The Lost Meaning of Strategy

On 19 November 2003, President Bush delivered a major speech on international relations at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall in London. The event was controversial; however, the speech was less so. Indeed, most British commentators welcomed it as a clear statement of United States foreign policy. ‘We will help the Iraqi people establish a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East. And by doing so, we will defend our people from danger’, Bush declared. He then went on: ‘The forward strategy of freedom must also apply to the Arab–Israeli conflict’.

This last sentence is puzzling. Strategy is a military means; freedom in this context is a political or even moral condition. Strategy can be used to achieve freedom, but can freedom be a strategy in itself? A fortnight after Bush’s speech, on 2 December 2003, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office published its first White Paper on foreign policy since the Callaghan government of 1976–79. Its focus was on terrorism and security; it was concerned with illegal immigration, drugs, crime, disease, poverty and the environment; and it included – according to the Foreign Office’s website – ‘the UK’s strategy for policy, public service delivery and organisational priorities’. The punctuation created ambiguity (were public service delivery and organisational priorities subjects of the paper or objects of the strategy?), but the central phrase was the first one. It suggested that the Foreign Office now developed strategy to set policy, rather than policy to set strategy. The title of the White Paper was UK International Priorities: A Strategy for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Introducing it in Parliament, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, explained that ‘the FCO strategy analyses the ways in which we expect the world to change in the years ahead’. There was no mention of diplomacy or foreign policy, the traditional domains of foreign ministries. Moreover, the timing of the White Paper’s publication created wry, if cynical, comment. It managed – just – to put the horse before the cart: the Ministry of Defence’s White Paper, Delivering Security in a Changing World, appeared a week later. Those who wondered whether that too would establish a strategy for policy, as opposed to a policy for strategy, might point to the degree to which the Ministry of Defence had already come to set the foreign policy agenda. The key statement on British policy after the attacks of 9/11 was neither UK International Priorities nor Delivering Security in a Changing World, but the so-called ‘New Chapter’ to the Ministry of Defence’s Strategic Defence Review published over a year previously, in July 2002.