Force and the international community: Blair’s Chicago speech and the criteria for intervention
| Author | Lawrence Freedman |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117817707395 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817707395
International Relations
2017, Vol. 31(2) 107 –124
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817707395
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Force and the international
community: Blair’s Chicago
speech and the criteria for
intervention
Lawrence Freedman
King’s College London
Abstract
Tony Blair’s April 1999 Chicago speech is widely seen as foreshadowing his later decision to
support the invasion of Iraq. Two sets of context for the speech are described: other criteria for
the use of force, going back to the Just War tradition and more recent contributions from Caspar
Weinberger and Colin Powell, and the December 1998 strikes against Iraq and the Kosovo War,
which began in March 1999. The origins of the five factors mentioned when considering force are
explored and their implications assessed.
Keywords
armed force, Blair, Chicago Speech, humanitarian intervention, Iraq War, Just War, Kosovo,
Lebanon War, non-interference
In her speech to the Republican Party Conference in Philadelphia on 27 January 2017,
just before her first meeting with President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Theresa May
distanced herself from what she described as ‘the failed policies of the past’. The first
item promised:
The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the
world in our own image are over.
This was widely taken as a repudiation of the Blair years, but it was clearly not a
repudiation of the idea of intervention. The Prime Minister immediately followed up her
first sentence by insisting:
Corresponding author:
Lawrence Freedman, King’s College London, London, UK.
Email: lawrence.freedman@kcl.ac.uk
707395IRE0010.1177/0047117817707395International RelationsFreedman
research-article2017
Article
108 International Relations 31(2)
But nor can we afford to stand idly by when the threat is real and when it is in our own interests
to intervene. We must be strong, smart and hard-headed. And we must demonstrate the resolve
necessary to stand up for our interests.1
Elsewhere in the speech, she spoke of the United Kingdom’s contribution to the effort
to defeat the Islamist group Daesh in Iraq and Syria2 and a reinforced ‘commitment to
peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, South Sudan and Somalia’.
So this was not an anti-interventionist position. The Prime Minister still favoured
‘strong, smart and hard-headed’ intervention. The sort it was supposedly rejecting, at
least according to many media accounts of the speech, was that proposed by Tony Blair
in his Chicago speech of 24 April 1999.3 Fraser Nelson of the Spectator declared this to
have been ‘buried’ in Philadelphia.4 According to the Daily Mail, her:
comments effectively bring an end to what have been dubbed ‘wars of choice’ and the so-called
‘Chicago doctrine’ established by Tony Blair.5
The BBC described the speech as ‘arguably the biggest by a British prime minister in
the US since Tony Blair’s in Chicago’ when ‘Mr Blair first advocated active military
interventionism to overturn dictators and protect civilians’. Now, it continued, ‘Mrs May
has repudiated much of what he said then’. Henry Mance in the Financial Times called
the speech a direct contradiction of the Chicago speech,6 and so on. Yet although Blair’s
Chicago speech is widely considered to have set the framework for what happened later
in Iraq, it contained no references to ‘wars of choice’ (although choice was implied by
setting criteria), made national interest one of the criteria, did not talk about overturning
dictators and at no point suggested remaking ‘the world in our image’.
Not long after the Chicago speech was delivered, I was identified as the person who
provided the first draft of the relevant sections.7 I had met Mr Blair a couple of times (accom-
panying other foreign policy specialists) before the 1997 election but had no connection
with the government after the election. Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff,
who I had got to know when he was in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), con-
tacted me on 12 April 1999 and asked me to provide a draft if possible of some ideas for a
speech by the end of the week. I assumed at the time that the request was no more than
Powell looking for some support at a time when government capacity was stretched because
of the Kosovo crisis. I had no idea who else had been asked and no expectation that anything
I wrote would find a way into the Prime Minister’s speech. I submitted my ideas on 16 April.
I discussed them with Powell in his office the next Monday but made no further changes.8
To my surprise, there was a close connection between my words and the relevant section of
the speech as delivered (which involved a much wider argument about the benefits of glo-
balisation and the inter-connectedness of the modern world).
My aim in this article is to provide some background to the speech, the factors which
influenced my draft, where the suggested tests for intervention came from, the differ-
ences between my draft and the speech as delivered in Chicago, and then draw some
conclusions about the costs and benefits of setting criteria for the use of armed force.
What matters with such speeches in policy terms is not what the speech-writer thought it
meant but what the politician who took responsibility for the words thought it meant.
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