Nothing eases pressure on a leader like a foreign trip. Thatcher took herself to Paris the day before her downfall. Tony Blair took himself to Moscow, Delhi and Islamabad before invading Afghanistan. The floundering Boris Johnson could not stay away from Ukraine. Last week, assailed by two byelection defeats, Rishi Sunak sought consolation on the red carpets of Riyadh, Cairo and Tel Aviv.
To what possible end? Blair’s flirtation with great-power diplomacy went to his head, and disastrously so. After traipsing round one capital after another, he told his 2001 party conference: “The pieces are in flux … let us reorder this world around us.” His reorder, he said, should cover Africa, Asia and even “the slums of Gaza”. He was obsessed after any crisis with being the first to call the White House. When the Afghan war broke out, he wanted his bombers up there with America’s. When Iraq imploded two years later, America had no need of British troops, but Blair insisted. It was post-imperialism as Fomo – fear of missing out.
Any civilised person must respond to the horrific events unfolding in the eastern Mediterranean, and do so in words and charitable deeds. Such events are now a regular occurrence on almost every continent, and often below the media radar. The intensity of mass communication offers such a deluge of bad news it risks inuring people to the shock.
How nations express themselves collectively is a different matter. Other people’s woes are seldom solved by other people’s actions or interventions. Mostly they are made worse by them, especially when they are bound up in other people’s politics. The organisation of humanitarian aid should never be remotely contaminated by politics.
Sunak could have conveyed his support for Israel and hope of humanitarian restraint from London. He chose to raise his profile by going in person. He spent an hour with the Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and visited Riyadh and Cairo; he met the emir of Qatar and the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. This came on top of Sunak’s dispatch of two navy ships, including a hospital ship, and a unit of marines, to “support efforts to ensure regional stability and prevent further escalation”. The whole operation was described by Downing Street as a great success. “It felt like Britain could make a difference,” said an aide. “He’s good at this stuff.” Sunak was firmly in play.
This sounded alarmingly like Blair in 2001: the craving to be seen on the world stage, to have a role, to punch above our weight. It is equally reminiscent of David Cameron in 2011, who played a leading role in the assault on Libya and then left it in anarchy. Two years later he sought war with Russia in Syria and was stopped from this lunacy only by a vote in the House of Commons.
If America is now to return to the Asian mainland with force, Britain should have no part in it. It has already joined a proxy war in Europe in defence of Ukrainian sovereignty. It was right to do so, even though the risk is now desperate of this war mutating into an indefinite east-west conflict.
The horrors perpetrated in Israel/Palestine are awful and call for a concerted humanitarian response. But as always, charity must be impartial. British warships should be there not to “prevent further escalation” – an absurd pretension – nor to support either side. A meagre 100 beds are there, on the navy’s hospital ship, to save the lives of those who most urgently need them. As for British prime ministers, the only safe place for them abroad is on a beach.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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