That Saudi visit

I meant to mention the state visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Having written before about UK-Saudi relations, I did a couple of television interviews yesterday on this.

The notion that nations have interests rather than friends, and that it would be imprudent to jettison our strategic goals for abstract principles, isn't entirely misguided. While I'm a supporter of liberal-democratic interventionism and highly sympathetic to the democratic globalism of Tony Blair, I would fault Blairite principles to the extent that they lack a sense of priorities.

Consider this example. There is no worse state in the world (now Saddam Hussein is gone) than North Korea. Nonetheless, countering North Korea's nuclear adventurism and support for terrorism is less urgent than countering Iran's, despite the fact that North Korea is a totalitarian state whereas Iran is not. (Iran is an oppressive state with an extremist regime, but it also has elements of a civil society that we should try to win to our side.) It was always a weakness of President Bush's 2002 identification of an "axis of evil" that it failed to distinguish between different types of oppressive regime. I don't doubt that the states Bush named were evil, and that there was complicity among them (if only in the sense implied by a trade in North Korean weaponry). But the genuinely threatening relationship is an axis of Islamist terrorism, of which Iran and its client Syria are constituents. Dealing with that threat must be the centrepiece - not the only part, but the most pressing one - of our security policies.

The irony of our treating the Saudi royal family (and I'm painfully aware that Tony Blair made this his practice too) is that it doesn't even serve our long-term strategic interests in countering Islamist terrorism. I wrote last year, in the context of the scandal of the forced closure of the Serious Fraud Office’s inquiry into corruption in a Saudi arms deal:

Saudi Arabia is not so much a state as a fiefdom. Single-family rule is a bizarre anachronism, but this ruling family largely owns the country as well as governing it. The family has stolen vast sums from the country’s wealth. The spending habits of the House of Saud is an inevitable source of popular discontent.

The Saudis therefore clearly encourage an aggressive Islamist ideology, Wahhabism, to divert political dissent into the mosque and then outward to the world. There could scarcely be a more effective way of incubating the forces of fanaticism that threaten us, and the Saudis too. Pressing for political reform in Saudi Arabia is urgent. Mr Blair is not pursuing that course, but instead is acquiescing in corruption for reasons of state. It is an unprincipled decision, but worse, it is a stupid one.

The awful precedent that comes back to me is the state visit in 1978 - when, likewise, a Labour government was in office - of President Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, whom some people who ought to have known better imagined to be a force for reform and polycentrism in the Communist bloc. (The most shameless and stupid such character was a Labour MP called Stan Newens, who urged that Britain adopt an independent foreign policy and thereby draw closer to the model of Romania. Here, if you can credit it, is a more recent piece by Newens: a review of an "extremely important" and "erudite" book by Abdullah Ocalan, a man aptly described by Christopher Hitchens as a Kurdish Pol Pot.) When Ceausescu visited, he and his party looted most of the furnishings - pretty much anything that wasn't bolted down - where they stayed. I doubt that King Abdullah will do likewise, but in other respects his state visit is scarcely a more creditable reflection on this country and its government. Flexibility and supineness are diplomatic postures that ought to be scrupulously distinguished.