Topics

Sunday, September 25, 2016

The May doctrine: Britain is still a global player (really)


PM announces plans to send British troops to Somalia and spend £100 million in Africa.


NEW YORK — Brexit might mean Brexit, but Britain still wants to be a player on the world stage.

That, at least, was the message Theresa May wanted the world to hear as she addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York Tuesday.


In her first major foreign policy speech as prime minister, the Conservative leader sketched out her plan to preserve British influence in the world, including a potentially transformative post-Brexit U.K. pivot from Brussels to the U.N.

The PM also set out a new “May doctrine” of pre-emptive international action to tackle the twin challenges of terrorism and mass migration which, she warned, would continue to challenge the political order in Europe and the U.S. if more was not done.

In a clear warning to other world leaders, May said voters’ concerns over the “unprecedented” mass movements of people could not be ignored.

In her first major foreign policy move, the U.K. premier announced plans to send hundreds of British troops to Somalia and spend £100 million in Africa to help stem the flow of migrants into Europe and tackle al-Shabaab.

May told world leaders that 30 U.K. military training teams, each up to 30 strong, would be sent on rolling missions to Somalia. A new U.K. headquarters in Mogadishu would also be established to help train the country’s armed forces in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

She said the move was part of wider U.K. efforts to tackle at source the cause of mass migration, including a 10 percent increase in international aid money to £660 million in 2016-2017 to be spent on humanitarian assistance.

Throughout May’s flying visit to the U.S., Downing Street aides were clear that one of the main targets of the trip was to reject the growing sense outside the U.K. that Britain has turned in on itself by opting to leave the European Union, giving in to Trump-style populism.

Earlier Tuesday, President Barack Obama used his final address to the U.N. while in office to attack the “crude populism … which seeks to restore what they believe was a better, simpler age free of outside contamination.”

May addressed the allegation directly in the opening of her speech Tuesday.

“My pledge to this United Nations is simple,” she said. “The U.K. will be a confident, strong and dependable partner internationally — true to the universal values that we share together.”

She added: “The United Kingdom has always been an outward-facing, global partner at the heart of international efforts to secure peace and prosperity for all our people.

“And that is how we will remain. For when the British people voted to leave the EU, they did not vote to turn inwards or walk away from any of our partners in the world.

“Faced with challenges like migration, a desire for greater control of their country, and a mounting sense that globalization is leaving working people behind, they demanded a politics that is more in touch with their concerns; and bold action to address them.”

May said the action required to tackle migration needed to be “more global, not less” and pledged not to “turn away from our United Nations” but “turn towards it.” Britain, she insisted, would help the U.N. “forge a bold new multilateralism.”

The prime minister said the U.N. was key to tackling mass migration and terror, but needed to act far earlier. In an implicit attack on the inaction of world leaders up until now, May said tackling migration at the source was the only way to defeat the growing “isolationism and xenophobia” surfacing in Europe and the U.S.

A No. 10 official said the speech was the first concrete exposition of May’s foreign policy.

“I think what you are seeing is the prime minister setting out the importance of delivering those root causes, reflecting that actually the country’s foreign policy should be about how best do you serve British interests, how do you best serve people at home, whether that’s security or prosperity.”

The source summed up May’s new foreign policy approach: “The more we do earlier on overseas the better we can protect people at home.”

Speaking to U.S. National Public Radio for the station’s “Morning Edition” on Wednesday, May defended the Brexit vote and voters’ right to demand controls on free movement.

She said: “I think what people were voting for was a feeling of more control in a number of areas over their own lives, more control, for example by the British government over who could come into the United Kingdom.

“You have those controls here in America, an ability to decide who can come over and work in America, for example, so I think people wanted to see more control for the British government, and that was one of the issues.”

The PM said leaving the EU provided opportunities for the U.K. to become “a global leader in free trade.” She added that there was a “real interest” in the U.S. and elsewhere in establishing new trade deals but suggested these could not be agreed before the U.K. had formally left.

May was also forced to defend Boris Johnson. She said: “I think Boris is making an excellent job as foreign secretary.

“He is with me here in the United Nations meeting a number of his opposite numbers and participating in some important talks such as talks about how we are going to deal with [the Islamic State] in Syria, a terrorist threat that, of course, we and the United States are working together as part of the Coalition in Syria and Iraq against.


“And Boris is forging his role as foreign secretary and taking the message that I’m taking across the world, which is that we want to work across the world here in the United Nations and bilaterally both to forge new trade relationships but also crucially to work together with other countries to deal with the key challenges we all face such as terrorism and migration.”

No comments:

Post a Comment