Olivia O’Sullivan: Lawrence, early in your career you spent six years here at Chatham House, running the British Foreign Policy Project between 1976 and 1982. We are here today to discuss its work, some of the future big names of British foreign policy it attracted, and how some of the issues challenging the governments of the day seem to loom large five decades later. What drew you to the project, and what was the mood like then?
Lawrence Freedman: What first attracted me was it seemed a more secure job than the one I had. Second, I worked for my PhD and at the International Institute for Strategic Studies on American and nuclear issues, and I wanted to broaden a bit. Also, the deputy director of Chatham House at the time was Ian Smart, whom I knew and admired. The other member of the team was Jocelyn Statler, who handled the administrative side.
Ian already had ideas about who would form the main steering group. They were the great and the good. Permanent secretaries, captains of industry, pretty male, pretty white. But within that, some variety. We had Robin Cook, he was my idea, and John Edmonds, who was a trade unionist. On the one hand the head of Unilever, on the other, Michael Palliser. Vince Cable did a paper for us. But I knew none of these people when I arrived. I and others would produce papers which appeared as articles in International Affairs and The World Today. The more important ones, such as the one on Polaris missiles that Ian Smart wrote, we published as a special paper and as an accompanying article in International Affairs.
One thing that struck me, being quite young, was that many of these people were in their 50s, 60s and had presided over a period of British decline. They weren’t ashamed of it and expected it to continue. I found this a bit depressing. My first year was against the backdrop of financial crisis, Britain going to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout, not long after the three‑day weeks and so on. It was a pretty bleak time.
OO: You refer to that depressing atmosphere of declinism in a chapter that you’ve con-tributed to a new book on the history of Chatham House. Do you think that in the work you did at Chatham House you ever found a way out of that prevailing mood of decline?
LF: Two things happened while I was at Chatham House. One was North Sea oil. The second was the 1979 election. Margaret Thatcher was a bit of an unknown, but a lot of the cabinet were old‑fashioned One Nation Tories, and nobody was quite sure what to make of it. The first two years of the new Conservative government were very difficult. The economy worsened for ordinary people, but there was still a sense of a fresh start and that things were being tried that hadn’t been tried before. That made a slight difference to the mood. Thatcher was not a declinist, whatever else you could say about her.
OO: There’s another theme that you discuss in the chapter you wrote for the book, which is the persistence of this question about Britain needing or having a special role in the world. People are always repeating the quote of Dean Acheson, the former US secretary of state, about Britain having lost an empire and not yet found a role. Does that remain a block to thinking clearly about British foreign policy?
LF: The sense that we lost an empire and hadn’t found a role I find a more insidious idea than the ‘special relationship’. It has led to a clambering around for something that made us distinctive and important, that wasn’t there. It was actually harmful. Christopher Hill wrote a good article on the topic as part of the project.
OO: I think we still suffer from that disease. At the beginning of every British government defence review or foreign policy review, it’s a kind of prayer we recite about Britain being in NATO, in international institutions, in the UN Security Council, as a sort of reassurance about our role in the world. And it’s somewhat adjacent to the question of how we defend and define our interests.
Speaking of the ‘special relationship’, it’s easy to think we are in this time of unprecedented upset. In the UK in the World Programme, we’re looking at the ways the relationship with the United States is changing and how that will potentially re-order many of our assumptions about our defence, security and foreign policy. In the late 1970s, there were obviously difficult issues as well. But our assumption today might be that you had a reliable, more ordered relationship with the US.
LF: At one level it was all fine and hearty. But people forget the difficulties the Troubles in Northern Ireland caused for the transatlantic relationship because of the active support for the IRA in the US. A classic example was the summit Thatcher and President Jimmy Carter held in 1979 – there was agreement on provision of Trident nuclear missiles to Britain, but not on small arms to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But I don’t think I ever felt transatlantic connections were in jeopardy.
OO: The way the Trump administration operates today is chaotic, it’s impulsive. Often international relations theory assumes a lot of rationality in counterparts – states identify their rational self‑interest, they pursue it – in practice, it doesn’t always look that rational. Has that always been the case, or is today especially chaotic?
Papers from the British Foreign Policy Project, which Lawrence Freedman ran from 1976 to 1982 and included Robin Cook and Vince Cable among its members. Photo: Chris Holmes.
LF: Oh, it’s especially chaotic now. One of the advantages of studying policymaking is you see people make spectacular errors, you see the self‑interest wrapped up in national interest, they’re not new. But nothing, nothing that I’ve seen in over 50 years – and I lived through Watergate – compares with the utter chaos of this administration. Because you’ve never had a president like Trump before who is ill‑informed, delusional, impulsive, erratic. And he’s not supported by a team that can counter his worst impulses.
The US government has been hollowed out. There’s hardly anybody left in the National Security Council. State Department key offices have been gutted, and the quality of the people there is not great. It’s a real problem, as we’ve seen with Iran, which is a catastrophic series of foreign policy failures which will cost the international community dear. I remember when Ronald Reagan became president, there were fears that the US would go into some strange right‑wing places, and it did to a degree. But I went there before Reagan’s inauguration, and you could see how Congress would balance things. I remember thinking, we’ll cope.
But I was in Washington a few weeks ago, that was not my impression. It’s hard to cope with this, hard for the Americans to cope with it. I hope it’s an aberration, but it’ll have long‑lasting effects. Lots of relationships and capabilities – health, for example, and USAID – they’re lost. They can start afresh and maybe that will be positive in some ways, but it’s going to take time. We’ve got a few difficult years to navigate before we get to that point.
OO: There’s a lot of talk comparing late 1970s Britain to today. If you were running the British Foreign Policy Project now, where would you focus?
LF: Much of the diagnosis of the ‘UK disease’ of the 1970s was about the role of unions and low productivity, which is still an issue. Were there foreign policy fixes to what was essentially a series of domestic problems? Thatcher believed that she had hit on some: the European Single Market, opening up to more competition, less regulation and so on. It’s not an unfamiliar formula now, but it was then.
In the 80s it certainly made people think that things were turning around. There was more money around, people could get rich – in the 1970s, nobody felt they were going to get rich. Can a foreign policy fix a domestic malaise? In the end it comes down to whether there’s a sufficient shock that could make you competitive. That’s something that could happen very quickly, given what’s going on now, and we may be in for a really big one.
OO: In your work at Chatham House, you brought together a group of influential figures. But it was quite a closed world, quite male, although there were some very prominent women at Chatham House at the time. Do you have any reflections on how foreign policymaking has changed, are there more voices in the mix now?
LF: It was a very male, upper‑class world – public school, Oxbridge. There was a class of diplomat who you just wished would stop smiling in a self‑satisfied way and take it all much more seriously. The people who stood out were the really committed ones, such as Michael Quinlan, the former permanent under‑secretary of state for defence, who had an enormous influence, particularly on nuclear policy.
One of the things I miss is the number of real specialists you had around Whitehall, who absolutely knew their stuff; Malcolm Mackintosh, for instance, who was a sort of chief Sovietologist in the Cabinet Office. The move towards generalists has meant that sort of specialism has been lost a bit. On the other hand, it’s a far more open, flexible system now, with very different perspectives around.
But after what has been quite a turbulent period in British foreign policy and domestically, I think there’s an issue for civil servants and diplomats over independence of thought, of how they position themselves vis‑à‑vis ministers. In the past, though they might diverge, they had enough confidence to check and correct their ministers.
So, I think there has been a sort of breakdown in the relationship between the ministers and the Civil Service. A lot of things have gone wrong with policymaking at certain points. For instance, one of the critiques made during the Iraq Inquiry was that military advice wasn’t interrogated enough. You need a stronger Civil Service with confidence to challenge, which is hard if everybody is churning. And then you need politicians who are going to be in a position for some time to ask hard questions and work with the Civil Service to produce good policy – but they’re churning as well.
We just don’t get a settled policy out of all of this. By contrast, John Bew served as chief foreign policy adviser in 10 Downing Street from Boris Johnson to Keir Starmer. He provided a real sense of direction, which is why, of all the things that went wrong over the past five or six years, foreign policy wasn’t one of them.
OO: We often have policymakers telling us it’s difficult to find time to think in government, and that they would like input and challenge from external institutions such as Chatham House. Yet you seem quite sanguine about the potential impact of Chatham House and other think tanks. What do you see as the future of independent think tanks?