Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader - Rilegato

Philip Stephens is a senior editor of the UK edition of the Financial Times and writes a column on political and economic affairs in Britain and Europe. He is the 2002 winner of the David Watt Prize for outstanding political journalism.

Introduction

ON MARCH 18, 2003, the atmosphere in the ornate wood-paneled chamber of Britain’s House of Commons crackled with electricity. The green leather benches of the nation’s legislative chamber were packed to overflowing. Tony Blair was preparing to take his country to war alongside George W. Bush. Confounded, exhausted, and dismayed by the diplomatic failures at the United Nations during the previous few weeks, the British prime minister had set his course. The mood of Britain, though, was against risking the lives of its soldiers to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. In his own left-of-center Labour Party, intense hostility to a Republican president in the White House was combined with genuine doubts about the justification for war. Even as British troops gathered on the Kuwait-Iraq border, Blair faced a mounting rebellion among his supporters. One senior member of his government, the former foreign secretary Robin Cook, had already resigned. Other ministers were preparing to quit. Scores of Labour members of Parliament (MPs) had resolved to vote against their own government. Beyond the political village of Westminster once-warm relationships with key allies in Europe lay badly broken.

Tony Blair was unmoved. Ending Saddam’s defiance of the international community was, in the phrase he had used over and again, “the right thing to do.” That was his decision, he told colleagues in the British cabinet, whatever the cost. Government officials made contingency plans should he be forced to resign after the votes had been counted. On that overcast March morning the prime minister was sure of a majority in Parliament because the opposition Conservative Party backed a war to topple the Baghdad regime. The risk he faced, however, was that more than half of his own supporters would rebel. In such circumstances, his premiership would be unsustainable. Britain and the rest of the world were being introduced to a leader they had not properly met. Blair had already transformed his party’s electoral fortunes and had many times proved himself an accomplished politician. This, though, was the politics of conviction.

He had everything to lose. Six years earlier, a few days before his forty-fourth birthday, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair had become the youngest British prime minister since the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. Three years later, he was the first prime minister in more than 150 years to father a child while in 10 Downing Street. In June 2001 he had won a second landslide election victory against the Conservatives, seemingly assuring himself a place in the record books as the longest-serving Labour prime minister in history. More than that, he had remade the landscape of British politics, wrenching the party he had rechristened New Labour from the barren socialist left into the fertile center ground. While his policies and campaign techniques had been borrowed from Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, Blair had always been a politician impatiently dismissive of the old ideological divides between right and left. They owed their place, he thought, to an age that had passed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. He embraced the values of progressive politics while discarding the accumulation of sacred socialist texts that had locked his party out of government for nearly two decades. Most politicians start from a set of traditional political positions; Blair started from the values he had imbibed with his Christian faith. His political heroes were the leaders of the centrist Liberal Party, which had ruled Britain during much of the nineteenth century, rather than the giants of the Labour movement that he now led. The product of a privileged private education and the son of a Conservative lawyer, he had always been at something of a distance from his own party. To the discomfort of many of his colleagues he saw himself as a national, rather than a partisan, leader, even though he had succeeded in exiling the Conservatives, the dominant political force in Britain for most of the twentieth century, to the frozen margins of politics. But, as British troops moved to the “start line” in Kuwait, all this was now imperiled.

During the weeks and months before the crucial debate, the prime minister had emerged as the most articulate and passionate advocate of decisive action to force Saddam into compliance with the United Nations resolutions passed at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. His speeches and interviews resonated well beyond Britain’s shores. The strong rapport he had forged with George W. Bush in the wake of the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001, had become the fulcrum of the West’s response to the new threats to its security posed by so-called rogue states and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But this relationship between prime minister and president was one replete with puzzles and paradoxes. Blair was a politician of the center-left, a leader who still counted former president Bill Clinton among his closest political allies and friends. The prime minister once said that Clinton was the most brilliant politician he had ever met—a judgment from which he never resiled. Bush was the Republican from Texas, the president whom most European leaders of the center-left had come to scorn and, sometimes, despise. Throughout the Iraq crisis, Blair sought Clinton’s private counsel. Most recently, on the very morning of that House of Commons vote Clinton had been enlisted to help his old friend. The former president wrote an article for the Guardian, the newspaper of choice of Labour members of Parliament, urging them to back their leader. “Trust Tony’s Judgement,” the headline declared. For one extraordinary moment on that March day, it was almost as if Bush, Blair, and Clinton were standing side by side.

The prime minister was unapologetic about his relationship with Bush, judging it in his country’s vital strategic interests to stay close to Washington regardless of who occupied the White House. He saw Britain’s role as that of a “pivotal” power, the essential hinge of the transatlantic alliance between Europe and the United States that had kept the peace since 1945. He shared many of the president’s fears—more so than most other European leaders—about the new security threats of the twenty-first century. The destruction of New York’s twin towers in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had exposed a perilous threat that had to be met with military resolve. But the menace could be effectively countered only if the United States and Europe stood together. The attack on New York, the prime minister would often say, had “changed the psychology of America,” though “it should have changed the psychology of the world.” While the end of the cold war had seemed for a time to rob the transatlantic alliance of its raison d’être, Blair believed that the terrorism of Al Qaeda, the defiance of Saddam, and the growing number of failed and failing states around the world were reasons to rebuild it. Befriending a Republican president was a matter of temperament as well as realpolitik. For all that he had worked with Bill Clinton to create a Third Way movement of the center-left, Blair has never been a tribal politician. His relationships in Europe saw him closer to Spain’s center-right prime minister José María Aznar than to the French socialist Lionel Jospin.

Yet Tony Blair’s war against Iraq differed in many respects from the one fought by George W. Bush. Beyond the common purpose of the expulsion of Saddam Hussein, Washington and London seemed to have divergent designs for the world. The driving motivation within the U.S. administration seemed to be the removal of a defiant enemy—a demonstration to the world that America would deploy all of its military might to defend itself. America had to assert its primacy, to fulfill its role as the world’s sole superpower. Richard Cheney, the vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon were briskly dismissive of talk in Downing Street of a new multilateral order hinged on a partnership between the United States and Europe. Blair wanted to build just such a new international system. For all his instinctive Atlanticism, he is a multilateralist—convinced that the West’s security depends on an effective international alliance. In his analysis, September 11, 2001, was a tragic demonstration of the inescapable interdependence of the modern world. Even a nation as uniquely powerful as the United States could not alone secure itself against the dangers beyond its shores. Blair believes, too, in “nation-building,” the responsibility of the West to make and safeguard peace as well as, when necessary, to wage war. In this he has something in common with American neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, but nothing at all with assertive nationalists like Cheney and Rumsfeld. The price of his support for President Bush in the war against Saddam Hussein was that the administration first give the United Nations a last chance to secure Iraqi compliance. The second pledge he sought of the president on every occasion they met was that the United States give impetus to peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Terrorism, he told Bush more times than he could remember, would only be tamed when a durable peace agreement had been secured in the Middle East.

There are echoes of an earlier age in Tony Blair’s premiership. His approach to foreign policy has its roots in the interventionism of the nineteenth-century Liberal British prime minister William Gladstone. Like his distinguished predecessor, he is impatient of the strategic doctrines that say governments should turn their backs on tyranny and injustice in the world unless their narrow national interests are in imminent danger. His politics—and a deep Christian faith—tell him that civilized nations have the right and duty to confront suffering beyond their boundaries; in the medium to long term, such intervention is a matter of enlightened self-interest. Even before the events of September 11, Blair had emerged as the most outspoken advocate of military ...