Cameron's foreign policy failures - or what happens when a Conservative fails to be conservative

David Cameron's foreign policy travails are damningly examined by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in a Comment is Free article:

"Since becoming Conservative leader David Cameron has shown considerable skill on the domestic scene, impressing foe as well as friend ... But abroad it has been a quite different story – a series of missteps and own goals, culminating in the gruesome embarrassment of his volte face on a referendum, and his forlorn attempt to explain it away ... Every way Cameron has turned has led him into a blind alley".

The core of the problem, says Wheatcroft, is ideas - bad ideas. Despite what appeared to be a rethinking of Conservative foreign policy heralded in a keynote speech by Cameron in September 2006, the reassertion of the traditional conservative virtues of caution, reserve and scepticism of grand projects, have not been allowed to reshape Cameron's foreign policy.

Europe has proven this to be painfully true. The result has been the ongoing attempt to appease a thoroughly unconservative ideological opposition to Europe inside the Conservative Party. Appeasement will not work with the Europhobes. They do not want a referendum on Lisbon. They want the UK out of Europe. This is their grand, revolutionary project. Kieron O'Hara in his brilliant After Blair: David Cameron and the Conservative tradition has demonstrated just how unconservative it is:

"Britain has been in the EU for some 30 years now; it affects our financial governance, our political governance, our diplomacy, our employment patterns and our law. Withdrawal from the EU altogether is not a conservative option ... It is essential that the conservative takes systems as he or she finds them and makes them work. Britain is in Europe ... That fact alone puts pretty strong limits on the extent and virulence of the euroscepticism that a conservative is allowed".

The europhobe revolutionaries and their most unconservative of projects have been allowed to mis-shape Conservative European policy under Cameron. Alienating Europe's Christian Democratic tradition in order to ally with a small grouping of somewhat dubious parties lacking any influence in the European Parliament was, of course, the first act of such futile appeasement. But Europe is not the only instance of ideological obsession perverting Conservative foreign policy instincts. Wheatcroft also points to Georgia.

Chekov reminds us of the ridiculous suggestion by Cameron at the outbreak of hostilities with Russia that Georgia should be given NATO membership ... inevitably dragging us into conflict with the Great Bear:

"I certainly endorse wholeheartedly Wheatcroft’s contention that Cameron suffered his ‘worst moment of all’ during Georgia’s war with Russia. The suggestion that the Georgians should have been immediately admitted to Nato was an enormous lapse of judgment which has since been placed in even starker relief by the European Union’s independent enquiry, which concluded that Georgia started the war. It was obvious from the outset that conflict in South Ossetia was not simply a result of Russian aggression. When Cameron wholeheartedly, and without reservation, backed the government in Tbilisi, he was providing succour to a President whose aggressive adventure cost many lives. He adopted an astoundingly unreflective policy directly from the neoconservative wing of his party. He was, at best, badly advised".

The other revolutionary, unconservative tendency in Conservative foreign policy, thrown into stark relief during the Georgian crisis, is the influence of the neocons - who have a Jacobin belief that the use of force can create a just order of democracies across the face of the globe.

Wheatcroft urges the Conservatives to be authentically conservative in their foreign policy. When it comes to Europe, yes, oppose the centralising nonsense proposed by the EU's elite. Toryism in its very nature is about opposing such grand, abstract, ideological schemes. But withdrawal from the EU is equally ideological and abstract, equally unconservative. The advice, therefore, is to lose the ideological obsessions. And that includes, by the way, the other fetish of the Europhobes - the so-called 'special relationship'. As Wheatcroft so pithily puts it is "so special that only the English know it exists".

The reserve, caution and scepticism with which Conservatives should approach Europe - a scepticism to be equally displayed towards the Eurofanatic and Europhobe ideologues - should be rolled out across foreign policy matters. This means, as Wheatcroft tells us, "there is another Tory tradition". Restating that tradition has been previously urged by Burke's Corner. Wheatcroft invokes one recent restatement of it, by Sir Malcolm Rifkind during the Georgian crisis:

"Britain, France and Germany are not going to go to war with Russia over South Ossetia".

The historical resonances are, of course, quite explicit: for a foreign policy shaped by traditonal conservative concerns, it remains the case that Danzig is not worth the bones of British Grenadier. Wheatcroft ends his article with a passing reference to Afghanistan. Here is a conflict that surely requires that other Tory tradition to raise its voice, saying that Helmand province and President Karzai are not worth the sacrifice of young British servicemen and women.

In his 2006 speech Cameron said that he was conservative in his approach to foreign policy "because I recognise the complexities of human nature, and am sceptical of grand schemes to remake the world". Those words have not guided his foreign policy. It's time for change.