As Cameron travels to the US and Hague to Kabul, early forays suggest the Tories are trying to weave liberal elements into an essentially Conservative foreign policy, but Commonwealth remains above climate change in priorities  

The Federal Parliamentary Labor Party yesterday morning elected an unopposed Julia Gillard to replace Kevin Rudd as Labor Leader and Australia's 27th Prime Minister. Significantly, Gillard becomes Australia's first woman Leader. Former PM, Kevin Rudd, decided at the last minute to not contest the leadership spill and instead resigned his Commission as PM, thus avoiding a bloody party room ballot.

Celebrating success is not always something that comes easy to the left in politics, not least when the word Iraq is mentioned.

Michael Cockerell's documentary series on the great offices of state examined the history of the Foreign Office in its second programme shown last week. In it, the veteran journalist wistfully considered the faded glory of King Charles Street, the failures expressed in the grandeur of rooms like the Locarno suite which celebrate collapsed treaties and concluded it seemed to symbolise more a 'palace of dreams' than a powerhouse of the modern era.

In the world of media management, Baroness Kinnock's timing couldn't have been less fortunate. To admit, just two hours after Gordon Brown had made a series of policy announcements on tackling the terrorist threat, that counter-terror funding in Pakistan and counter-narcotics work in Afghanistan was being cut was a gift to the opposition. While the scale and significance in the impact of the exchange rates shouldn't be overblown, it raises an interesting question about how we can most effectively deliver a counter-terrorism strategy at a time when resources are stretched.

It might seem a little premature to judge President Obama as an international statesman just 9 months after his inauguration, but given the huge weight of expectation across the world, he had a lot to live up to even before he was awarded that Nobel peace prize.

I write this having just listened to the prime minister talk about Britain’s strategy for Afghanistan. There wasn’t a huge amount to disagree with in the content of the speech – he was right to talk about the need for increasing support for the Afghan National Army and police, and for other NATO members to play a full role in the mission there.

Christopher Hitchens at a speech in the Commonwealth Club in California recently observed that the underlining principle of the Islamic Republic – the concept of ‘velayat-e-faqih’ (or rule of the jurist) - is based on the idea that the people of Iran are the children of the regime. The original concept of the velayat was for orphans, children, the mentally ill or lost in society were to be looked after as wards of the state. “Khomeini decided that this velayat should be extended to everybody. Everyone in Iran is now considered to be a child with the paternal authority vested in the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader…[it is] the father who will never go away.”

The French post-structuralist philosopher, Michel Foucault, had a fascination with Iran. When a million people descended onto the streets in 1979 to oust the venal and corrupt Shah, he declared it to be the ultimate proof of his theory of revolutions – one of the very few historical examples of a popular overthrow that was not simply an elite coup d’etat.

So the pundits and the pollsters got it wrong.

They predicted the tightest result in the general election for years, with less than a hair’s breadth between the two main parties, the Congress and the BJP. That would have given the so-called ‘Third Front’ – a mixture of leftist and regional parties – a decisive role in forming a ruling coalition.

There has been much cynical comment written in the international media in the run up to the general election in South Africa this week, and the anticipated victory of the ANC leader, Jacob Zuma. Some of it is fair, but we should still celebrate the great achievement that South Africa has made in the last two decades.

China’s political leaders are not prone to smiling in public, but President Hu may have allowed himself a private moment of glee in the run up to this week’s G20 summit as commentators dubbed his first private tête-à-tête with President Obama the ‘G2 summit’.

When you talk to Iranian diplomats about why their country feels they might need nuclear weapons, they often mention a sense of strategic encirclement. You would think they were referring to the presence of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the governments in Israel or Saudi Arabia. But ask Iranians what they fear most, and the answer is somewhat surprising - a nuclear armed Pakistan which could self-implode. It’s just one example of why Pakistan’s future is of such geo-strategic importance.

We’re all too familiar with the economic and social effects of the credit crunch – rising unemployment, house price collapses, bankers portrayed as devils incarnate, but in an interdependent world, how far is the credit crunch affecting our foreign policy?

Everyone expected fireworks would mark the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution and yesterday we saw the biggest rocket yet as Iran launched its first satellite into space.

In the summer of 2006, I took some time out of a quiet Sunday to do an interview with Sky News on the conflict in Lebanon. Calling for an immediate ceasefire was the easy part of the argument, the Israelis having just killed 28 civilians, including several children in an air strike in Qana. But the interview then descended into a messy argument with the anchor, Tim Marshall, as to whether you could make a moral equivalent between the lower number of civilians killed deliberately by Hezbollah, and the higher number killed accidentally by Israel.

We are delighted to welcome Alex Bigham to Progress Online as the new Progressive Internationalism columnist. We would like to thank Alan Johnson for all his hard work and excellent contributions to the website. Read Alex's first column here.

In Progress magazine (‘Foreign Affairs,’ September 2008) Ken Gude, the Associate Director of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, trashed the idea of a league or ‘concert’ of democracies as nothing but ‘a neoconservative dream,’ which would ‘undermine the UN’ and ‘re-ignite great power conflict’. The idea, he wrote, was part of John McCain’s ‘dangerous quest’ for ‘new conflicts’ and ‘wars in the Middle East’.

The genius of the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi was, as Norman Geras observed , to use ‘common experience to illuminate the experience of the Nazi universe of death, and vice versa'.

Finlandisation is back. During the cold war the term described those states which had a formal independence but existed in barely disguised servitude to Moscow. Finland, noted Jean-Francois Revel in his 1983 book How Democracies Perish, ‘preserved the inviolability of its territory, what was left of it, and the right to live privately in a non-totalitarian society’ but was forbidden to accept Marshall Plan aid, join the EEC or sign trade agreements with Europe. It took its orders from Moscow in foreign policy.

On an almost daily basis, we hear that Britain faces an impending fuel crisis. Energy bills could rise by more than 60 per cent in the next few years; the cost of petrol and gas continues to soar.

But what do we really understand about our use of energy - and who is offering the vision to do something about it?

Barack Obama has made much of his hopes for a renewed approach to common challenges, should he succeed in his bid for the US presidency. He advocates a new ‘Marshall Plan', which would see the US and Europe united with other key players around the world to confront the common threats that now affect us all. And in the race for the presidency, it is likely that Obama and McCain will go head to head in setting new targets for foreign policy, whether for climate change, troops in Iraq, ending US oil dependency or overseas development spending.

We face an assault on the idea of democracy. Take Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister: ‘For the first time in many years a real competitive environment has emerged in the market of ideas between value systems and development models'. As some authoritarian states have done well economically they have sought - tentatively at first, then with more confidence - to ‘giv[e] new life to the old idea that dictatorship is better than democracy at producing socio-economic development' says democracy-promotion expert Thomas Carothers. And, of course, radical Islamism rejects democracy tout court as sacrilegious.

‘Last November, 10-year-old Alaina Podmorow got together with 18 of her fellow grade 5 pupils in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, and they raised enough money to pay the salaries of five Afghan schoolteachers for a whole year. How is it that in doing this simple thing, Alaina and her young comrades, in the space of a few weeks, made a greater contribution to the liberation of the Afghan people than the combined efforts of the NDP, the Canadian Labour Congress and the Canadian Federation of Students, over the past seven years?'

‘"Yes, Castel," he replied. "It's hardly credible. But everything points to its being plague."

Castel got up and began walking towards the door.

"You know," the old doctor said, "what they're going to tell us? That it vanished from temperate countries long ago."'

Russia has received a lot of attention in the past month. This was mainly due to two events: Dmitry Medvedev succeeding Vladimir Putin as President, and Moscow hosting the Champions League final between two English clubs, Manchester United and Chelsea.

Ok, it would be churlish not to mention a third event: the triumph of Russia's Dima Bilan in the Eurovision song contest. The ‘Karachay-born heart-throb' wiped the floor with Britain's Andy Abraham - who came joint last - amid widespread complaints of politically motivated back-scratching among the former Soviet bloc. Our beloved Terry Wogan has gained something like infamy in Russia for threatening to give up commentating on Eurovision.

Is a pious attitude to the UN now an obstacle to progressive internationalism and a dangerous gift to the emerging league of autocracies?

The UN's signature failures are well known and range from the comedic, such as Zimbabwe chairing the Human Rights Council, to the tragic. In Rwanda the UN's response to the genocide was to pull out the troops. In Bosnia in 1995 UN peacekeepers handed over 7,000 men and boys to Serb fascists, its 'safe areas' revealed as a mere paper commitment unsupported by force. In East Timor in 1999, UN staff, 'abandoned civilians to murdering pro-Indonesian militias' in the words of the left-wing sociologist of war Martin Shaw.

Stepping back from the day-to-day headlines, there are six signposts to a progressive internationalism that emerged from the conversations reproduced in my recent book for the Foreign Policy Centre, Global Politics After 9/11. Each is a response to a new terrain of foreign policy. That terrain was mapped in the book by Anne-Marie Slaughter, of Princeton and co-convenor of The Princeton Project - a three-year effort to develop a bipartisan security strategy for the USA.

Anne-Marie told me that when the Princeton Project began they hoped to write a new ‘X' article. This was the ‘long telegram', titled ‘X', sent by George Kennan, then acting head of the US embassy in Moscow, in 1946, back to his bosses in Washington. In it, Kennan made the case for the strategy of containment to be the cornerstone of the west's response to communist totalitarianism. It was probably the single most important State Department cable ever written.

Two years ago a 3000-word political statement, the Euston Manifesto , argued that much of the left had suffered a theoretical collapse and a collapse of sensibility. In the words of Nick Cohen's best-seller, the left had ‘lost its way'. We called for a realignment of progressive politics.

By reducing the complexity of the post-cold war world to a single great contest in which ‘imperialism' or ‘empire' faced ‘anti-imperialism' or ‘the resistance', parts of the left had transformed themselves into a reactionary post-left that took its enemy's enemy for its friend. We were ‘all Hezbollah now' as the placards had it. Listen to John Rees, a leader of the Stop the War Movement and Respect:

That's the question posed by the Court of Appeal's decision that al-Qaeda's ‘ambassador in Europe', Abu Qatada, and two Libyan terror suspects cannot be deported from the UK.

‘DD' was described by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) as a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. He was found with a map marked with the flight path of Birmingham Airport. ‘AS' was involved with a serous terrorist group in Milan judged to be close to the operational stage of a terrorist attack in Europe.

‘In the present state of the world it is difficult not to write lampoons', remarked the Roman poet Juvenal. The author of The Satires came to mind last week when I heard of the decision of the UN Human Rights Council to elect Jean Ziegler to their advisory committee by 40 votes to 7.

All advisors to the Council are supposed to possess ‘expertise in human rights', ‘high moral standing', and ‘independence and impartiality'. So how does Ziegler measure up?

The hate-filled opinions of Pastor Wright are an expression of a new political ideology that is gaining influence in the academy, media and politics: ‘post-leftism' (a term coined by Andy Markovits and Gabe Brahm writing in Democratiya). The post-leftist Noam Chomsky says ‘America is the greatest terrorist state'. Pastor Wright preaches that ‘America is the number one killer in the world.'

Post-leftist Joe Faegin, a former president of the American Sociological Association, calls America ‘a total racist society' and believes ‘the white-racist mind is the basic problem on campus and in society'. Pastor Wright preaches against the ‘US of KKKA' and claims that America ‘believes in white supremacy and black inferiority ... more than we believe in God.'

The young Primo Levi was tormented at the thought of picking up a gun and killing another human being. His biographer Carole Angier writes of his ‘deep horror of violence'. But in 1943, he would ‘resist his instincts and make a moral choice to accept the necessity of killing' by joining the anti-Nazi resistance.

After weeks of agonising Levi came to the painful conclusion that his personal ethic of non-violence was inadequate to his times. By joining the Justice and Liberty partisans he resolved a tension between what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously called ‘moral man' and ‘immoral society'.

'When your top foreign policy adviser tells an overseas interviewer that you do not really mean something you have put at the center of your campaign, well, Chicago, you have a problem', wrote Mark Halperin in Time last week. You may think the 'problem' is that Barack Obama does 'not really mean' his Iraq policy. You would be wrong. The real problem, according to Halperin, is that a political 'neophyte', Samantha Power, admitted this in public. The cynicism is breathtaking, the politics are unprincipled, and both tell us why the Democrats might yet lose in November: the lingering doubt that they can be trusted on national security.

Here is the exchange between the BBC's Stephen Sackur and Samantha Power on Hardtalk ...

‘Nato is not winning in Afghanistan', failure would be a catastrophe, and time is running out. That was the message of three reports published in January 2008 by the Afghan Study Group, Oxfam and the Atlantic Council.

Little wonder. ‘Winning' in Afghanistan, says Anja Havedal, a member of the aid community in Kabul, means defeating a fascistic Taliban, corrupt warlords and narco-barons in a country that ranks 174th out of 178 in the world development index and which has known war for almost thirty years. ‘Winning', then, demands we ‘rebuild houses and roads, bring twenty million people out of starvation and unemployment, establish the rule of law, revive a largely dead economy, wipe out corruption and crime, build hydropower plants and an electricity grid, educate generations of illiterates, and institute a capable and legitimate government able to mend and transcend ethnic rifts. All of this while fighting off a resurgent Taliban'.

Last week's Future of Progressive Governance conference brought together policy-makers and politicians from European social democratic parties to debate ‘a new 21st century vision of social democracy'. Listening to some contributions I was reminded of the thesis of Robert Kagan's famous book: Europe is wont to see itself as a post-historical Kantian paradise of peace, prosperity and law, while the US and its allies are left to exercise power in the Hobbesian world outside.

Now don’t get me wrong. As Albert Camus said, ‘There is no shame in preferring happiness’. Or paradise. And these social democrats were brimful with ideas about how to get there. Carlos Mulas Granados is the man in charge of drafting the election manifesto for the Spanish PSOE and he spoke thoughtfully about a new green industrial revolution, the expansion of rights for minorities, and of the responsibility to recapitalising Africa rather than draining it of scarce human capital. Our own Ed Miliband conjured a compelling vision of the next stage of public service reform. Having built the ‘first floor’ of basic security, the task was now to construct the ‘second floor’ of self-actualisation - personalised, flexible high-quality services in which users are co-participants, even co-architects.

‘The very poor are unthinkable’, said the novelist EM Forster, ‘only to be approached by the statistician or the poet’. Making the poor ‘thinkable’, says Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale, is the key to ending global poverty. And in the new edition of World Poverty and Human Rights he offers a ‘modest proposal’ to help – a global resources dividend. Think about this. 2,533 million people account for 1.67 per cent of all household consumption expenditure, while 1,004 million people account for 81 percent. While poverty kills one-third of human beings, a shift of just one-seventieth of the resources of the 1,004 million to the 2,533 million would end severe poverty.

President Obama would lay a gift at the feet of European liberal internationalists:  the opportunity to liberate the social-democratic ‘doctrine of the international community’ from its long entombment within the ‘Bush doctrine’.

Obama’s 2007 speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, subsequently written up in Foreign Affairs, reveals a hard-headed internationalist. His victory in November would transform the terms of debate about ‘progressive foreign policy’.

‘In London ... one finds Britain’s finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan.’ So wrote Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan, back in 2003.

He was onto something. The Latin-splashed prose of the Marxist Perry Anderson, ex-editor of New Left Review, is a world away from the homespun wisdom of paleoconservative Pat Buchanan. But when it comes to the idea that Israel controls US foreign policy, the ornament of European intellectual culture now chimes with the former Nixon speechwriter.

We suffer from ‘neoconitis’ and we badly need a cure. The disease was diagnosed by Roger Cohen in the New York Times. ‘Neocon’, he pointed out, ‘has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian US interventionism that brought down Slobodan Miloševic has a place.’ Neoconitis is now ‘as rampant as liberal-lampooning a few years back’. The result? The liberal hawk is now an endangered species, says Cohen