Robin Simcox: David Cameron’s Bad History
[Robin Simcox is a research fellow at the Centre for Social Cohesion in London.]
"I am not a naïve neoconservative who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet,” said British prime minister David Cameron last month. Like most of Europe’s political class, Cameron has a long track record of criticizing neoconservatism. What makes Cameron’s latest criticism noteworthy, however, is that it came at the culmination of the most neoconservative month of his life.
He got the ball rolling in a speech in Munich, where he said state multiculturalism in the U.K. had “failed.” Segregating different ethnic minority communities away from the mainstream and allowing them essentially to live according to their own values had led to social breakdown. What was needed, Cameron said, was a more assertive “muscular liberalism.” He then became the first world leader to visit Egypt since Mubarak’s overthrow, speaking about the need for immediate democratic reform. From there he went to Kuwait, where he extolled the virtues of democracy promotion. Cameron then became the first leader to threaten the use of military intervention against Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi. He concluded with a speech to the Community Security Trust in the U.K., in which he discussed the threat of Islamist extremism. Its “ultimate goal,” he said, was “an entire Islamist realm, governed by an interpretation of sharia.” This is strong stuff.
Acknowledging the existence of an existential threat; the need to assert your own values and lead by confident example; the promotion of democracy as a foreign policy goal in and of itself; and the awareness that military strength can further these goals when all other avenues have failed. That’s a neoconservative clean sweep....
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"I am not a naïve neoconservative who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet,” said British prime minister David Cameron last month. Like most of Europe’s political class, Cameron has a long track record of criticizing neoconservatism. What makes Cameron’s latest criticism noteworthy, however, is that it came at the culmination of the most neoconservative month of his life.
He got the ball rolling in a speech in Munich, where he said state multiculturalism in the U.K. had “failed.” Segregating different ethnic minority communities away from the mainstream and allowing them essentially to live according to their own values had led to social breakdown. What was needed, Cameron said, was a more assertive “muscular liberalism.” He then became the first world leader to visit Egypt since Mubarak’s overthrow, speaking about the need for immediate democratic reform. From there he went to Kuwait, where he extolled the virtues of democracy promotion. Cameron then became the first leader to threaten the use of military intervention against Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi. He concluded with a speech to the Community Security Trust in the U.K., in which he discussed the threat of Islamist extremism. Its “ultimate goal,” he said, was “an entire Islamist realm, governed by an interpretation of sharia.” This is strong stuff.
Acknowledging the existence of an existential threat; the need to assert your own values and lead by confident example; the promotion of democracy as a foreign policy goal in and of itself; and the awareness that military strength can further these goals when all other avenues have failed. That’s a neoconservative clean sweep....