Scottish Government foreign interventions need coherence
It is a rule well known in Western politics that if your domestic agenda isn't going well, there is nothing like a pivot to foreign affairs. The visuals are usually great – you get photographed with important people, you get to look statesperson-like, there is generally no much domestic blowback from international engagement and so on.
The Scottish Government has repeatedly shown the downsides of international engagement; it has regularly ended up embarrassing them. It suggests that Scotland in the devolution era should perhaps think more clearly about what it is trying to achieve.
Yesterday the Scottish Government provided an airport to the US so it could capture a Russian-flagged oil tanker which had broken a western embargo on Venezuelan oil. This follows comments from the First Minister on the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro which were stronger than anything from Westminster yet still pretty insipid.
On that event the First Minister said it was hard to see how it accorded with international law. Well, it is far from clear that the seizing of a ship in international waters was legal. Nations are entirely free to impose sanctions on foreign opponents on their own soil but there is no international legal basis for imposing those sanctions outside their own territory. Certainly most of the world appears to view this as illegal.
It isn't clear the fundamental difference between imposing US law by kidnapping someone from a foreign territory and imposing US sanctions by seizing a vessel in international waters. Why does the Scottish Government comment negatively on one but participate in the other? It may not have had the power to prevent this, but did it object?
Indeed, it may not have known this was happening in advance, but then what sort of arrangement did it sign for permission of user for the facility in the first place? Did it not think to put compliance with international law as a condition?
This is the problem in talking about international issues without having a proper policy development capacity on foreign policy. To put it another way, the Scottish Government doesn't have the proper capacity to think these issues through (foreign affairs being reserved) but it can't resist commenting for domestic political reasons.
This has led to some bad optics. The First Minister breaks diplomatic protocol and asks for Americans to vote against Donald Trump and then over-corrects course with a series of sycophantic engagements including being the only political leader in Britain to join Keir Starmer at a state dinner rather than boycott as a matter of principle (as did the leaders of Wales and London).
As glaring has been the disconnect between Scottish Government rhetoric on Palestine and any identifiable action to make good on those comments. Making big statements without any meaningful action is the preserve of student politics, not national leadership.
Even the SNP's European position has problems. The broad arguments are fine (that Scotland should rejoin the EU) but the party's politicians are making these comments without having done any proper work on what rejoining would mean in terms of process, finance and institutional architecture. They therefore remain no more than slogans.
There are two obvious routes to go here. One is to stop making unfocussed, off the cuff comments on international affairs altogether. This is neither desirable nor realistic; politics demands people respond to big events even when they are not a politician’s responsibility.
The other is a stance long promoted by Common Weal which is to start acting more like Scotland is an independent nation by developing properly funded and supported think tanks which help to develop the international political infrastructure an independent country would need.
Foreign affairs think tanks tend heavily to the centre ground of western foreign policy and Common Weal would be likely to disagree with some of their thinking, but at least it would form a more consistent approach. At the moment Scotland's foreign policy interventions are random and meaningless.