Boris: a diplomatic debacle?

Ever since Theresa May appointed the Three Brexiteers – David Davis, Boris Johnson, and Liam Fox – to her Cabinet, a group of Tory MPS has been running a sweepstake on who will be sacked first, said Simon Walters in The Mail on Sunday. Until last week, Fox was the favourite. But in the wake of Johnson’s bungled intervention at the G7 summit, the odds have shifted dramatically. The Foreign Secretary had already been accused of being America’s “poodle” for cancelling his trip to Moscow, hours before his flight was due to leave, so that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could deliver a “clear message” to the Kremlin about its support for the Assad regime. Then, two days later, he went to a G7 summit in Italy hoping to persuade foreign ministers to impose tougher sanctions on Russia – only to have his proposal roundly rebuffed. Even Tillerson gave it only lukewarm support, and there wasn’t so much as a mention of sanctions in the G7 communiqué. Johnson, it seems, had failed to heed the first rule of diplomacy: “never propose anything unless it has been stitched up in advance”.

Poor old Boris, said John Bew on Capx. First, he was chided for stepping out of the spotlight for Tillerson – leading to the inevitable laments about Britain’s diminished standing on the world stage. Then, he was chided for stepping back in again, with his push for new sanctions – triggering another familiar canard, that Britain must learn not to “punch above its weight”. Yes, Boris’s G7 gamble failed, but it is a “vast exaggeration” to suggest that this was “the moment at which the wheels fell off British diplomacy”.

Even so, it was a setback – and one that adds to the “unsettling impression” that Johnson is “making foreign policy up on the hoof”, without the full support of the PM, said The Times. Which is regrettable, because his approach to sanctions is, in fact, the correct one. At the G7, Italy’s foreign minister cautioned against “pushing Russia into a corner”. Even if his resistance to sanctions wasn’t wholly principled – Italy, like other G7 nations, has valuable trade links with Russia that it is surely anxious to preserve – it is true that there is a value in constructive engagement with Moscow. But we need sticks as well as carrots: sanctions, or the threat of them, are one more way of ramping up the pressure on the Kremlin. If Vladimir Putin decides to withdraw his support for President Assad, it won’t be down to “any moral compunction at the barbarism of his client. It will be because he has been ‘pushed into a corner’.”