The UK Foreign Secretary Makes His First Speech

In recent years the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom has often been deprecated.

As a champion of that relationship (who got a Master’s degree in the UK and loved the time spent there), I could only grimace when reading a new and important speech—David Lammy’s Kew Lecture, his “first set speech as Foreign Secretary."

Here is how he began:

Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have dominated my time in office so far. But I was very clear in Opposition that, in this job, I would focus on the most profound and universal source of global disorder – the climate and nature emergency….nothing could be more central to the UK’s national interest than delivering global progress on arresting rising temperatures….

He continued:

The threat may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or an imperialist autocrat. But it is more fundamental. It is systemic. It’s pervasive. And accelerating towards us at pace….today, I am committing to you that while I am Foreign Secretary, action on the climate and nature crisis will be central to all that the Foreign Office does….My ambition here is clear: for the UK to lead the G7 debate on international institutional reform.

Reading these words, my initial thought was “Oh my.” The Foreign Secretary apologizes for spending so much time on Ukraine and the Middle East?

There is a major war underway in Europe due to Russian aggression.

Iran is approaching possession of a nuclear weapon and war in the Middle East may soon spread.

China, Russia, and Iran are now working together closely, as Iran’s provisions of hundreds of missiles to Russia demonstrates.

China is the pacing military and economic threat to the West.

The British Parliament was told in January that:

The UK’s ability to fight an all-out war would be marred by the armed forces’ capability, stockpile shortages and a recruitment crisis…. The Commons defence committee heard that the “hollowing out” of the armed forces since 2010 had undermined the UK’s war fighting resilience, and the army would exhaust its capabilities “after the first couple of months” in a peer-on-peer war.

IISS reported that:

[a] former senior Ministry of Defence official has said that the UK armed forces are unprepared to fight and win a conflict at any scale. Recent deployments have underscored how stretched the armed forces have become. On a recent exercise in the Baltic Sea, the UK representation was just a handful of small patrol craft, even though this has been identified as a priority area of UK interest.

Lammy is of course the foreign, not the defense, minister. But he chose to announce in his first speech that he has other priorities than Britain’s security—or Europe’s, or the West’s. I might have argued that the “most profound...source of global disorder" is nations that seek global disorder, that commit aggression, that start wars, and that seek to overturn the international order we have enjoyed since World War II. 

If he really means that “the climate and nature crisis will be central to all that the Foreign Office does,” pity those civil servants who merely want to discuss peripheral issues like war and peace.

Mr. Lammy is a very nice man who clearly ought to be Environment Secretary. He is miscast in his current role. Let us hope the Foreign Office can resist being turned into a version of Greenpeace until there is a Cabinet shuffle.