Britain doesn't need to punch above its weight

There is a European view of the world, which we can share and have some hope of influence over

If Britain is finding itself at odds with the United States over the Middle East, in disgrace with the Europeans over its attitudes to asylum-seekers at the Seville conference and now apparently marginalised in the G8 meeting on Africa in Calgary, it really only has Tony Blair to blame.

Not that the Prime Minister doesn't work hard at international diplomacy. Indeed, in the manner of virtually every Prime Minister of the post-war era, he spends too much time on it. Nor is he short of ideas and initiatives. Every time there is an incident, or even a scandal such as the Mittal affair, it is astonishing just how much he does in direct communication with fellow leaders around the globe.

But that is half the trouble. Mr Blair, on foreign as much as domestic affairs, likes the chief executive style: shirtsleeves rolled up, a pile of papers by his side and a problem to sort out. Like a businessman, he prefers issues reduced to questions and action.

Asylum-seekers? Get together with Jose Maria Aznar, Prime Minister of Spain, to present a forceful plan and push it at the Seville EU summit. Defence? Promote bilateral action with France's President, Jacques Chirac, in which the two countries can act as the strike force of European intervention. Structural economic reform? Join with Silvio Berlusconi in Italy to preach the virtues of labour flexibility.

This ad hoc bilateralism would be fine if Tony Blair were John Browne, the chief executive of BP, or even George Bush, the President of the US, who can achieve their interests by instructing their divisional directors or their client states. But Britain does not have this power. It has to work not just with individual allies, but with whole groupings.

The Middle East fiasco is a classic example. The UK has developed an individual policy based on its belief that it has a special locus in the area through its relations with Jordan, various Gulf States and Iran. Over the last months, Mr Blair has pursued a particular approach based on bringing Yasser Arafat to the table, with the support of Jordan and Syria. Our close relationship with America was supposed to bring us special access to the President via a State Department in league with our ambitions.

But an American president has quite different interests to the State Department. That President Bush decided to demonise Arafat – one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the last half-century – is not because he thought it was a better route to Middle East peace. It was because it was a better route to domestic votes. British views were the last things on his mind.

If the British Prime Minister has quite wrongly put his faith in bilateralism with the US (what, after all, has he gained on steel tariffs, agricultural subsidies, the Kyoto agreement or Nato's future?), this is even more true of his relations with Europe.

Of course there is a general problem with asylum-seekers in Europe. But to go into a plan with Spain was to invite trouble from politicians elsewhere, who were desperately anxious not to seem as if they were being driven by the right. Blair may have thought France would welcome such an initiative to outflank the far right, but a newly elected President Chirac was more likely to show his strength by rejecting such a course – which he did.

The Prime Minister is about to make exactly the same mistake over structural reform. Should Edmund Stoiber regain the German chancellorship for the conservatives in the September elections there, the last thing he will want to do is to seem intent on total victory over the unions and the last ally he will want is Britain. A reassertion of the Franco-German alliance, which has been in abeyance lately, is far more likely than a new Anglo-German alliance for reform. There is a real danger that Britain will be marginalised in the next six months, for all Blair's talk of engagement. And it will not be helped by us appearing the "special friend" of Berlusconi or retreating from the decision on a euro referendum.

The lesson of the Seville summit, as with the public division with Washington over the Middle East, is that Britain will increasingly have to define its interests over the future by what it can achieve as part of a group, not as a world player in its own right.

If Britain divides from Washington on the Palestinian question, it is because it is part of a continent that has more than 100 million Arabs on its border. America has none at all. Relatively speaking, the proportion of Muslim voters in Britain is at least twice that of Jewish voters in America. There is a European view, which we can share and which might have some hope of influence. The British view, as such, has little influence outside graduates of Sandhurst.

Unfortunately Mr Blair's tendency to egocentric bilateralism is enthusiastically backed by his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who sees his job as acting as presidential cheerleader to a weakening Prime Minister. It is also promoted by a foreign affairs adviser in Number 10 who comes from the Foreign Office and share its vision that Britain should "punch above its weight".

But Britain shouldn't be seeking self-magnification for its own sake, let alone seeing its foreign interests in pugilistic terms. It has interests that it should seek to promote. Those interests are increasingly best effected through internationalism, not bilateralism.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk