Britain is not Trump’s poodle in this Cold War
The president may be right about Huawei, but his emissaries have no right to lecture us on our own soil
Huawei was the pretext, but you couldn’t help but think that Iran was the primary motive for Mike Pompeo’s decidedly undiplomatic visit to London this week. The US Secretary of State’s public dressing down was for Britain one of the most humiliating episodes – and there have been plenty of them of late – I’ve seen in a long time, and can only really be excused in the context of the paralysing chaos into which the British Government has descended these past two years.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so it is not surprising that Mr Pompeo should attempt to fill it. His visit was not just about straight talking, or ensuring that old allies are on side for whatever intervention the White House has got planned for Iran. There was an air of instruction about his demands that was reminiscent of the attitude the US had towards Britain ahead of the last Iraq war, when Tony Blair’s slavish backing was casually taken for
granted. Not for nothing was Blair known as George W Bush’s lapdog.
President Trump may or may not be right about Iran; he may even be right about Huawei, but how dare his emissaries lecture us on our own soil, as though already a colony of the American hegemon, about what we should and should not be doing? Are we once again to be America’s poodle?
For Mr Pompeo to cite the Iron Lady in support of his demands was doubly insulting. The “special relationship” was never more secure than under Margaret Thatcher, but one thing is for sure; she was no slave to the US, firmly rebuffing its defeatist attitude to the Falklands and vocally objecting to its invasion of Grenada. The relationship under Lady Thatcher was one based on shared values and British interest, not subjugation.
Which brings us to China, and Sir Mark Sedwill’s visit, together with a veritable army of other top British mandarins, to Beijing. The Cabinet Secretary’s apparent grandstanding has been widely criticised as Britain’s “deep state” in action, or “shallow state” as a friend of mine more accurately describes a cohort whose competence, cleverness and political judgment are not in obvious evidence.
In any case, while Mr Pompeo was demanding support from Britain for America’s Cold War with China, our own deep state technocrats were off hobnobbing with their Chinese counterparts talking about the exact opposite.
I hold no candle for Sir Mark, an over-promoted civil servant who has preyed on Theresa’s May’s lack of authority and needy penchant for acolytes of no political threat to accumulate great power and influence. But his cosying up to the Chinese hierarchy is actually an entirely sensible and smart thing to be doing.
Whatever else we might think of them, one thing authoritarian regimes such as China do have going for them is that, untroubled by the constraints of the ballot box and the prejudices of public opinion, they are very good at long-term planning and delivering on national goals. Britain’s civil service is in a sense our own version of this form of continuity government. Long after Mrs May and Donald Trump are gone, and US foreign policy has pivoted away from its present confrontational stance, the technocrats will still be there. And so will President Xi Jinping, now installed as head of state for life. One way or another, we have to learn to get along.
Graham Allison’s book, The Thucydides Trap, posits that when a rising power meets an established hegemon, war becomes inevitable. This may or may not be true, but the main lesson from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is that unless threatened with invasion, belligerent confrontation rarely gets you very far. Sparta would have done much better to embrace and cooperate with the Athenians than fight a 30-year war with them.
Like China today, America was built on intellectual property theft, whether it be the knowledge brought by waves of largely European immigration, the key role British scientists played in developing the bomb, the wholesale transfer of Britain’s cutting-edge technologies during and immediately after the Second World War, or the German rocketry of its missile and space programmes. The process continues in the way the US hoovers up the best available international talent and expertise, taking their innovations and secrets with them. It is in any case a bit rich for a country that tapped the mobile phone of a key ally, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to complain about the potential security threat from using Chinese telecoms equipment.
American mercantilism is in truth as much of a factor in the campaign to ban Huawei as security concerns. If US companies spent half as much again on research and development as they do on lawyers to protect the patented monopoly profits of their existing technologies, Chinese rivals such as Huawei wouldn’t be such a threat. The hypocrisy and sense of entitlement is breathtaking.
We must obviously stay loyal to our allies, and must sometimes make sacrifices on their behalf, but with our “global Britain” pretenses, it is also vital that we remain our own boss.