How Britain broke the world: war, greed and blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997–2022

Abstract

It is true that some of Britain's recent mistakes have had negative global consequences. The 2013 Syria vote in Parliament certainly influenced US President Barack Obama to sit on his hands. Britain and France were jointly responsible for the mess in Libya in 2011. Bad British intelligence made it easier for Obama's predecessor George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, though there is little doubt that he would have done so anyway (p. 87). In How Britain broke the world, Arthur Snell assaults readers with a barrage of chapters about foreign policy, military and intelligence mishaps. With a wide range of case-studies, Snell starts with Kosovo and then goes on to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and India, finishing off with the United Kingdom's delusions over the ‘special relationship’ (a term which should be buried forever) with the United States. Snell lived through many of these events and witnessed them at close quarters. It is difficult to forget either the British evacuation from Basra in 2007 in the face of American and Iraqi disdain or the 2006 deal with the Taliban to allow British troops to retreat from Musa Qala in Afghanistan's Helmand Province (p. 107). But military interventions were not the only recent UK foreign policy blunders. Snell concentrates on what he sees as the error of Brexit, rather than on why the decision was so poorly implemented. Why, for example, were diplomats not able to develop a close relationship with Ireland, which stood to lose more than the UK from a bad deal? And why were they so ineffective at explaining to President Joe Biden that London had more to lose than any other country from a failure of the Good Friday Agreement (p. 324)?