Can the UK Get its Global Development Groove Back?

Plus, what the hell is going on here in the USA?!

I once interviewed Dr. Larry Brilliant for the Global Dispatches podcast. He’s a legendary public health figure central to the WHO’s successful global eradication of Smallpox in the 1970s. He was also part of the 1960s U.S. counter-culture, and toured alongside the Grateful Dead and various performance artists with names like “Wavy Gravy.”

The interview was about 7 years ago and I recall discussing with him the similarities between the 1960s and the late 2010s. He made the point that the 60s were way more violent than our modern era. Political violence — high profile assassination attempts, terrorism, hijackings, etc — were fairly common back then.

Needless to say, I was thinking about that conversation this weekend as I absorbed the news of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I fear that the events of this weekend suggests a return to a period of normalized political violence here in the US — and all the disorder and chaos it produces. This will impact US foreign policy and international affairs in ways we can’t predict, but probably will not lead anywhere good. Violence tends to beget more violence and these cycles can be hard to escape.

In much, much better news the new Labour government of Keir Starmer is poised to return the United Kingdom to its rightful place as a global development leader. This is not a partisan observation. In fact, it was under the Tory government of David Cameron that the Department for International Development (DFID) cemented its reputation as a singularly impactful development agency. All the while, the UK became one of the few western countries to meet the target of contributing 0.7% of its GDP to foreign development assistance. Subsequent conservative governments, however, reversed those impactful policies—and even dissolved the much-vaunted DFID.

In today’s Global Dispatches interview, I speak with fellow podcaster Jason Pack about the foreign policy and global development implications of Labour’s huge victory. The full episode is freely available across all podcast listening platform. The full transcript is available immediately for our paying supporters.

A few quick programming notes:

• I’m off to Aspen, Colorado for the Aspen Security Forum this week. This will be my third time at the forum. I’ve always found it to be a valuable opportunity to collect interviews and foreign policy expertise that I can share with my audience. Top Biden administration officials are on the schedule, including CIA Director Bill Burns, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan. Let me know if you’ll be there, too!

• I caught up with the head of the Aspen Security Forum, Anja Manuel, to discuss a major political event in China known as the “Third Plenum” which kicks off in Beijing today. It was a great conversation about Xi’s tradeoff between securing his regime and bolstering the Chinese economy. I learned a lot. You can find it here.

• With the Republican National Convention kicking off today (and the increasing likelihood of a Trump victory) the next episode of To Save Us From Hell will examine how a new Trump administration may approach the United Nations, potentially to include removing the US from the UN all together.

Here’s an excerpt of my interview with Jason Pack about what Labour’s victory means for UK foreign and global development policy. Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg: So Jason, just to start, what should people in the foreign policy and international affairs community who congregate around Global Dispatches know about Keir Starmer

Jason Pack: Keir Starmer is a fundamentally good man. Many people have maligned him as boring. But for me, he is messianic in his nonmessianicness and charismatic in his lack of charisma. After about eight years of charlatans, charismatic reality TV prime ministers and presidents on both sides of the Atlantic, we have a solid good technocrat who worked as a lawyer for people’s human rights. He has led the Labour Party in purging its anti-Semites. And he has pulled that party from the post-Marxist socialist fringe towards the center. He’s a good man. He has some flaws, but I put my faith in him.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And I mean, is there a foreign policy vision that he embraces? Is it just conventional transatlantic multilateralism? And, believe me, conventional is not a problem here! Conventional is perfectly fine! Is there anything of note on the foreign policy front that would distinguish him or that you would cite as being particularly relevant?

Jason Pack: Sure. I think it’s important to understand about Sir Keir that, as he loves to say, his father was a toolmaker, and then he got interested in the law from a human rights and justice perspective. But he’s not someone who cares about foreign policy. Barack Obama was not particularly into foreign policy, but he had at least grown up in Indonesia. This is a guy who doesn’t care about foreign policy and has had his entire professional career in England. Foreign policy is going to be set by David Lammy. Keir is not very concerned with it.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Yeah, that’s a name I’m familiar with. He was like a young rising star 20 years ago in Labour politics if I recall. Now he’s a bit older and his star has risen to the foreign minister.

Jason Pack: Exactly. He’s someone who knows Obama. He was at Harvard Law with some of the movers in the shakers in the U.S. But there really is a Lammy Doctrine. I can share with your listeners the great New Statesman bio. And this is a magazine portfolio of Lammy that you might want to put in the show notes because that really gets at what the foreign policy tenets will be.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, what is his doctrine? What is a Lammy doctrine?

Jason Pack: I think the key thing is that it’s Atlantic. It values the special relationship. It sees Britain close to its European allies. It wants to get closer to Europe. But then it sees Britain as advocating on behalf of the global south. He also is close to his Ghanaian ancestry, his Caribbean connections, and he wants Britain to leverage the diasporas that exists in London. And Ghana, Nigeria, India, Iran — these are places with very strong diasporas in London. He wants to bring them into the foreign policymaking process. He wants to do it because it will increase Britain’s soft power potential. And I think that that combination of the global south humanitarian plus Britain’s unique role in the world, that’s going to be really special.