Alan Watkins: The world policeman's lot

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Joan Smith: A little more politics and less religion, please

Harold Evans: America loves a good guy

In January 1961 I heard J F Kennedy, in his inaugural address, promising that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend to assure the survival and success of liberty". I thought this amounted to a declaration of war on the rest of the world or, at least, a good part of it. So it turned out, in the Bay of Pigs, in Laos and in Vietnam. Most observers, however, thought Kennedy was marvellous. Even the New Statesman published a laudatory leading article on the speech, though it had opposed the various bits of US interventionism that had occurred before its delivery. But then, the paper was using Kennedy as a youthful contrast to the elderly Harold Macmillan, irrespective of what he said or believed about anything.

There have been abundant examples of the same political phenomenon – of choosing new friends because they help defeat political enemies – in the past weeks. Thus Saudi Arabia, the smaller Gulf states, Iran, Pakistan and Russia under its friendly secret policeman, Mr Vladimir Putin, are hardly beacons of human freedom. They are all police states, of greater or lesser degrees of inefficiency. Their support is deemed to be necessary for the US and UK invasion of Afghanistan and the consequential death or capture of Mr Osama bin Laden. This is the first paradox.

Mr bin Laden may or may not be guilty as charged, to use Mr Iain Duncan Smith's somewhat populist phrase. My own view is that the Government has not yet produced enough evidence even to put him on trial. No matter. The British and American administrations are now out to get him. They may succeed or not. This is far from creating a new world order, as Mr Tony Blair promised at Brighton on Tuesday.

The phrase has been around since the collapse of Communism in 1989. It was, I think, used by Mr George Bush senior at the time of the Gulf War. It was certainly used by Mr Bill Clinton later on. Stripped of the varnish which politicians such as Mr Blair like to apply to it, it means that states should be entitled to intervene in the internal affairs of other states.

For centuries, this is exactly what they have done. In this country in the 19th century there were Little Englanders and Imperialists. On the progressive side, W E Gladstone wanted to punish the Turks for persecuting their Christian subjects; before him John Bright had wanted to keep out of foreign entanglements of any kind. The Liberal Party had its expansionist wing, the Liberal Imperialists, of whom Mr Blair may be a descendant and whose members included the young H H Asquith, Sir Edward Grey and Sir Charles Dilke. He wrote a book entitled Greater Britain and his sexual adventures were divertingly chronicled by Roy Jenkins.

David Lloyd George was not among them – it would have been surprising if he had – but after the war, as Prime Minister of the Coalition government, he became a greater interventionist than anybody through his support for the Greeks against the Turks. He thought the Greeks were the same as the Welsh. This was the occasion for Andrew Bonar Law's letter to the press in October 1922:

"We cannot alone act as the policemen of the world. The financial and social condition of this country makes that impossible."

Lloyd George's adventurism was the principal cause of the Conservative withdrawal from the Coalition and his ousting as Prime Minister, never to hold office again. But if we alone could not be the policemen, others could join the force with us. This was the theory of the League of Nations, "collective security". It did not work because the nations were frightened of Germany and because the left wanted to "fight Nazism" without resorting to war.

But the League still saw international relations as a static system. The reason for invoking collective security was to defeat aggression by one state against another, in contravention of the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928. The persecution of the Jews, in as much as it was acknowledged at all, was seen more as a sign of the disagreeable nature of the Hitler regime than as a reason for bringing it to an end.

The United Nations was based on the same principle of resistance to aggression. Sometimes it worked, as in Korea; sometimes not; more often, it was not put into practice at all, owing to the exigencies of the Cold War. The UN Charter nevertheless had something to say of human rights, too. Yet to believe in human rights and, at the same time, in the entitlement of a state to regulate its own internal affairs is to believe two contradictory things.

The Government recently tried to square the circle by incorporating the European Convention into UK law, though ministers are now regretting their action, as I predicted they would. In reality they overstate the effects of the Act. Parliament can even pass another statute explicitly stating that it breaches the Human Rights Act and the new measure takes precedence.

The second paradox is that Mr Blair is advocating a world of universal human rights, from China to Peru, while busily taking ours away from us as fast as he can. In this he has the active support of Mr David Blunkett. Why has Mr Blunkett chosen this time to extend the already ridiculous blasphemy laws to include the heathen, too – a course once foolishly recommended by Lord Scarman? It is, presumably, to get the Mohammedans onside.

I will give his measure, as yet unpublished, a try-out. If it leads to a knock on the door at six in the morning by one of Mr Blunkett's policemen, I shall have to bear the imposition with such fortitude and equanimity as I can summon. Human rights are the creation of the Enlightenment and the separation of Church and State. It is impossible for a Mohammedan state to recognise them at all. Turkey is an exception – unless you have the misfortune to be Kurdish – because it remains the secular state founded by Kemal Ataturk, even though the majority of its population are Mohammedan.

No doubt the Taliban regime in Afghanistan runs a particularly foul Mohammedan state, in so far as it is a state at all. Mr Blair admitted – indeed emphasised – as much on Tuesday. But he said also that if it handed over Mr bin Laden it would be safe, irrespective of its record on human rights. Mr Jack Straw was more emphatic about this. The "war aim" was to secure a suspect rather than topple a regime, as the object in the Gulf had been to repel an invasion, not dislodge a dictator. "Blair Warns God" is a fine slogan. But he should first clear his mind about when and in what circumstances he is prepared to intervene in the affairs of other countries.