Why we’re in the state we’re in
FOREIGN POLICY IS IMPRECISION. It’s the purest form of politics — Oakeshott’s boundless and bottomless sea, with “neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat.”
By that measure, these books by a pair of Foreign Office grandees triumphantly demonstrate their authors’ art form. Woolly thinking, cloudy expression, and the possibility that great matters are at hand, but have been hidden for raisons d’état mortals can’t be expected to grasp, is the best case you can make for these Rolls Royce mandarins. Taken at face value, we have sorry proof for why we’re in the state we are.
Their CVs are spookily parodic — obscure West Country public school and Midlands Tudor grammar school, then Oxford, then the Office. Westmacott got Ankara, Paris and DC; Ricketts, by far the wilier proposition, got Paris and was also Permanent Secretary, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the first British National Security Advisor (NSA), and lead civil servant for the disastrous 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (the one that sank the carriers and
