BRITAIN:British prime minister Tony Blair has effectively challenged would-be successor Gordon Brown to maintain his foreign policy based on military intervention and the projection of "hard" as well as "soft" power.
In a major speech on defence, and amid widespread British scepticism about the latest US initiative in Iraq, Mr Blair acknowledged that his foreign policy had been controversial - and admitted the war on terror might last a generation - while insisting retreat now would be a "catastrophe" for the UK.
Mr Blair said there might be a case for Britain, with its imperial strength behind it, "to slip quietly, even graciously into a different role" in the world.
However, the departing prime minister made clear his continuing preference for British forces "to be warfighters as well as peacemakers" and for a foreign policy rooted in the American alliance, "prepared to project hard as well as soft power".
Mr Blair's speech to an audience of military top brass and academics aboard HMS Albion in Plymouth came just days after renewed speculation that a Brown premiership would distance itself from the US and forge an alternative British foreign policy through an economic approach to world problems.
In his most obvious reference to Mr Brown - now considered certain to win any Labour leadership contest later this year - Mr Blair insisted that "hard" and "soft" power were for him driven by the same principles.
"The world is inter-independent," he said: "That means we work in alliance with others. But it also means problems interconnect. Poverty in Africa can't be solved simply by the presence of aid. It needs the absence of conflict. Failed states threaten us as well as their own people. Terrorism destroys progress. Terrorism can't be defeated by military means alone. But it can't be defeated without it."
Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond claimed Mr Blair had made the world "a more dangerous place" and was "clearly trying to foist that legacy on to his successor".
And there was no doubt Mr Blair was not only defending his record, but staking his claim to influence the debate about the future direction of British foreign policy, as he spoke of a new situation "which yet again changes the paradigm within which [ the] military, politics and public opinion interact with each other." That new challenge, said Mr Blair, resulted from a worldwide movement which he likened to "revolutionary communism in its early and most militant phase".
With its "ideology based on a misreading of Islam" Mr Blair said the new threat was global and had a narrative about the world and Islam's place within it that had a reach into most Muslim societies.
"Its adherents may be limited. Its sympathisers are not. It has states or at least parts of the governing apparatus of states that give it succour. It's belief system may be, indeed is, utterly reactionary. But its methods are terrifyingly modern," he said.
And it had realised two things: "The power of terrorism to cause chaos, hinder and displace political progress especially through suicide missions; and the reluctance of western opinion to countenance long campaigns, especially when the account it receives is via a modern media driven by the impact of pictures."