Hebrews 8: Jesus is for us forever

Hello, this is Madeline Grant, host of Quiet Write alongside Michael Gove. If you want to hear the latest episode of Quiet Write in full, then you can do so on its dedicated podcast channel, just search Quiet Write wherever you are listening now. Listeners on the best of spectator playlists can enjoy a section of our discussions, but for the full thing, please seek out the Quiet Write channel. While you're there, click the follow button to never miss an episode, and why not give us a rating and review? It really helps us out. Happy listening! Welcome to Quiet Write, the Spectators podcast with me, Monica Gove, editor of the Spectator. And me, Madeline Grant, assistant editor and parliamentary sketchwriter. And this week, we'll be looking at the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, we'll be reflecting on what it reveals about British foreign policy, and we'll also be asking with energy at the heart of our economic debate while on Earth is Ed Miliband still in charge of our energy policy. Wisps to Rüssel convulsed by what Britain's stance and posture should be in the war in the Middle East. The debate within the UK, I think, has exposed various fault lines on both left and right about what Britain's foreign policy posture should be. So strikingly at the weekend, Tony Blair was recorded as having said that our principle that I was America, if America acted, you should show up. That was the poll around which all foreign policy decisions, if you the UK should be decided. There's quite a lot of pushback against that, not least because of memories of the Iraq war. I think that you would probably reject not just that principle, not just Blair himself, but also the idea that the UK should be subservient to anyone or anything in foreign policy. Well, in an ideal world, I would love us to be able to operate from a position of strength with recourse to our national interest. But I think that in some ways what the Prime Minister has done is initially cleave to one path and annoy one group of people. And then you turn and then get involved to a lesser extent. And in doing so, irritating both camps, winding up both groups, groups of people in a way it seems characteristically starmerist. But on the point about Tony Blair, I mean, I think it's not exactly surprising that he made this intervention. I do worry though that in a way, our position has already been determined for us by our weakened position. We are not acting from a position of strength. We have such diminished army, navy and air capacity compared to how things have been in decades past. And I think this crisis has really exposed in a visceral way just how weakened our position. So maybe we have no other choice but to do whatever America wants. And whoever is in charge in the years to come, if they don't make it their business to turn that around and explain to the country, what they plan to do about it. Well, I think we have essentially made our bed. Yes, we have because the price of our continued, we think influence, some might say grandeur, but certainly status, the price of our status internationally is actually bought through a collaboration with the United States principally. This I think is what Tony Blair was really driving at. And I suppose one of the things that he would say is, okay, if you want to be entirely independent from foreign policy terms, if you want to be ultra gallist, if you want to take a realist stance of a particular kind, that's fine, but who's going to protect your bases abroad if you can't? Who is going to service your independent, nuclear deterrents, not that independent? Who's going to service your nuclear deterrent? Who's going to provide the kit that is necessary in order to maintain your aircraft carriers and so on? If not the US, if you want to divorce yourself from America, fine, go ahead, but you will find that your status is diminished overall and your capacity to achieve other things is diminished overall. But then some others will say, well, actually, do you know what? America exercises this control over us or this coercive or influential power. What do we get for it? What does Britain get during the Falklands conflict to the invasion of Grenada without appropriate consultation beforehand that you see America pursuing its national interest come what may and regarding Britain as there to either acquiesce, provide a fig Lee for Orton, Jogelon as a more or less helpful elf and that that's no position for an independent nation to take. And I guess the counterpoint to what Tony Blair is arguing is, has there been a massive come-up for the countries that haven't followed America in whatever it was doing? For example, did France see a come-up that's not participating in the Iraq war? I mean, I could be wrong, you will know a lot more about this period than me. I was very young when it was happening, but I don't seem to see, you know, France being kind of ostracized by American diplomats, for example, or there being a material come upends. Meanwhile, we who did follow America into two conflicts in that troubled part of the world. You know, at the end of the day, President Obama was still willing to say, you're at the back of the queue for any trade deal. We've still had our war dead and repeatedly insulted by American lawmakers. So I have to wonder, well, what does what does non-actriestance look like? If this is the price of act reassence? Now, the natural feeling of many would be that Britain and America have allied interests in so many ways that certainly 20 years ago, you would have said freedom of navigation, free trade, support for democratising regimes, support for the rule of law as basically understood, support for Western values in their broader sense. But it's more difficult to sustain that argument. Now, that's why I think there is an increasing salience of what one might call a more realist argument, that realist argument, if it becomes reflexively anti-American, I think, is as foolish, if not more foolish than slavish pro-Americanism. But if you are going to take a more realist stance, then you've got to be clear that the extent to which you could achieve your aims depends on your own economic and military strength. And that gets to the heart of Britain's weakness at the moment. Yes, but I also think it's fair to say that we should always follow what our interests are, which will often be shared with our allies. Sometimes the incentives will be very different. For example, the incentives when it comes to intervention in the Middle East, there are very different consequences for Europe compared to America. Obviously, if we turn Libya into a failed state and Libya becomes the conduit for all African migrants to then head towards the continent of Europe, that has very clear real-world consequences for us that aren't going to be experienced by ordinary Americans. I think that is really important to bear in mind. It's the equivalent of a luxury belief, in some cases, for a hawkish American, because you have, it's not a million miles away from when some celebrity who lives in a gated community says, "Let's abolish the police." We're the ones that have to pick up the slack from these interventions. And I'm really surprised, actually, that in mind, reform UK seem to be adopting, in fact, much of the British right, seem to be adopting a policy of backing escalation in the region. Never mind just a purely defensive strike, but a kind of escalate, something that could lead to escalating when there is a never-table side effect or very likely side effects of more refugees. If controlling immigration is, as you see, the big existential crisis for our country, for the British state in the next decade, then why would you want to engage in something that will at best make that task more difficult and it will at least make it impossible? Well, it's interesting that you mention reform, because I think all of the political parties have tensions within them, but finally, if the parties that have the least divisions on this area, at the moment the Greens live down to the Conservatives, it's reform and labour that are more interesting in terms of divisions. Obviously, we've seen the divisions within the government laid out through Tim Shipman's amazing reporting from inside the National Security Council, showing the divisions between. Which no one has denied. No one's denied. Between the Miliband faction and the sort of Starmer-Heely faction, between the cautious skeptical of intervention left and the slightly more interventionist tried right of labour. But in reform, you have a curious situation whereby Nigel Farage was gunned here initially. Robert Jenric, both speaking at the weekend and then writing in the telegraph, has struck a much more cautious note and has said, "No, we shouldn't get involved, we should certainly offer support to America by letting them use the bases, but we say that we shouldn't get involved in this war because it will lead, as you pointed out, to an inevitable migratory flows later if chaos carries on. But you've also had Nadim Zaharwe, who is in this sort of oscillating space between general reform recruit and wannabe reform for a secretary, saying that we should escalate. Nadim, of course, very sort of sympathetic to the position of the Kurds and Iran and to the interests of the United Arab Emirates. You've also had Richard Tais and Andrew Jenkins taking that hawkish line, whereas I think Robert Jenric's more. That's interesting. for sure. I have a number of reform voters would think, which is another foreign dispute that, if it ends up on our shores, will only end up with us paying more. Although I understood that there is greater support amongst reform voters for these actions in the short term than any other political group of Kurdish interests. Which is interesting. 2024 voting in Sench, which I accept is perhaps different to. It's not as clear-cut today. I mean, I think the history of foreign intervention, especially in the Middle East and around and the environment suggests that often people support something at the beginning. They come to regress it. I think it can be a real misnomer and short-sighted to simply look at what the opinion polls say on this particular day and try to judge the wisdom of engaging on term in a very unpredictable part of the world. I think that is completely right. You're right to correct me that, although your opinion polls suggest that in surprise one can draw conclusions from them and one has to be tentative, you're right. They do suggest that reform voters are amongst the most enthusiastic, familiar reaction. That did strike me oddly as a kind of attitude of, you know that reform voters, one knows that reform voters tend to take a more positive view of Trump than the general British public. But my assumption being that the sort of reform base would tend to be. I don't mean this in a patronizing way, would tend to be a bit more isolationist and insular and wary of foreign conflict. And my assumption was that Rob Jenrick spoke for them and that he was trying to draw contrast between the enthusiasm, undoubtedly the enthusiasm that the conservatives have showed for toppling the Iranian regime. But looking at opinion polls and also looking at a conflict when we're only, you know, a fortnight in, a less than a fortnight in. Yes. And trying to draw conclusions from that, I think you are absolutely right is dangerous because we've grown used to short shop interventions, likely original intervention to deal with Iran's nuclear capability and like the Venezuela intervention. And we forget that the course of a conflict has seldom decided in days and that public opinion during conflicts can be very mutable and initial enthusiasm for dealing with an horrific regime can, over time, become not just war-wearing opposition to the massive sacrifice that conflict requires. America seems to be adopting a position now that whatever Israel does and whatever Israel considers to be an its interest is automatically in the interests of America and the American people. And which I think is kind of fascinating, you know, we've discussed this before, but when Marco Rubio basically said we're getting involved because the Israelis have decided they're going to go for it. And if we don't follow them, we suspect that we will have incur greater losses on our side. You know, this is an interesting break from even American interventions of your, for example, America, under Teddy Roosevelt, engages in the Russo-Japanese war primarily to bring an end to that conflict, and broker the Treaty of Portsmouth. The idea that you would intervene just purely on the basis of what your ally wants and thinks is in its interests. And I think it's a mistake. I do agree. Israel's interests will often be shared, but they won't always be shared. For example, the destabilization of the Middle East is not in the interests of the religious ethnic minorities that live there. For example, Israel is currently shelling southern Lebanon, where there are a great many Christian communities, ancient Christian communities. There was I think a Catholic village that was destroyed in the last few days and great loss of life. One of the problems that we have is that we're in a diminished position. Historically, one of the things of being a kind of great power rather than like the world power, but a great power is that you exercise your own ability to decide what is in your country's interests, but also in the interests of the region as a whole. And we seem to be completely out of the game altogether. And this is partly a product of the sad reality that we're in. We know that the attack on Iran is something that BB Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, has supported, is intimately involved in. We know that for decades now he's warned that Iran poses the biggest threat to Israel and that those who are attacking Israel in the near abroad, Hamas, hisbalat, etc., are ultimately bankrupt by and aren't suitable to at least import Iran. So we know that Netanyahu would welcome action to decapitate the regime. What hasn't been entirely clear because they've been conflicting signals is the extent to which America has been driving this or has been driven by Israel's calculation about what is required to deal with Iran. As you quite rightly point out, Mark Rubio at one stage seemed to suggest that America, if it hadn't been dragged into this conflict, has certainly acted because they knew that Israel was going to act in a particular way. That created a backlash in the United States. Yeah, I mean, it's the tale wagging the dog, isn't it? Completely. Yeah. And there are a number of people who said either that Rubio mispoke or that he had been misinterpreted and that actually the situation was that this was entirely driven by America. Israel was its ally. One of the consequences though of the interpretation placed on Rubio's words, perfectly reasonable given what he said, has been that within America some of Israel's traditional allies have found life more difficult because precisely the point that you make has been made, which is it's good for America to be a steadfast ally of Israel, but it is bad for America to subordinate the timing and the nature of its military strikes to any other country. Yes. One as dear to American heart says, as Rubio has been, it emphasizes the play of contingency in foreign policy. What do I mean by that? Once you start on the foreign policy initiative, particularly a war, you cannot know how it will end. And while it is undoubtedly the case that from Israel's strategic position, they will be at the moment very pleased that the military steps that have been taken to degrade Iran, a price may have been paid in terms of the solidity of future American political support for Israel. Now, BB Netanyahu may be prepared to pay that political price in order to secure the elimination of a existential adversary, but we don't know how far America will go, and we don't know if the Iranian regime, even though it's lost a lot of its military capability, will actually fall. And sometimes I think that conflicts in the Middle East are generally presented to Western audiences, as if they are a very straight and simple fight between, for example, Israel versus the Middle East, the Islamist versus our friends, which is not untrue, but it downplays the extent to which there are a whole range of other parties who have who's interested being subsumed in this kind of this presentation as a straight civilizational fight. I think it's sad that the British right has actually had very little to say about the way that Christians have suffered because of Israel's response over the last few years. And you can believe that Israel stepfarsely has a right to defend itself while still calling out examples of overreach. You put your finger on one of the particular problems and challenges in foreign policy, which is that there is a restless search to find goodies and baddies, black hats and the white hats. You can understand how our politics left versus right, labor versus conservative, propositional versus opposition, entrenched as a binary divide. And indeed, that's how arguments need to be made in order to thrash out which course of action to follow. But in the world of foreign policy, it is much more difficult. I believe to determine who is a permanent goodie and who is a genuine baddie. And in fact, using that prism will often lead you into all sorts of difficulties. And within foreign policy, you can have some people who are actually pro-American, others who are anti-American, those who are pro-intervention abroad, muscular liberals, if you prefer, those who take a more restrained, cautious, realist line. But one of the striking things about foreign policy is that you also have people on both left and right who take a crusading point of view, who look beyond our shores and find regimes or forces that they want to support. And then those who actually say, well, we must be prepared in extremists to fight and we certainly don't want to forfeit allies. But you can't look at how individuals and states behave and put them into the camp of paladins on the one side and pirates on the other.