War drums are beating – and Britain appears so impotent

RIGHT around the points of the compass, the war drums are beating again. President Trump has ‘turned on a dime’, as they put it, reversing the isolationist promises that won him the US election.

USS Carl Vinson and its escorts are heading for Korean waters, where Kim Jong Un may conduct his sixth nuclear test.

On Thursday, the American military heaved ‘the mother of all bombs’ out of a plane to destroy a unit of IS’s most dangerous affiliate in Afghanistan.

Before that, cruise missiles pounded the Syrian air base from which chemical strikes were allegedly launched. American tensions with Russia and Iran have increased sharply.

And where is Britain in all this? The answer is nowhere.

Increasingly detached from Europe, the only power bloc that could give us real significance for the future, we are looking isolated and ineffectual, as the humiliating G7 rejection of Boris Johnson’s ill-considered plans to increase sanctions on Russia made clear.

You might say this has been coming for a while as Britain’s post-war influence steadily declined. Many commentators have revisited US Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s cutting witticism, delivered in 1962, that Britain had lost an empire – but had not yet found a role.

Of course, this is unfair to successive generations of extremely capable British diplomats, not to mention Foreign Secretaries of real distinction such as Lord Carrington or David Owen. There are times when our diplomacy was both extremely good and effective.

Britain sought to protect its interests through membership of several overlapping circles: the North Atlantic Alliance, the

Commonwealth and the EU. It is half a century ago, but we even had a Prime Minister brave enough to decline involvement in American wars of choice. In 1964, Harold Wilson refused to send ‘even a bagpipe band’ as President Lyndon Johnson put it (referring to the Black Watch) to Vietnam.

But now this patiently constructed approach is unravelling. Under Blair, then Cameron, we have been in thrall to the concept of Britain as a ‘transatlantic bridge’ between Europe and the US. But that was ill-advised and doomed to failure ever since 2003, when Blair attached himself like a limpet to the belligerent George W. Bush, while major European powers declined to support his war in Iraq.

Even clinging to the coat-tails of America looks unrewarding – and no wonder. President Trump’s policies seem to chop and change according to the President’s whims. For months Trump signalled he wanted to repair relations with President Putin, while declaring a trade war against China. For weeks he has been saying that the ousting of President Assad is no longer a priority. Now he wants this ‘animal’ out as fast as possible.

After sharing Dover sole, steak, and chocolate dessert with President Xi Jinping, there was no more talk of a trade war.

There are those, of course, who believe in a successful British future in an ‘Anglosphere’ of the English-speaking democracies, but this is a pipe dream. The brute reality is that Australia is very far away, does little trade with us, and is preoccupied with a Pacific region in which China is its biggest customer for its coal and minerals. How close do we wish to be to India, a democracy in name only? Some 163 Indian MPs are currently charged with murder, rape and kidnapping. We have friends in the Gulf, but do we really want to get in bed with Qatar (home of the Muslim Brotherhood), or despotic Saudis?

There are chronic problems with our foreign policy, and now Brexit has thrown them into sharp relief.

Never before has our impotence been so clearly exposed on the world stage. With true global forces such as America and China – and wannabe world powers such as Russia – openly bidding to shape the world their way, Britain is in a very lonely world.

‘Britain is now in a very lonely world’