“The West’s purported end state in Syria, a rebel victory, was brought about by the West walking away from the problem, and conceding strategic defeat.”
For all the moralising discourse we’ve suffered on Syria over the past decade, the conflict was internally, a multipolar one, with multiple armed groups making pragmatic bargains and shifting alliances depending on their self-interested needs of the moment. That internal dynamic has now recapitulated itself in terms of the international order, with the pragmatic and so far mutually agreeable deal-making of regional powers presenting, if anything, a hopeful vision of multipolarity in action. What does all this mean for us, for Britain and for the West?
Just before Christmas, Robert Jenrick published a piece in The Telegraph arguing that “liberal interventionism is dead”, saying, explicitly, that “The experiment in liberal utopianism has proven to be a fantasy.” It is difficult to imagine a senior Conservative politician — and, surely, the next leader of the Tory party — making this case, and certainly not using this terminology, then seen as rather a fringe view within IR discourse, even during the last Trump administration. That Jenrick does so is a reflection not just of the manifold and obvious failures of liberal interventionism at the height of American imperial power, but also of the fact that its power has waned, we can assume, permanently — unless, like al-Sham, liberals wage a shock campaign of reconquest from their embattled stronghold. Arguing, as Jenrick does, for Britain’s “Palmerstonian pursuit of our self-interest abroad” is a tentative glimpse of British foreign policy in this new multipolar order — something that would have sounded naughtily transgressive just a few years years is now the common sense worldview of a senior Tory writing for The Telegraph readership. That is how rapidly the world has changed.
Will the second coming of the Trump World Order be similarly pragmatic? On Ukraine, Trump’s likely aim of imposing a painful peace on the country, writing off its losing war, can certainly be framed as ruthlessly pragmatic. Yet, whether bullying humour or sincere, Trump’s rumblings of annexations and interventions in North America — of absorbing Canada and Greenland while imposing order on Mexico — are surely less so. Yet intimidating Canada and Denmark at least robs America’s Nato vassals of the comforting illusion they are partners instead of vassals: perhaps a pragmatic case can be made for establishing the ground rules of 21st-century international politics early on. The lanyard-wearing, security conference-attending clerisy of liberal Atlanticism now finds itself wedded to an order of purely homeopathic liberalism. Flanked from across both the Atlantic and the Channel by a Rightist surge whose form is still being defined, the changing political order will hit Whitehall’s ideologues hardest of all.
Perhaps, like Jolani, we should rethink our situation from first principles. If we could put every aspect of 21st-century Britain’s governance, individually, to a referendum, which parts would survive? The gap between the likely answers and the current reality explains British politics at this moment. It is sadly ironic that while Syria seems to be acquiring pragmatic, post-ideological governance led by al-Qaeda veterans, Britain is still ruled by the arcane processes and ideological fixations of zealots. As in France and Germany, now rendered ungovernable by the last ideological spasm of Left-liberalism, its total commitment to mass immigration and its consequences as a moral end in itself — its last irreducible principle when all other goals and aspirations have been abandoned — will define British politics in the coming decades. European politics in the 2020s is largely the product of safe, orderly societies suddenly becoming not so; Americans, who are used to this lifestyle, thinking we’re being prissy about it; and European progressives, who are entirely America-brained provincials, are taking social cues from the imperial metropole rather than their own lived experience.
Yet it is the liberal argument, that such a dramatic and socially-disruptive course of action is both natural and desirable that now requires defending — the pragmatic case is simply that the experiment has been tried and, as many warned, failed. Slowly, then suddenly, the progressives became marginal reactionaries and the dissident Right, the sensible pragmatists. The fundamental demand of the British new Right, from which Conservative party and its allied thinktank-thought is now increasingly downstream, is a return to the Britain of the early Nineties: a hard reset to fix the bad coding newly written into the system. Yet, as it stands, the British state in 2024 appears to be an experiment in formulating an angry ethnic nationalism, by heightening competition for increasingly scarce resources. This is a dangerous path to travel: the pragmatic choice is simply to admit, and undo, the errors of past ideologues.
Yet no less than Starmer’s Labour Party, an increasingly isolationist holdout of a now-dead order, the Conservative Party is wedded to the past. Its choice of Badenoch, a leftover 2010s culture warrior seemingly self-exiled from party politics in search of ageless Tory principles to bear back down from the mountain, was a poor one. The British Right is now rapidly consolidating on a Cummings-Jenrick-Lowe platform, of data-driven questioning of bad governance, and urging the necessity of radical reform — with Starmer now signalling his own agreement. The previous model failed, but we live in a time of change: in Britain as in Syria, the people will tolerate experiments in governance that offer them prosperity, security and stability. The rigid ideological certainties of the 20th century did not serve us Europeans well. To survive the coming order, our political leadership should accept the luxury of pragmatism over fossilised principles that the dawning world order affords it.