A new American isolationism and the transformation of Russia’s global status has led to the “world order getting out of control”, and “unimaginable things happening”, the international development minister Rory Stewart has said.



He also suggested that, faced by a swaggering Russia, there was little that “poor old” John Kerry or Barack Obama can do in Syria in the final few weeks of their White House administration. He suggested different strategic questions could be asked if Hillary Clinton were elected.

In a frank assessment of the scale of global disorder rarely offered by a serving government minister, Stewart warned: “The world is getting out of control. You look at that whole arc of what is happening in northern Nigeria, in Mali, in Chad, what is continuing to happen in Libya, the problems that persist in Somalia, not to mention what is happening in Darfur, South Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, in Iraq, in Syria, you are looking at a real collapse of the multilateral system at a time when the United States is increasingly doubtful about what it can do to solve it.”

Speaking at a fringe meeting organised by the thinktank Radix at the Conservative conference, Stewart added: “A lot of the great driving theories that kept the American public involved have gone, of which the most important from 1946 to 1989 was the fight against communism. That was the way of really motivating the American public to invest and spend on defence. Those ideas have gone now. You cannot motivate the public in the same way.

“That leads to a situation in which things are happening that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago – the Saudis directly intervening in Yemen without the US directly behind them.”

Stewart, a former diplomat, is one of the Conservative party’s acknowledged thinkers on foreign policy, and his appointment as minister of state at international development gives him a new platform.

Russia, he explained, “has been able to transform its global status in the past three years”, requiring a complete rethink of how the UN operates, and new ways of strengthening multilateral institutions.

He said: “Russia has succeeded within the past few years in completely transforming its global position at a time when you thought it would be at its weakest. Its economy is struggling, it is not getting the incomes it would have expected and yet it behaves like a much bigger country than Britain.

“It swaggers its way around. The way it is currently operating in the Ukraine, the way it is threatening in the Baltic states and in Syria would be almost unimaginable a few years ago. What Russia is demonstrating is that they are able, like Iran, to do very, very strange things.”

He also admitted that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had been saved by Russian military intervention. “Assad was in very real problems two years ago. The likelihood is that he would have lost Aleppo, most of the south and probably Homs as well if Russia had not intervened. Russia has been decisive in that intervention.”

He added that the west was in a double bind. He said: “Assad has done genuinely terrible things and it is almost unimaginable that there will be peace in Syria so long as that guy is around, partly because it is in his interests to keep disorder. It is in his interests for terrorists to be there because terrorists are his legitimating principle. It is the way he gets support; to say there are terrorists out there.”

He went on: “On the other hand, what are the options facing President Obama? Setting aside the fact there are only nine weeks to go for this administration … it is pretty difficult for poor old Kerry and Obama to make a strong decisive act at the moment.

“The model of successfully taking on a Russian-backed central government from the point of view of an opposition was only pulled off by the US once and that was in Afghanistan in 1981-89. But – there is a big but – because the success of the opposition to Russia led to the catastrophe of Afghanistan from 1991-2000, you end up funding, if you are not careful, opposition groups that are much more radical than you want them to be and actually when the government collapses it leads to a civil war and the situation comes become worse on the ground.”

He said the task was to bring some structure of global order and security back into place, partly by investing in the idea of the United Nations. But, he added: “My God, that organisation needs reform. We have to be aware that aspects of the UN, some people will remind them in some ways of the issues we had around Brexit – supranational government, bureaucracies, the way that money is spent, what does this organisation actually do?”

He argued that, before greater military intervention could be considered by the UK or the US in Syria, fundamental questions needed to be asked about the role of regional partners, such as Saudi Arabia, the role of the Kurds, the balance of military advantage inside Syria and the future of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, which is due to be attacked by the west in the next few weeks.

