Geopolitics in the Age of Chaos

I spent forty-five years in the British Diplomatic Service: four decades of rich experiences and extraordinary memories. To pick out some highlights, I recall accompanying David Cameron on a pre-Christmas trip to see our troops in Afghanistan. We visited an isolated British contingent holed up in a “Forward Operating Base”; in reality a fort in the middle of the Helmand desert. As night fell, the soldiers gathered for a carol concert, and the songs which ring out across every village green and town square over the Christmas period floated up into a clear, chilly and star-studded Afghan sky.

And there were other moments, both dark and light. I headed the Balkans Department of the FCO during the break-up of Yugoslavia, and visited Sarajevo while it was under siege from the Bosnian Serbs, and by contrast, Kosovo after NATO had forced the Serbs to pull out. I went to Libya several times after the fall of Gadaffi, seeing at first hand its collapse into civil war. I went to Gaza while it was still a metropolis rather than a wasteland. I worked for two Prime Ministers, Europe Adviser to Tony Blair and National Security Adviser to David Cameron, and travelled with them so I was “in the room” for an Oval Office meeting with President Obama, a private dinner in Beijing with President Xi of China, and a lunch with Vladimir Putin in his summer residence on the shores of the Black Sea. And I attended forty-three European Councils in succession -to be honest, only a few of them memorable, and nowadays blending themselves in my mind into one long sleepless night.

Lord (kim) Darroch speaking at a JLA Speakers Breakfast event.

But across all of these years, I cannot remember ever feeling as uncertain or concerned about the state of the world as I do now. We are more than 1,000 days into a war in Europe which has left close to a million and a half killed and wounded and caused the destruction of thousands of homes and countless lives. The Middle East remains locked in a cycle of violence, with an almost totally destroyed Gaza at the epicentre, a continuing Israeli military operation, intermittent and inadequate food and medical supplies to a beleaguered Palestinian population, and no lasting solution in sight. The United States has joined Israel in bombing Iran; time will tell whether their joint claims of the comprehensive and complete obliteration of the Iranian nuclear programme are accurate.

Meanwhile, the great International institutions of the post-war era, led by the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation, have never been weaker or more ineffective. The days of the great global trade liberalisation agreements are long gone, with protectionism now on the rise. And we are seeing an increasingly assertive China building links with the developing world and constructing alternative international structures: the Chinese leadership believe this century belongs to them.