LONDON — Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss will take a not-so-subtle swipe at Emmanuel Macron over his attempt to build bridges with Beijing.
In a Wednesday morning speech to the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C. Truss will argue that too many in the West have “appeased and accommodated” authoritarian regimes in China and Russia.
And she will say it is a “sign of weakness” for Western leaders to visit China and ask premier Xi Jinping for his support in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — just days after Macron’s own high-profile trip there.
While Truss — who left office after just six weeks as crisis-hit U.K. prime minister — will not mention Macron by name, her comments follow an interview with POLITICO in which the French president said Europe should resist pressure to become “America’s followers.”
Macron said: “The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction.”
Macron has already been criticized for those comments by the IPAC group of China-skeptic lawmakers, which said Monday his remarks were “ill-judged.”
And Truss — who had a frosty relationship with Macron during her brief stint in office last year — will use her speech to urge a more aggressive stance toward both China and Russia.
“We’ve seen Vladimir Putin launching an unprovoked attack on a free and democratic neighbor, we see the Chinese building up their armaments and their arsenal and menacing the free and democratic Taiwan,” Truss will say according to pre-released remarks. “Too many in the West have appeased and accommodated these regimes.”
She will add: “Western leaders visiting President Xi to ask for his support in ending the war is a mistake — and it is a sign of weakness. Instead our energies should go into taking more measures to support Taiwan. We need to make sure Taiwan is able to defend itself.”
Relations between Macron and Truss’ successor Rishi Sunak have been notably warmer. The pair hailed a “new chapter” in U.K.-France ties in March, after concluding a deal on cross-Channel migration.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss argued the U.K. should have “done more earlier” to counter Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric before he invaded Ukraine, and said the West depended on Russian oil for too long.
Truss — the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister who resigned amid market turmoil last year — was speaking in a House of Commons debate about Ukraine, her first contribution in the chamber as a backbencher since 2012. She has been increasingly vocal on foreign policy since leaving office.
The former prime minister, who as served foreign secretary for Boris Johnson before succeeding him in the top job, recalled receiving a phone call at 3.30 a.m. on the morning of the invasion, and told MPs: “This was devastating news. But as well as being devastating, it was not unexpected.”
Truss praised the “sheer bravery” of Ukrainians defending their country, as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Cabinet for not fleeing the country in the aftermath. “I remember being on a video conference that evening with the defense secretary and our counterparts, who weren’t in Poland, who weren’t in the United States,” she said of Ukraine’s top team. “They were in Kyiv and they were defending their country,” she added.
But while Truss argued Western sanctions had imposed an economic toll on Putin’s Russia, said urged reflection. “The reason that Putin took the action he took is because he didn’t believe we would follow through,” she argued, and said the West should “hold ourselves to high standards.”
Ukraine, she said, should have been allowed to join NATO.
“We were complacent about freedom and democracy after the Cold War,” she said. “We were told it was the end of history and that freedom and democracy were guaranteed and that we could carry on living our lives not worrying about what else could happen.”
Truss urged the U.K. to do all it could to help Ukraine win the war as soon as possible, including sending fighter jets, an ongoing matter of debate in Western capitals despite Ukrainian pleas.
And the former U.K. prime minister said the West should “never again” be “complacent in the face of Russian money, Russian oil and gas,” tying any future lifting of sanctions “to reform in Russia.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Britain and the rest of the G7 should urgently agree a tough package of sanctions to impose on China if it escalates military tensions with Taiwan, Liz Truss will argue, as she uses her first public overseas speech to pile pressure on Rishi Sunak.
Speaking in Tokyo on Friday, the former prime minister will urge her successor to be more hawkish in standing up to Beijing, warning coordinated action is needed to block “the rise of a totalitarian China” given “the free world is in danger”.
Truss is expected to raise concerns about the threat to Taiwan’s independence, saying the self-governed island should have its diplomatic status upgraded by being accepted into international organisations.
Other calls to action Truss will make as part of a six-point plan being presented to a conference in Tokyo include the creation of “an economic Nato” and regular audits by democratic countries to reduce dependence on China across critical industries.
Her speech is a further attempt to rebuild her political reputation, after resigning in October and becoming the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister.
However, it will also be viewed as an attempt to put pressure on Sunak to ensure a promised update to the government’s defence and security plan, known as the integrated review, and a stronger stance on China.
Truss herself ordered the review be updated only 18 months after the strategy – meant to look ahead to the next decade – was published, with suggestions China would be reclassified as a “threat” instead of a “systemic challenge”.
During the summer Conservative leadership contest, the then foreign secretary and her allies sought to present her as more hawkish in standing up to Beijing and less enticed by closer economic ties, given concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the erosion of democracy in Hong Kong and military tensions with Taiwan.
Sunak has backed away from escalating a diplomatic row with China, but stressed in November that the so-called “golden era” of relations was over.
Defence and foreign affairs officials in Whitehall believe that China is closely watching the west’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and acknowledge that deep economic sanctions were in part designed to deter other potential aggressors.
But Russia’s economy is substantially smaller, and any sanctions against China would carry potentially much greater consequences for the global economy.
The Guardian revealed earlier this week that government officials were strategising a series of scenarios about the economic fallout if China invaded Taiwan – both due to the disruption to supply chains of items like microchips and the impact of sanctions.
China’s government claims Taiwan as a province, and its authoritarian premier, Xi Jinping, is set on what he terms “reunification”.
Truss herself will admit that having “rolled out the red carpet” for Xi on his state visit in 2015, when she was a cabinet minister, was a mistake. In her speech to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China symposium, she is will say: “I should know – I attended a banquet in his honour. Looking back, I think this sent the wrong message.”
Taiwan is a “beacon of freedom” and “flourishing democracy, with a thriving free press and an independent judiciary”, Truss will stress, adding that the UK should “learn from the past” and “ensure that Taiwan is able to defend itself”.
Some Conservatives still want Sunak to take a more lenient approach to China. Philip Hammond, a Tory peer and former chancellor under Theresa May, wrote an article for China Daily suggesting the UK and China should “return to business as usual”.
He acknowledged “the background noise to that relationship over the last three years has been challenging”, but said political differences should “not become an impediment” to boosting trade ties.
“Quite honestly, if we only trade with people with whom we have no political differences, we can close half our ports tomorrow,” Hammond added.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
If Truss had reconsidered the soundness of a program that sent the pound plunging, triggered emergency actions by the Bank of England and drew open scorn from the Biden administration, she did not say so. To the contrary, she seemed to believe her defective strategy of borrowing Republican ideas could be improved by borrowing more Republican ideas.
And in Washington, Truss found a new one she admired: the Republican Study Committee, an influential body within the House of Representatives that serves as an ideological anchor for the GOP and a clearinghouse for government-shrinking policies. In a meeting with Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, the group’s chair, Truss said she wanted to create a similar caucus in Westminster to “house all of their ideas into a collective group, in order to hold the current prime minister accountable,” according to Hern.
Truss floated a few names for that entity. One, Hern told me, was the “Conservative Growth Group.”
Weeks later, my colleague Eleni Courea reported that a handful of MPs, including Truss and several former ministers, had gathered to toast the creation of a group with precisely that name.
Truss’ Washington tour came at a moment of trial for conservative movements on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain and the United States, small-government ideology is facing a renewed test of relevance in an age of populism and interventionist economic policy. The austerity-minded conservatism of the Great Recession gave way years ago in both countries to the spirit of culture war and nostalgic nationalism, leaving lawmakers who truly want to roll back government marginalized even within right-leaning parties.
If Truss has lately taken inspiration from the Republican Party in a narrow, tactical way, American conservatives might draw some bigger lessons from her tribulations.
Here, Republicans are contemplating their own adventure in economic reengineering. Having abandoned fiscal restraint during the Trump presidency, they are now demanding spending reductions from President Biden in a fight over raising the statutory limit on government borrowing. If Democrats do not agree to some form of cuts, then Republicans have threatened to risk a calamitous national default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.
There is not much evidence that Republicans have a strategy for prevailing in that confrontation, or for avoiding the kind of market panic that broke Truss’ government. Republicans did not campaign in the midterm elections on a defined blueprint for downsizing government. Like Truss, they are pursuing structural changes to their country’s finances without an electoral mandate.
Unlike Truss, Republicans still have time to adjust course.
The conservatives Truss met in Washington did not seem inclined to see her as a Ghost of Christmas Future — a grim embodiment of what happens when you try to revise the relationship between taxpayers and their government without first persuading voters to go along with you. They welcomed her, instead, like a pal who has fallen on hard times.
Accompanied by two colleagues — Jake Berry, the former Conservative Party chairman, and Brandon Lewis, a former minister — Truss visited Capitol Hill and advocacy groups like Americans for Tax Reform. The voluble activist Grover Norquist, a self-described Truss fan, told me he urged her to focus relentlessly on lowering tax rates and avoid other factional disputes within her party. That, he said, is how you build a diverse bloc of support for cutting taxes.
“You do one issue. You do Jack Kemp. You do, ‘We’re the lower-rate people,’” said Norquist, who displays a 1990s-vintage Tory poster in his office (“New Labour, New Taxes”).
In Britain’s immediate political environment, this is not obviously good advice. Sunak has dismissed a fresh push for tax cuts as impracticable; his government is beset by labor strife, crises in health care and the cost of living, mounting ethics scandals and apocalyptic polling brought on in part by Truss herself. A read-my-lips anti-tax message does not look like much of a route to relevance for a former prime minister now returned to the back benches.
But it was a door-opener for Truss in Washington. Hern told me his session with Truss was scheduled to last 15 minutes and then unspooled over more than an hour as he, a 61-year-old Tulsa entrepreneur who amassed a fortune as an owner of McDonald’s franchises before joining Congress in 2018, outlined his legislative playbook for Truss, a lifelong activist who at 47 has served in Parliament for more than a decade, including as foreign secretary.
Hern told me they bonded over a shared view that their countries were on a dangerous path. Referring to Truss as having been “prime minister of what once was a great nation,” Hern credited her with trying to “save Great Britain” even though her attempt misfired.
“I think she felt like she tried to do too much, too soon, and didn’t have a following,” he said.
When I asked Hern if Truss’ fate could inform the debt ceiling fight, it did not sound like he had considered the idea before. But he did not wholly dismiss it.
Truss, he said, tried to impose her plans in a “top-down” fashion that would never work here. Hern said Republicans had to have a “hard conversation” with Americans about how the government spends money.
A congressional aide who met with Truss said she expressed fear that Britain’s conservative movement could “disappear entirely.” Truss did not quite say she expected Conservatives to get wiped out in the next election, according to this aide, but she warned that Britain’s volatile electorate has a way of obliterating political parties in a manner that seldom happens in the United States.
I imagine much of Truss’ party would find it galling to think of their toppled premier plotting in America to revive her unpopular agenda and squeeze her struggling successor. So, it was not too surprising that a spokesman for Truss declined to make her available, sniffing that her office would not provide “running commentary” on her activities.
But one of her traveling companions was more forthright about their mission in America.
Berry, a veteran MP from the band of Northern England known as the “red wall” for its historic tilt toward Labour, told me in late January that it was painfully apparent his party had “failed over a significant period of time” in the task of explaining “why we are conservatives in a compelling way.” His baleful outlook reflected a widespread sense in Britain that the Tories’ imagination and credibility is depleted after a dozen years in power.
Berry, who is 44, said his country now needed “sort of a Marshall Plan for conservatism,” invoking the American aid program that rebuilt Europe after World War II. Republicans, he said, had been admirably successful at forging mass support for cutting taxes and trusting the private sector to govern itself. The British right could use a kind of intellectual rescue mission on that front.
What the Republican Party has not done any better than its British counterpart, however, is persuading voters to give up cherished federal spending in order to balance the public ledger, while holding down taxes. The one neat trick to modern American conservatism has been campaigning on tax cuts while embracing deficits and debt that would be intolerable for nearly any other country — certainly for the United Kingdom. This most powerful weapon in the Republican arsenal cannot simply be leased to besieged British conservatives.
It may not be easy to discard for Americans like Hern either, no matter how sincerely they want to jolt their country from its fiscal laxity. Voters here are accustomed to living in a land of low taxes, loose expenditures and staggering public debts. If Republicans want to engage Americans in a demanding reassessment of that formula, there is not much time to do that before the debt-ceiling fight reaches a climax.
They, too, could find that they have tried to do too much, too soon, without a sufficient following.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
