The Foreign Office is refusing to “wake up” to the reality of modern diplomacy under Donald Trump, a former diplomat has told GB News.Ameer Kotecha, who spent more than a decade working as a diplomat across Russia, Israel and the United States, resigned earlier this month after accusing Sir Keir Starmer of “craven surrender” by giving up the Chagos Islands. Speaking to GB News, Mr Kotecha warned the Labour Government and Whitehall mandarins now put international law above the national interest.He said: “For me, the Chagos deal just represents that and possibly it’s because Starmer and Lord Hermer are lawyers themselves that they are sort of almost zealously, religiously focused on international law to the exclusion of almost anything else.
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“But what I saw throughout my Foreign Office career, actually, is the caution of Government lawyers who are constantly taking the path of least resistance because they aren’t willing to countenance legal risk.“So, whatever the reason is, I just think the Chagos deal is a surrender of British territory solely for the reason of abiding by a very narrow form of international law.“And it’s becoming a straitjacket rather than a guide, which is what I think it should be.”Mr Kotecha, who was posted to the UK mission at the United Nations during his career as a diplomat, pointed out how his experience using international law as a guide no longer seems to apply in the Foreign Office.“My fear is that the Foreign Office does seem to hold a sort of a different view. It holds a view that we must follow international law to the very letter,” the ex-diplomat told GB News.“And it doesn’t recognise that actually international law, as any student of international relations knows, is actually a much more amorphous, evolving thing. It’s a sort of living framework.”“It seems to me that almost every other country around the world is waking up to that more realist, pragmatic understanding of the world, right? “That we have to wake up. But it seems to me that the Foreign Office is refusing to do that.”LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:Whitehall whistleblower reveals four ways to fix ‘broken Britain’ and the reason it won’t happenHome Office ‘covers up’ number of local authorities wanting to put asylum seekers in council housesKeir Starmer staves off Labour revolt after ‘accidental victory’ – but PM faces new crisis in weeksThe UK’s fears about violating international law sparked a rift with the US ahead of Operation Epic Fury on February 28. Mr Trump ultimately decided to rescind his support for the Chagos deal after Sir Keir blocked the US from using Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire to launch strikes against Iran. Whitehall lawyers were incredibly cautious about the legality of the strikes.However, ministers later agreed to give the US access to the bases on March 20. Mr Kotecha suggested the UK’s decision to dither and delay ultimately damaged the special relationship by putting international law above the national interest.He said: “I, again, think the Americans are probably getting the impression that we’re more trouble than we’re worth because we seem to have given very mixed messages out to them around use of our bases, for example, and we’re clearly bringing very little to the table. “At the moment, on Iran, just as an aside on that, I’m very, very sympathetic to those who don’t want us to be dragged into another Middle Eastern war. “But I think my only point would be we’ve got to be kind of prepared to articulate what we can do and what we are willing to do and what we’re not willing to do and to be consistent. “We’re almost in the worst of all worlds at the moment, where we seem to be giving very mixed messages about what we can do, what we can’t do, we’re too slow to act.”However, the 34-year-old also argued that recent events showed the Foreign Office remains uncomfortable with Mr Trump’s style of diplomacy.He said: “Is the Foreign Office uncomfortable with Trump’s diplomacy or a more realistic way of doing things? I think so, yes.“Essentially the Foreign Office has, for a very long time, worked on the premise that this rules-based international system, and there was even a catchy acronym for it used in the Foreign Office, which was RBIs, has become the guiding principle of British foreign policy that there is this set of rules and everyone else will abide by them except for the really bad characters.“Our foreign policy should exist basically to strengthen this rules-based international system. “And we’re therefore scrambling around now, struggling to wake up to a reality where the Americans don’t seem to slavishly adhere to this rules-based international system in the way that we thought they might.”Mr Kotecha added: “My concern and what I saw is that we’re insufficiently hard-nosed.“We’re insufficiently ruthless into actually following our national interests and wherever that lies.“And we seem to be clinging to this, this outdated notion of a rules-based international system that, frankly, as much as we might want it to, simply doesn’t really exist anymore.“And I do think the Foreign Office establishment is being very, very slow to wake up to the world in which we’re living.”GB News has approached the Foreign Office for comment.
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