A warning to thin-skinned souls who drift into the political arena. “It’s a bit of a brutal business, politics,” former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.
Blair was in Seattle on Wednesday to address the fourth-annual William D. Ruckelshaus Center luncheon. The center, a partnership of the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs and WSU, works as a neutral untangler of policy challenges — often disagreements freighted by politics and emotion. Currently, the Ruckelshaus Center facilitates the Joint SR 530 Landslide Commission, where balance and professionalism are crucial.
Blair spoke on the eve of the historic Scottish independence referendum, warning that the “cost of divorce will be painful indeed.” A diminished United Kingdom makes for a more dangerous world. “You are the top dog,” Blair said, alluding to the United States’ mandate to fill the global-leadership vacuum, particularly in the Middle East.
The challenge is a war-weary Western population and a finger-to-the-wind political class. At times, you have no choice. Blair, who was elected prime minister in 1997, acknowledged that foreign policy wasn’t his bailiwick. He was focused on shaping a new Labor party, maneuvering a national minimum wage and constitutional reform. He would craft a consensus-based “radical” centrism. Then came 9/11.
Blair stood squarely with the United States in battling al-Qaeda and in support of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The consummate liberal, slouching toward the sensible center, transfigured into a neoconservative. Labels can be situational.
In the political arena, “events come along that change your mandate.” Blair was a quick study on Islamist terrorism. And he bears an unkind truth, which only exacerbates war fatigue at home: This will be a long, twilight struggle. A group such as the Islamic State “will occupy several presidents,” Blair said. “We look at this like there’s going to be an ending.”
No such luck. ISIS and groups such as Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group, and al-Shabab, the Somali terrorist faction, are analogous to revolutionary communism, he said. Members of ISIS “kill without mercy and die without regret.”
Blair argues that we have no choice, that we must fight. A do-no-harm foreign policy can create harm. This is the dilemma that defines us: A war in Iraq, premised on a lie, and a Middle East riven by war and Islamist terrorism.
Global leadership requires stepping up, however much we know that war is hell. Like politics, it’s a brutal business.
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