Airstrikes and the national interest
The ramifications of last weekend’s Syrian airstrikes continue to reverberate. On the military side, the US, British and French armed forces acquitted themselves professionally, proportionately and clinically. The limited action taken to uphold international protocols prohibiting the use of chemical weapons was an unqualified success and has not drawn the three countries into a wider conflict with Russia, as some had feared. However, the threat remains, not least of a cyber warfare campaign orchestrated by Moscow. Questions also persist over the extent to which the Assad regime’s capacity to gas its own people has been degraded. But with Syrian and Russian authorities impeding the work of weapons inspectors, it will be hard to know.
On the political side, Theresa May and the Cabinet took a decision to join the mission which she considered to be in the national interest and justified on humanitarian grounds. She spelled out her reasons for doing so compellingly and convincingly in the House of Commons yesterday, both for taking action and for not consulting Parliament in advance. The recently promulgated principle that the executive can only commit the Armed Forces to battle with the prior approval of MPS has been clarified and convention restored. As Mrs May observed, the bizarre alternative posited by Jeremy Corbyn to act only with a resolution of the UN was to accept a Russian veto on UK action.
Diplomatically, the implications of the past week are considerable. When Donald Trump was looking to Europe for support, he called on Emmanuel Macron first, a fact not lost in Paris or London. The French leader claims to speak daily to Mr Trump and to have convinced him to stay in Syria “for the long term” though this has been contradicted by Washington. None the less, President Macron is in the business of supplanting the UK as America’s leading partner in Europe. He has already hosted Mr Trump in Paris on Bastille Day and will shortly be in Washington on a state visit, the first foreign leader so honoured.
It is testament to the puerility of politics in Britain that President Trump has now visited all the leading European capitals except ours. With Germany reluctant to act and Britain preoccupied with Brexit, France is stepping into the breach. An important dimension of the Syrian strikes, then, was to ensure the UK retains a global role as a reliable ally. It is in the national interest to do so.