At a time when Tony Blair is running around tirelessly shoring up international support for Western action in Afghanistan, it is salutary to remind ourselves of his Tory predecessors and their cynical, dogged insistence on not getting "embroiled" in the Bosnia conflict, a horrendous war at the centre of Europe which, precisely because of Western weakness, most notably in the laughably named "safe havens" like Srebenica, resulted in the worse massacres in Europe since World War II. Not only did the British themselves shun engagement, but they also prevented other international action, until resolute US air strikes eventually blunted the aggression of the Serbs and brought an end to the miserable conflict.
Nor did Ireland acquit itself well in all of this, cravenly going along with the arms embargo which prevented the Bosnians from defending themselves against the overwhelmingly more powerful Yugoslavs. This was the very issue about which we might been active in the old days but, as our Ambassador despairingly informed us at the UN in New York, we had "settled for a mess of pottage" in 1992, meaning £7 billion from Brussels, and we weren't about to be awkward or "non-aligned" about the survival of beleaguered Bosnia.
Brendan Simms's brilliant, angry account explicitly addresses what commentators and historians have always felt: that, in the context of weak Western leadership, it was classic British diplomacy which stymied any real attempt to prevent the feeding of Serb ambitions, and instead ended up rewarding the culture of "whoever keeps shooting, keeps gaining", a culture with consequences still to be seen today in Macedonia. British diplomacy came either with the dithering naivety of David Owen or Lord Carrington, or the hard Realpolitik of Malcolm Rifkind and - even more so - Douglas Hurd, harping on about "ancient hatreds" and insoluble conflict - what Simms calls "conservative pessimism". In fairness to Margaret Thatcher, who didn't come from this equivocating culture, she favoured air strikes from the beginning.
Simms perhaps goes too far in stating that many "in the upper echelons of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office remain profoundly Serbophile", but there is little doubt that the old Etonian bureaucrats had a grudging respect for the plucky Christian Serbs, with their anti-Nazi pedigree, and little regard for the "sentimental" notion of an multi-ethnic Bosnia. Given that the same calibre of diplomat/politican was in charge of Northern Ireland for years, it is little wonder that a breakthrough took so long.
Simms's other claim that "the upper ranks of the British army were riddled with anti-Americanism" is also interesting. Certainly, the begrudging attitude of the British and French military to the US-brokered Dayton peace deal bears this out. It is also interesting how such anti-Americanism is shared by both left and right, be it jealous backbench Tories and crusty Daily Telegraph pundits, or the perpetually self-satisfied Tony Benn airily marching through London surrounded by Serb Chetnik banners. The same motive is at work for the Cambridge spies. The hurt of being supplanted by a new pro-active superpower was too much for these old imperialists to bear, and so they would sooner work for the Soviets than the vulgar Americans.
Whatever about the evangelical zeal of Tony Blair and New Labour, at least it has put an end, hopefully, to the arthritic grip of the Foreign Office and the grey old men in the clubs, tut-tutting over the problems of ancient hatreds in the Balkans and, more ominously, over the wide moralising of those who want to solve them. Stuffed shirts such as Douglas Hurd are a constant reminder: beware politicians who have been diplomats.
Eamon Delaney is a writer and critic. An Accidental Diplomat, his account of the Irish foreign service, was published earlier this year by New Island Books