered the representative of the British Government at the Court of the Sovereign of Afghanistan... It is impossible to impress upon you too strongly the notion of the importance of the restoration of our reputation in the East. Our enemies in France, the United States, and wherever found, are now rejoicing in our disasters and degradation. You will teach them that their triumph is premature.

Wellington

He defies me to state, in one sentence, what is the object of the war. I know not whether I can do it in one sentence; but is one word, I can tell him that it is SECURITY: security against a danger, the greatest that ever threatened the world. It is security against a danger which never existed in any past period of society. It is security against a danger which in degree and extent was never equalled; against a danger which threatened all the nations of the earth; against a danger which has been resisted by all the nations of Europe, and resisted by none with so much success as by this nation, because by none has it been resisted so uniformly, and with so much energy. This country alone, of all the nations of Europe, presented barriers the best fitted to resist its progress. We alone recognised the necessity of open war, as well with the principles, as the practice of the French revolution.

Pitt the Younger

When Peace Fails

I have buried the lede in the previous section when mentioning Britain’s policy before the First World War by referencing the war itself as “necessary containment”. The point is that, if peace is to be maintained in ordinary times, if the sea lanes are to remain free and the borders secure, infringements of our rights must be punished, so that those infringements cease. Sometimes, this means recalling an embassy; at others, an embargo; at others, open and crimson-handed war, rendering blow for blow until their blood smokes on the ruddy earth and the last of their tattered pennons sink beneath the waves.

To arm, to build an alliance system, and then to allow the total triumph of your rival is to have not just wasted the treasure spent heretofore to prevent this, but also to all but guarantee a later war on worse terms. Yes, it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war, but you only get to be able to jaw-jaw because your peers know you can, and will, break their nose if slighted.

That is at the heart of Wellington and Pitt’s observations above. A British army seeking to occupy Afghanistan had been destroyed; Wellington rightly understands that this is not only a moral enormity, but shows Britain weak in front of anti-British factions everywhere. Britain could have done the “sensible” thing and simply retrenched its border at the North-West Frontier, but the government of the day sent Lord Ellenborough to remind everyone that you simply could not triumph over Britain, even if you ended up with your nominal goal; Afghanistan had to learn the lesson of Pyrrhus.

Consider Pitt’s context. He is not claiming that France attacking Britain was the cause of the war; he was not even claiming it had attacked anyone directly. Nonetheless, British security relied upon a severe penalty being extracted for the murder of Louis and Marie-Antoinette. Regicide may be a historical fact, but there must always be a scapegoat for it; ask Mortimer, or the gibbeted skeletons of Cromwell and Bradshaw. When the greatest state in Europe commits such a final regicide, and claims that its principles are exportable – well, you do not need to enter trade negotiations in such a case, but destroy the very stock before it leaves their ports. Gin on the streets causes a great deal of damage; Jacobinism, as we have learned since, causes infinitely more. British security relied on burning the weed before it flowered. That meant war.

None of this implies adventurism, and a key part of statecraft is to draw as few red lines as you can afford. You do not want to be dragged into hunkum-bunkum wars because you are afraid to risk your reputation, having spoken loudly beforehand; you do not want to overextend your credit, and be left looking foolish. Take the wisdom of Wellington on this. After the King of Spain was strongarmed into accepting a liberal constitution, the Concert of Europe considered what it ought to do – and several powers agreed that the King’s absolute power had to be restored as a matter of policy. France sent “St Louis’ One Hundred Thousand” over the border to settle the matter. But Wellington could see that the Liberal Triennio was not equivalent to the murder of the French Bourbons, and involving Britain meant spending British resources not on Spanish stability (at any rate soon to be lost again in the Carlist wars), nor on European stability (which was not shaken at all) but on French anxieties. His counsel, accepted in London, was British non-involvement.

We may bring to mind, in our own time, the delusional calls for a no-fly zone over Ukraine, or of a land engagement in Syria during the Arab Spring, There are always people looking for a noble cause to die for or get others killed for – but this is not the business of statecraft. Britain, given our limited resources, has more than exceeded expectations on what she has accomplished in training and arming the Ukrainians, and thereby punishing the breach of European peace grievously; why bring on general war and greater bloodshed and chaos if we do not have to? And who is in charge of Syria today, anyway?

Any “red line”, then, must be drawn over an item of actual national interest, which for Britain are the freedom of routes of trade, the protection of our kinsmen overseas, and the balance of power in Europe. We must arm and ally in favour of these real issues of interest, and otherwise be ever the affable and discrete neighbour – until the moment comes, and with full coffers and a safe island home, we prepare for the long struggle with the Jacobins, or to burn Kabul to the ground, or to limit the steel reach of Germany.

“O, let us pay the time but needful woe,

Since it hath been beforehand with our griefs.

This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror

But when it first did help to wound itself.

Now these her princes are come home again,

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue

If England to itself do rest but true.”

Fauconbridge, King John V.7

This is a guest essay by Owen Edwards, who writes over at The New Scrapbook. Subscribe below!