Alex Massie: Spoils of war are meagre for Cameron

DAVID Cameron is about to be reminded that foreign policy is a matter of many risks but few rewards. Failure has a much longer half-life than success.

British voters may be quite happy Colonel Gaddafi is dead; this will not persuade them to think more fondly of their own government.

In these anxious, recessionary times the public is not much enthused by the idea of fresh adventures abroad. Even successes overseas are liable to be met with indifference. This may be unfair, but that’s too bad. In foreign policy you receive less credit for being right – or lucky – than you do blame for being wrong.

Perhaps this is part of Tony Blair’s legacy. Poor Blair: Libya was once considered a British and American foreign policy success. Gaddafi’s partial rehabilitation was one of the diplomatic coups of the post-9/11 era. Already that seems like a different, distant time. Condemned for his idealism or recklessness in Iraq, Blair was then pilloried for the flinty realism of his approach to Libya. Gaddafi was a monster but a monster who could be tamed. And anyway, dealing with him was good business. Since admitting that Blair might have been right about any aspect of foreign policy has long since been forbidden, it has become important to forget that there were excellent reasons for cuddling Gaddafi.

But a deep-rooted cynicism about foreign policy is another aspect of Blair’s legacy. Idealism is unfashionable and the public won’t believe in it even if idealism is sold to them honestly. Moreover, the Iraqi misadventure changed the way the West could intervene in an Arabic-speaking country.

It was vital that the Libyan rebels “own” their rebellion. Nato’s job was to provide the space and air cover for their insurgency. This was a prudent, low-cost approach but also one that, seeking to limit any potential losses (of any kind), necessarily also capped the political rewards on offer. You cannot credibly argue (correctly) that this was a great victory for the Libyan people and then claim much credit for it yourself.

Cameron is not the only leader lumbered with a cynical, weary electorate. Since President Barack Obama has received little public acclamation for presiding over the execution of Osama bin Laden he cannot expect to be garlanded with praise for dealing with Gaddafi. It’s a measure of the sourness of the times that twin successes such as these offer such a meagre bonus.

In Obama’s case, that in part reflects the caution of the president’s style. It is hard to boast of success overseas when your own advisers claim the American president wants to be seen “leading from behind”. Moreover, with the American economy the only political issue worth a hill of beans right now, foreign policy successes are met with a sigh and a bored “yeah, yeah, whatever”.

Nevertheless, the Libyan rebellion might not have survived but for Nato’s intervention and for that Cameron and France’s President Sarkozy can justifiably claim credit. It is another feature of the post-Iraq environment, however, that such interventions are both limited in military scope and limited to issues or countries that are not actually central to the national interest. In other words, Nato could intervene in Libya because Libya is not very important.

These same considerations apply to Uganda, where Obama has dispatched a small number of American troops to help defeat the brutal lunatics of the Lord’s Resistance Army. As with the Libyan campaign, this is an intervention sheltered by the Responsibility to Protect and, in this instance, also assistance requested by the Ugandan government. As such, it is relatively uncontroversial. (And unlike the Libyan half-war, Obama’s mini-intervention in Uganda at least enjoys Congressional backing.)

Again, however, this suggests a foreign policy paradox: intervention may be more easily sold to the public when it is not a question of pursuing the national interest than when, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is. Altruism, even when armed with laser-guided missiles, is more easily sold than self-interest. This must be what some kind of post-modern foreign policy looks like, and lord knows what Lords Salisbury or Palmerston would have made of it.

Still, Cameron should enjoy his moment of vindication since such occasions come but rarely in any political career. Having enjoyed – if that is the appropriate term – this adventure, there must be a chance he will be more easily persuaded to intervene overseas again. The threshold for action has been lowered even if Britain’s capacity for intervention has not been increased.

For all that he played a leading part in this Libyan mini-war, military and foreign issues do not yet drive Cameron. In opposition, Liam Fox once boasted he could cut the MoD’s budget by 25 per cent without there being any impact on “frontline” capabilities. This was always a nonsense and has been proved such by events. Even so, who would have thought a Conservative-led government would preside over a military that owns aircraft carriers but no planes to fly from their decks? Britain’s armed forces are still being expected to do too much with too little. This, if nothing else, will cap British adventurism.

So too will political reality. Libya was “do-able” because it was limited and unimportant. Syria and Iran fall into the other camp: important and impossible. There is no easy agreement on them and no obvious approach to solving the problems they present. Interventionism is still fenced in by reality and the memories and lessons of Iraq. Even in his moment of apparent triumph, Cameron can’t afford to forget that.