Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary: Two Centuries of Conflict and Personalities [Hardcover]

Douglas Hurd's "Choose Your Weapons," written with the help of Edward Young, is a sweeping review of British foreign policy and its architects from the Napoleonic wars to Suez. The book is worth reading for its history and for its observations by a man eminently qualified to make them. However, it falls somewhat short against the inevitable benchmark of Roy Jenkins' "The Chancellors," published in 1998, in both the quality of its writing and its insight into human nature.

"Choose Your Weapons" begins with the duel between Castlereagh and Canning on Putney Heath in 1809. Their physical contest stands as a metaphor for the tension between the multilateralist diplomacy favored by the former and the more interventionalist, nationalistic policies advocated by the latter - a theme that has run through all of British (and for that matter, US) foreign policy ever since. It also illustrates the importance of personality in determining national direction. Hurd observes that the right path can seldom be deduced simply from objective analysis of the facts: "that intelligent people have occupied both aisles of .... the argument suggests more clearly then any essay the limits of reason in foreign policy. "

Of the eleven foreign secretaries covered by the book, Hurd - true to his own personality - reveals a preference for Castlereagh, Salisbury and Bevin and a certain disapproval of the more flamboyant Palmerston and Disraeli. He is quite forgiving of Grey, who arguably let Great Britain drift unnecessarily into the Great War, he bolsters Austen Chamberlain's reputation as an early critic of Appeasement and he shares posterity's disappointment in the superficially promising Anthony Eden. Several themes, other than the Castlereagh-Canning dichotomy, run through the history: the relationship between Prime Ministers and their Foreign Secretaries (Hurd believes that the PM should be more of a senior colleague than a boss, though many PMs did not agree), the increasing professionalism of the Foreign Office, the influence of public opinion (which even Salisbury, no natural democrat, took very much to heart), the importance of concepts of national honour and prestige even up to the present day, the inadequacy of strategies based narrowly on notions of the balance of power, and the evolution of the Atlantic relationship even as Britain's great power status waned.

While the book formally concludes in the Fifties, it makes some relatively subtle but clear comments on more recent events. Tony Blair is chastised for misusing the "doctrine of humanitarian intervention," cynically "flinging " it into the "pile of words" he used to justify the war in Iraq. Gordon Brown is compared to Eden in that his failings as Prime Minister have come in the domain over which he presided for years prior to his accession to the top spot - perhaps for the same reason "relying too exclusively on his own judgement, he ignored the warnings and expressions of dissent that were plentiful in the lower reaches of Government." President Obama's situation is compared to that of Salisbury: "none of the dangers confronting the United States can be overcome by the asset in which she is still unmatched, namely the massive use of military force."

Looking to the future, Hurd believes that a "Fourth Settlement" is needed (following those which concluded the Napoleonic and the two World Wars) in which new frameworks and institutions embracing a wider set of issues and giving due weight to China and India are created. Inevitably, only the US has the influence to initiate this future, but Britain has a role in which its "values and character" can help define an "intelligent middle way."

"Choose Your Weapons" is a worthwhile book, but it falls short of what it might have been. Its writing is choppy, alternating between formality and colloquialism and intermixing successful epigrams with clichés. Its balance between multiple biography and pure history is uneven, with personality frequently swamped by a torrent of facts. Its Hurdian insights and wisdom often seem pasted on rather than emerging naturally from the work, and it has a disappointing dearth of entertaining and penetrating anecdotes about its subjects.

This is an excellent review of British foreign affairs from the start of the 19th century to the present day. The title comes from the duel between Canning and Castlereagh in the first decade of the 19th century. The book discusses the different approach of these two foreign secretaries and how the attitudes they had has inlfuenced foreign affairs for 200 years.
The author Douglas Hurd is a former foreign secretary and has a unique insight into the pressures and opportunities of being in that position. He is ably helped by his co-author, Edward Young. Very readable and enjoyable.

"Choose Your Weapons" is a book which attempts---quite successfully---to straddle the lines between biography, political history, and policy analysis. As I'll repeat at the end, it is well-researched, engagingly written, and highly recommended for anyone who cares either about British history or anything that happens beyond their nation's borders in the modern world. Based on a series of biographies of Foreign Secretaries, the book describes the foreign policy challenges faced by Britain in the past two centuries, and the solutions attempted with varying degrees of success. The central premise is that, throughout the past two hundred years, there have been two major ways British Foreign Secretaries have attempted to operate in the world: one is through international systems, agreements, alliances, and cooperation (think the Concert of Europe). The other is through active, independent intervention (think gunboat diplomacy).

The authors, Douglas Hurd and Edward Young, begin with Canning and Castlereagh at the opening of the nineteenth century, in part (one assumes) because the post-Napoleonic world is imagined to open a new era for Europe. In many ways, the ancien regime had been broken and the pieces would have to be put together differently. The other reason to start with Canning and Castlereagh is because, in the eyes of the authors, each embodies one of the two strands of policy thought (Canning the active interventionist, Castlereagh the cooperative multilateral). This seems appropriate: both Canning and Castlereagh are referred back to by later of the book's subjects as policy models. Hurd and Young then hop, skip, and jump through Foreign Secretaries before finally ending with Eden and Bevin (in another post-cataclysmic war scenario, and another opportunity for Britain to have a hand in reshaping the political boundaries and future course of Europe). While the authors don't claim to provide a comprehensive discussion of every event of British diplomatic history, the reader doesn't feel like they are missing part of the thematic story. We may be seeing pieces, but they certainly add up to a coherent whole, at least within the world of diplomacy.

Biography as a method of examining policy has strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, it makes it quite clear that individuals matter to the course of world history. Whether Canning or Castlereagh was in power mattered very much to the path Europe would walk after Napoleon. In a system where decision-making power is held in the hands of a few or in the hands of one, this is a completely justifiable emphasis, and it is one which is borne out by the facts. Given that one of the authors is an ex-Foreign Secretary himself, it is probably not surprising that he should believe in the power of an individual to shape a national response. And again, it's not inaccurate: individuals in power do matter. But they still operate within constraints. Some of these constraints are very clear through the course of the book: Foreign Secretaries are forced to react to events outside of their control and sometimes against their will. But events are not the only constraints, and this is where biography is not at its strongest: if individuals have a huge role to play in Hurd and Young's story, interest groups (for example) do not. Cecil Rhodes pops up, but industrialists don't. Queen Victoria has a say, the landed interest doesn't. "The public" occasionally intrudes on a Foreign Secretary's game of diplomatic chess, but always as a homogenous, usually irrational, entity. There's not much recognition that part of "the public" may want one thing, and part of "the public" another, for extremely rational reasons and not because they've been sucked in by jingoistic ditties. The height of this focus on security and diplomacy issues to the exclusion of other factors comes when the authors assert that, in fact, Foreign Secretaries are not influenced by economic concerns. Given that the Foreign Secretaries they describe have just spent the past 400 pages defending empire in one way or another (an economic concern if ever there was one), including Eden's attempt on the Suez Canal and Bevin's attempt to mobilize the natural resources of Africa as a way to take a useful role in exploiting the United States' economic weaknesses, this seems surprising. One doesn't have to be a Marxist (an approach to history they explicitly disagree with) to think that economic concerns might well fall within the security concerns of government.

Where biography does work quite well---aside from illustrating contingency---is in emphasizing that the two strains of policy thought the authors highlight cannot be equated with party lines. There is nothing about independent intervention vs. cooperative negotiation that inherently denotes either Conservative or Liberal (or Labour, for that matter).

While Canning and Castlereagh make a charismatic and logical place to start, in fact the policy dilemma Hurd and Young describe, and the reactions to it, go much further back, as they at one point acknowledge. Certainly the question of an independent, blue-water, empire-based Britain vs. a more diplomatically engaged, Eurocentric one dates back at least to the 17th century, and perhaps further. This only strengthens "Choose Your Weapons"'s central argument about there being two fundamental approaches to foreign policy which British ministers have embraced in recent (and not-so-recent) years.

One question we, as readers, are left with is whether the book is prescriptive rather than simply descriptive. Between independent intervention and cooperative negotiation, is there a right approach? I'm not sure if the authors think there is or not. There seem to be right answers in right situations, but sometimes it's intervention and sometimes it's cooperation. Only history can tell---history in this case meaning both the perspective of future generations and a careful examination of the past. Between Churchill, Eden, and Bevin (the visionary, the tactician, and the strategist), Bevin is their winner, because he understood the lesson of the book, and here I quote: "that the context was changeable, but many of the questions stayed the same." Insofar as the book is prescriptive, it is this: the exact problems of the world may change, but the categories of problems don't, or, perhaps more accurately, that there is a limited repertoire of answers.

To a certain extent, this is now a moot point for British Foreign Secretaries. Previously (and still) constrained by events, Britain is now constrained by relative power. Occupying a different position in the world, Britain looks unlikely to spend the 21st century running around the globe independently intervening (intervening as a multilateral effort is a different story). But of course, the argument is not simply for Britain, but for America, and for whoever comes next.

Though the book straddles history and policy, Hurd and Young's real engagement is with policy. They argue, however, for a policy informed by history. They make an extremely compelling case. Once again, "Choose Your Weapons" is well-researched, engagingly written, and highly recommended for anyone who cares either about British history or anything that happens beyond their nation's borders in the modern world.