The Foreign Office launched its new Strategic Framework yesterday. It seems rather a grand title for a leaflet that stretches to two pages of A4, but perhaps that means we can hope for a fuller exposition in due course. Here’s your cut-out-and-keep guide to how it’s different from the old strategic framework:
Stuff that was in before and is still in now: WMD, terrorism, conflict prevention, the EU, a high growth economy including support for UK business, energy security, climate change, human rights & good governance, migration, consular stuff, overseas territories.
Stuff that was in before but has disappeared: Organised crime (“reducing the harm to the UK from international crime, including drug trafficking, people smuggling and money laundering”); sustainable development.
Stuff that has appeared for the first time: More emphasis on conflict resolution (“including through an integrated civil-military approach to peacekeeping, stabilisation and sustained post-conflict peacebuilding”); an explicit reference to the Millennium Development Goals [happy faces over at DFID, no doubt]; and a reference to the international system in its own right [rather than just in the context of conflict prevention, as under Margaret Beckett].
FCO say that they’ve shrunk the list of priorities from ten priorities to four policy goals (counter-terrorism and weapons proliferation; prevent and resolve conflict; low-carbon, high-growth global economy; effective international institutions) and three essential services (support British economy; support British nationals abroad; support managed migration to Britain). But given that there are three distinct sub-points under each policy goal, and that 95% of the content of the old priorites is still in there, I’m politely sceptical.
Still, let’s offer up a small prayer of thanks for David Miliband’s special gift to us all: the defenestration of sustainable development, the world’s leading all-things-to-all-people concept. On the other hand, it’s a bit worrying that resource scarcity has effectively disappeared as a result, especially on the food and water front. A missed trick there (especially since Miliband really pioneered the concept of ‘one planet living’ hard while he was at Defra); it could have fitted in nicely alongside the energy security stuff.
So what happens now? David Miliband’s statement to Parliament on the new framework says a little about what it all means in practice:
We will be increasing substantially the overall level of resources the FCO puts into counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation; climate change; Afghanistan and other conflict regions; and key international institutions. All these areas will receive additional staff and money.
We have also decided that we should adapt the FCO’s overseas network of posts to align it more closely with our own priorities and those of HMG as a whole. So we will be shifting a proportion of our diplomatic staff from Europe and the Americas to Asia, the Middle East and other parts of the world, while continuing to sustain our global flexibility and reach…
In order to put more resources into these new priority areas and to sharpen our strategic focus, it is necessary to reduce the resources the FCO puts into certain other issues, notably where other Whitehall Departments in London are better placed to direct HMG’s international priorities, in particular in the areas of sustainable development, science and innovation, and crime and drugs.
Miliband also said that “we will be taking forward the detailed planning and implementation over the next few months, inside the FCO and with other Government Departments”. As that process gets underway, it would be good to hear more about FCO’s strategy in two particular areas:
1. Its role on policy synthesis. As David and I set out in our paper last April on Fixing the Foreign Office, one of the core problems in UK foreign policy is that with domestic departments all leading internationally on their little bit of foreign policy (Defra on climate, BERR on energy and so on), we have a problem with policy coherence arising from the fact that all of these organisational silos emphatically do not add up to a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts. Traditionally, overcoming this would have been a Cabinet Office job. But today, the Cabinet Office just doesn’t have the resources for such a complex task. So does FCO have a special role in effecting a strategic policy synthesis and in joining up the dots? And if so, how does it work?
2. Its theory of influence. Miliband is already clear that the new empowerment of non-state actors in foreign policy is a Big Deal (c.f. his idea of the ‘civilian surge’). But if diplomats’ work now extends far beyond just talking to other diplomats, does the FCO have a clear approach towards leveraging influence in this new context? (This is the question that David and I will be tackling in our forthcoming Demos pamphlet on The New Public Diplomacy.) And if so, how does it work?
Tim Johnson’s China Rises blog has this video of chaotic scenes outside a southern China rail station in the midst of China’s winter storm. As Tim says, “it’s eight minutes long. But you’ll see scenes you won’t see on the television news”. (Hat-tip: Blake Hounshell.)
Also at ForeignPolicy.com, Blake’s buddy Drew Kumpf offers a tabulated comparison of how China’s winter storm shapes up against Hurricane Katrina. It’s much lower in terms of fatalities (60 versus 1,353), and damage ($7.5 billion vs. $96 billion) – but rather larger in terms of evacuees (1.7 million vs. 1.1 million), homes damaged or destroyed (1 million+ vs. 300,000) and troops deployed (500,000 vs. 50,000).
For centuries, Continental wars that included Great Britain tended to follow a pattern. The British would send an army to the Continent; it would be defeated by the French or Germans; the British would withdraw to their island; and their triumphant European enemy would draw up a superior force on the French or Dutch Channel coast. There was little doubt about the outcome, should that army land in Britain. But it could never get across the English Channel.
A recent conversation over dinner with a Marine lieutenant colonel, formerly a battalion commander in Iraq, helped clarify the nature of our “crossing the Channel” challenge in Fourth Generation war. With a combination of good counter-insurgency tactics (tactics that de-escalate confrontations), a strategy of protecting the population and some luck in the form of blunders by our 4GW opponents, we may be able to restore some degree of order in places where the state has disintegrated. We may further be able to take advantage of the restoration of order to get things working again on the local level: open the schools, turn the power back on, create some jobs, see local commerce revive.
What we do not know how to do, either in theory or in practice, is move from these local achievements to seeing the re-creation of a state. Yet in 4GW, that is crossing the Channel, because unless we can do that we cannot win the war.
But if you’re hoping for the answer, then disappointment sadly awaits.
The problem of crossing the Channel in 4GW is actually more difficult than it was for those French and German armies encamped on the Channel coast, hoping. They knew perfectly well how to cross the English Channel: in boats. They just could not do it in the face of the Royal Navy. As one admiral told the British cabinet during the French invasion scare of 1805, “I do not say the French cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.”
We have the boats and we have the superior fleet, in the form of complete material supremacy over our 4GW opponents. What we do not have is an understanding of how to employ that superiority to regenerate a state out of statelessness. Until theory can give us such an understanding – and it may find the problem insoluble – we, like yet another attempt to invade England, the Spanish Armada, will sail in expectation of a miracle.
Vulnerability. All of the same network vulnerabilities we see other infrastructures are in force with the Internet’s long haul systems (the network analysis of systempunkts applies). If this was a real attack rather than a series of accidents (the geographical concentration is interesting in this regard), then this was likely a capabilities test that yielded data on response times, impact, and duration.
Means. Attacks on undersea cables are within the capacity of small groups to accomplish. With precise mapping (these cables take very circuitous routes), a cable could be cut with as little as an anchor. However, nation-states are the most capable in this sphere (including, a growing number of micropowers). Why would a nation-state do this? Deterrence. Disconnection from the global communications grid is very likely become a form of economic/social coercion in the future (for standard national security reasons all the way down to an inability/unwillingness to crack down on rampant Internet crime, which is growing into a HUGE global problem).
Precision. It’s very hard to precisely target an attack’s damage. Regional impacts are unavoidable (collective punishment for everyone that connects to the target country?). Here’s a final point to consider: closed systems like China’s that route traffic through firewall choke-points, or other closely held infrastructure, are likely very vulnerable to an attack of this type.
Those of our readers in public service will be delighted to hear of a new project designed especially for you: Wikileaks. The short version is explained on the site’s homepage:
Have documents the world needs to see? We protect your identity while maximizing political impact.
Wikileaks accepts classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.
All staff who deal with sources are accredited journalists or lawyers. All submissions establish a journalist-source relationship. Online submissions are routed via Sweden and Belgium which have first rate journalist-source shield laws. Wikileaks records no source identifying information and there are a number of submission mechanisms available to deal with even the most sensitive national security information.
Wikileaks has a history breaking major stories (in the Guardian, New York Times, CNN, Reuters, etc), protecting sources (no source has ever been exposed) and press freedoms (all censorship attempts, from the Pentagon to London law firms have failed).
So, the $64 trillion question: have they had any good dirt? Well, here are a few examples. Make up your own mind as to the quality of the leak – and indeed whether the information should have been leaked in the first place…
A classified US report intelligence report on the battle for Fallujah in 2004, which is said to “show the U.S. military believes it lost control over information about what was happening in the town, leading to political pressure that ended its April 2004 offensive with control being handed to Sunni insurgents”. The report itself says, “The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion — coalition victory. But Fallujah was not simply a military action, it was a political and informational battle. … The effects of media coverage, enemy information operations, and the fragility of the political environment conspired to force a halt to U.S. military operations”;
The full ‘Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedure’ (large pdf), which apparently directly contradicts the US’s stated claim that “even though the [Guantanamo] detainees are not entitled to POW privileges, they will be provided many POW privileges as a matter of policy… The International Committee of the Red Cross has visited and will continue to be able to visit the detainees privately”. Documents leaked to Wikileak reveal that some detainees are classified as being permitted “No Access: No contact of any kind with ICRC. This includes delivery of ICRC mail.”; and
A 2,000 page breakdown of the entire US order of battle in Iraq, detailing full equipment registers for all US units in Iraq, as well as detainee operations and, apparently, demonstration that “the US has almost certainly violated the Chemical Weapons Convention”
Still, given the site’s cloak-and-dagger role, you’d have thought that they might have come up with something a bit more, well, subtle as a URL for the page where it all happens than ‘https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Leak‘. Mmm, that wouldn’t stand out at all on your browsing history.
