"Has the West gone soft?" asks Lord Powell, expert speaker on geo-politics
Writing in today’s Telegraph newspaper, Lord Powell, one of the most influential foreign policy advisors of the Thatcher era, argues that the West has none of the moral sense that inspired foreign policy in the time of Margaret Thatcher. Moreover, he believes that “those who resent Western values will now feel encouraged to challenge our interests.”
This follows from the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty yesterday, hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies, where Lord Powell put forward the question, “has the West gone soft?” He suggests that whilst it was unavoidable that the power and capability of our nation would fall, in relative terms, as others rose, “there has also been an avoidable decline in the West’s will to act – in short, our backbone.”
Lord Powell attributes a number of reasons for this, including the fact that is seems “notoriously hard to galvanise democratic societies to meet new threats in the wake of conflict.” More importantly, he adds, is that “the ability to convey a sense of the West’s destiny to lead in world affairs has evaporated.”
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