mr president there is something quaint almost touching about these debates about creating a european external action service as though the european union did not already have the full apparatus of a diplomatic service
go to any third country and you will find an eu embassy that towers over any of the member state legations
the european union's diplomatic corps has already squeezed out the national services
baroness ashton has about twice the salary of william hague the british foreign secretary and she controls a budget about twenty times as large as that of the foreign and commonwealth office
in a way this would not be quite so bad if the common foreign policy of the european union were demonstrably superior to that which is being pursued by the member states but it is not
what is it doing
it is isolating taiwan and cosying up to the tyrants in beijing it is refusing to deal with the anti-castro dissidents in cuba it is cosying up to the ayatollahs in tehran and it is funnelling money to hamas
i think we could just about manage to do better
we are the fourth-largest military power on the planet and the fifth-largest economy
i think we can run our own foreign policy to suit our own interests
