British Prime Minister Tony Blair will on Friday call for a return to a multilateral approach to global affairs built around a radically reformed United Nations led by a powerful secretary general, in a bid to salvage his legacy as a progressive leader on the world stage.
In a foreign-policy address at Georgetown University, Blair will put forward the case for ”values-based interventionism” in the name of democracy and human rights and the reinvigoration of the UN and other institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
Standing alongside United States President George Bush at a White House press conference on Thursday night, in what is bound to be one of the two leaders’ last summits, Blair portrayed UN reform as a path towards faster intervention by the international community in response to threats to global security.
He said: ”What we want to do is to make sure the UN is an effective instrument for multilateral action.”
Bush went further, declaring: ”The UN ought to be clear in its desire to liberate people from the clutches of tyranny. That’s what I think the UN should be doing.”
In Friday’s speech, Blair is expected to do more to distance himself from the US president, suggesting that in return for UN reform, world powers and the US in particular should take a more collective approach to foreign policy.
But the visit also represented a bid to recast the Iraq invasion in a more positive light than it is currently seen in Britain.
”He’s going to make the progressive case for engagement in Iraq,” a Downing Street official said. The prime minister would present the US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq, another source said, not as an aberration but as ”the natural core of a values-based interventionist foreign policy”.
Again and again, the two leaders referred to the formation of a democratically elected government and the transformation that represented. Whatever differences there may have been in the war, Blair said, the international community should now unite behind the Cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
However, the two men were obliged to repeatedly acknowledge the mistakes made along the road to Baghdad. Bush regretted his early challenge to the insurgents in July 2003: ”Bring ’em on.”
He described it as ”kind of tough talk … that sent the wrong signal to people”.
”I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know. ‘Wanted, dead or alive’ — that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted. And so I learned from that.”
The president said the US has been paying ”for a long time” for the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
For his part, Blair said that the process of de-Ba’athification had been badly handled and the insurgents had been underestimated.
British officials said Blair will use his visit to appeal for greater American involvement in the UN, in return for reforms that could make the UN more responsive to American interests.
Those reforms would include an expansion of the Security Council to 25 members and the addition of Brazil, Germany, India and Japan as permanent members. The position of secretary general would no longer be rotated to give every continent a turn (it is Asia’s turn next), but awarded instead to a high-powered international figure chosen from a global pool. He or she would have far greater powers over the budgets and staff of the UN agencies than Kofi Annan currently commands.
Blair denied on Thursday night that he was seeking to write a job description for his own post-Downing Street years. When asked about the timing of his departure, Bush jumped to the prime minister’s defence.
”Don’t count him out,” the president said. ”I want him to be here so long as I’m the president.”
Blair will also argue that the leadership of the IMF should no longer be seen as a European preserve, nor should the World Bank necessarily be led by an American, as tradition has dictated to date.
Blair’s spokesperson said on Thursday: ”It means having agencies not designed to meet the challenges of the world as it was in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but are designed to meet the challenges of today’s world … in which we shouldn’t be afraid to stand up for democratisation.”
Friday’s speech at Georgetown is an attempt to return to the high road taken in foreign policy addresses in Chicago in April 1999 and at the Labour party conference in October 2001. But as the prime minister flew into Washington on Thursday night it was unclear whether the proposals had meaningful support from his host or in the international community.
The US wants a more modest restructuring of the Security Council with one or two new permanent members at most. Meanwhile, developing countries have fiercely resisted Annan’s proposals to increase the freedom of action of the secretary general at the expense — as they see it — of the UN General Assembly. — Guardian Unlimited Â