The Daily Telegraph, July 12, Robert Tombs
With this week’s summit in Vilnius marking a momentous geopolitical power shift within Europe, it should also make us reflect on Britain’s place both in Europe and the wider world. Lord Palmerston, one of our most effective Foreign Secretaries (and deadly enemy of the Atlantic slave trade), remarked in the House of Commons that Britain had no permanent allies and no permanent enemies, but only permanent interests. Interests we indeed have, and broadly the same as his: an orderly world in which we can feed ourselves by trade, and support the principles of representative government and individual liberty – raw materials of a peaceful world.
But today we also have the nearest thing to permanent allies, in Nato, which the British public overwhelmingly supports. Nato was largely a British invention, the work of Ernest Bevin in 1949 – perhaps Palmerston’s nearest modern equivalent. As a seapower state, we have always needed land allies in time of emergency. We have only fought one major war without allies in over three centuries, and we lost it.
Thus, it is our good fortune that Professor John Bew – the biographer of Lord Castlereagh, who built an alliance to defeat Napoleon – now advises on global strategy in Downing Street. He helped formulate our “tilt” to the Pacific, made concrete in the Aukus pact with Australia and America, and followed up by accession to the CPTPP trading system. Yet Nato remains the bedrock of our security, and its maintenance the priority of our foreign policy.
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