Kemi Badenoch has unwittingly exposed the need for Britain to change course on foreign policy
Kemi Badenoch has blown our cover.
For decades, Russian and Iranian regime propagandists, and other third worldists who hate us, have tried to portray Britain as a sort of global puppeteer, a shadowy force behind most of the world’s wars and atrocities.
And they haven’t had much success. To the untrained eye, Britain’s leaders probably look like gullible clowns with no sense of their own nation’s interests. The kind of people who’d be more likely to get tricked out of their own candy by a baby, and then pay the baby for the privilege, than master manipulators of geopolitics.
But it’s always the ones you least suspect, and now Badenoch has let the cat out of the bag. When asked about the war in Gaza, the increasingly beleaguered Tory leader told Trevor Phillips that “Israel is fighting a proxy war on behalf of the UK”.
Rumbled! MI6 must be fuming. Badenoch followed up with the revelation that Ukraine, too, is fighting a proxy war for us, although in that instance she dropped all of Western Europe in it, not just Britain.
Needless to say, the Russian propagandists couldn’t believe their luck. Russia’s embassy tweeted that Badenoch “has finally called a spade a spade”. With respect to Israel’s war in Gaza, meanwhile, Middle East Eye told us that Badenoch had “said the quiet part out loud.”
It should go without saying that none of this is true. Britain is not orchestrating Israel’s war in Gaza, nor Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
If any doubt remained, Sir Keir Starmer took the opportunity at Wednesday’s PMQs to chastise Badenoch for her comments. He did this on the same day his ministers confirmed that their much-vaunted agreement on airport queues with the EU was effectively meaningless, further reassuring us that our leaders really are gullible clowns with no sense of their own nation’s interests.
But it’s probably a little unfair to single out Badenoch. Her words might have been a staggeringly irresponsible gift to those hostile to Britain, Ukraine, or Israel (or any combination of the three), but they’re also a particularly clumsy expression of a line that’s been repeated all too often in our foreign policy discourse: that Israel’s fight, or Ukraine’s fight, or anyone else’s fight, is our fight. That they are, in some way or another, fighting for us.
It’s probably for that reason that Badenoch’s comments went relatively unremarked upon in mainstream British discourse, at least until Starmer shoehorned it into PMQs some ten days later. A lot of people across the political spectrum sort of agree with what she meant, if not exactly what she said.
But it’s a myth that needs to be skewered. Israel and Ukraine are not fighting for us. They’re fighting for their own interests.
Unsurprisingly, neither the Israelis nor the Ukrainians particularly like being invaded, and their leaders have repeatedly stated that their primary aim is to prevent that from happening again. One can reasonably argue on many levels about whether they’re going about that the right way, but that’s the gist of it.
This sense of national interest is almost alien to British foreign policy discourse
And we can be pretty confident that nobody in Zelensky’s team on 24th February 2022, or Netanyahu’s team on 7th October 2023, had “the Brits will thank us for this” at the top of their minds.
This sense of national interest is almost alien to British foreign policy discourse, which is essentially dominated by three competing factions: neocons who see geopolitics as little more than a team sport (the main current among Badenoch’s Tories); Corbynite third worldists who cheer for the other “team”; and diaspora lobby groups insisting that we intervene in support of their ancestral homeland or co-religionists.
All of these factions base their arguments primarily on selective appeals to morality. But they’ll also regularly insist, often through tortured logic, that another country’s fight — be that Israel, Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, or whoever — is also our fight, actually.
The main loser in all this is, well, us. Our genuine, tangible national interest is lost amid wild scenarios of Britain being attacked by Russia, China, Hamas, or the Taliban, and tenuous assertions that our international standing depends on us taking an unusually strong interest in Kashmir, or Gaza, or Tigray. At this point, not even Britain is fighting a proxy war on behalf of Britain.
We can see the results of this in Starmer’s increasingly disastrous foreign policy, which is marketed as “progressive realism” but comes across more like a haphazard attempt to triangulate between the competing factions in our foreign policy discourse.
Within a year, Starmer has offered to guard Ukraine’s borders with British troops after the war, something even neighbouring Poland has refused to do; agreed a “decolonisation” deal with Mauritius that gives them strategically important British territory and pays them up to £30 billion; and concluded a trade deal with India that exempts Indian migrants from National Insurance and expands visa opportunities for Indian yoga teachers.
It’s not hard to see how different foreign policy factions could welcome different aspects of Starmer’s dealmaking, while thoroughly disliking others. But the common thread running through it all is Britain sacrificing its own narrow, tangible interest and making unnecessary concessions in aid of some other cause, or someone else’s fight.
Badenoch’s “proxy war” comments indicate that, while she’s rightly criticised the Chagos and India deals, the alternative she’s offering is little more than a double-down on neoconservatism, including, clearly, more fervent support for Israel, whom she apparently believes are also fighting for us in some nebulous sense. Would that really make us that much safer, stronger, or more prosperous?
Instead, Badenoch – or anyone, for that matter – should take the opportunity to break the mould of Westminster’s tired foreign policy discourse.
At a time when our military is under-resourced, our economy stagnant, our social fabric increasingly more threadbare, and enormous worldwide changes are coming our way, Britain is crying out for a foreign policy which approaches every issue with the radical question: what does this do, directly and tangibly, for us? Not our “team”, not anybody’s team, not anybody else — us.
Because the truth is nobody else is asking that question for us, and nobody is fighting a proxy war for us. Nobody else. Just us.
