All zones of public discourse have their excesses and irrationalities, but none like foreign policy. In our golden age of data, this is one area that remains resiliently unmeasurable. So anyone can say anything as long as they say it sonorously and use the word “strategy” a lot.
所有公共领域的讨论都具有过激性和非理性，但没有一个像外交政策这样。在我们的数据黄金时代，外交政策仍是一个无论如何都无法衡量的领域。因此，任何人都可以对此侃侃而谈，只要他们声音洪亮并大量使用“战略”一词。
And so the idea has taken hold that Britain is withdrawing from the world. The charge is built on topical grievances against Prime Minister David Cameron: his euroscepticism, his implied cuts to the defence budget in the coming years, his absence from the Franco-German diplomatic front against Russia. These observations are each true, to a point, but they add up to a partial reading.
因此，英国正在从全世界退缩的说法深入人心。这一指责建立在时下对首相戴维•卡梅伦(David Cameron)的诸多不满之上：他的欧洲怀疑主义(euroscepticism)、他暗示在未来几年削减国防预算以及缺席法德联合制裁俄罗斯的外交阵线。从某种程度上说，这些观点每一个说得都没错，但合起来看却有失偏颇。
Here is a rounder account. Since 2010, Britain has co-led a military operation in Libya that amounted to regime change, and come within a parliamentary vote of a strike against Syria. It has bombed jihadis in Iraq and declared that there is “no legal barrier” to an extension of those raids into Syrian territory. It has tried to deepen relations with China and other Asian powers, even at the cost of American umbrage. It has not just stuck to a target for foreign aid that has little grounding in logic and even less in electoral self-interest, it has codified it in statute.
这里有一些相反的说法。2010年以来，英国与其他国家一起领导了对利比亚的军事行动，导致后者政权更迭，并在议会就是否打击叙利亚举行投票。它对伊拉克境内的圣战分子进行轰炸，并宣称将这些打击行动扩大到叙利亚境内“没有法律障碍”。它一直在努力深化与中国及其他亚洲大国之间的关系，即便这让美国感到不满。英国不仅坚持逻辑上毫无道理可言、甚至还让自己在选举中失分的对外援助目标，而且还将对外援助写入法律。
Whatever one thinks of these ventures — some have failed hideously, some make sense, some lack any — they do not constitute a retreat from the world. They do not suggest a government ducking foreign policy in either its diplomatic or kinetic modes. If Mr Cameron is an isolationist, he is a lousy one.
不管人们如何看待这些行动——有些遭遇惨败，有些有意义，有些则毫无意义——它们都算不上英国从全世界退缩。无论是从其外交模式还是从其动力模式来说，它们都没有表明英国政府回避外交政策。如果卡梅伦是一名孤立主义者，那他也是一名蹩脚的孤立主义者。
Make do with the boring truth: on a spectrum of postwar prime ministers, Mr Cameron’s curiosity about the world puts him somewhere in the middle. He is more outward-looking than Harold Wilson but less restlessly adventurous than Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair. Our historical lens is coloured by the recent tenures of those two globe-trotters, who were in effect their own foreign secretaries. Given that Mr Blair’s activism involved the Iraq war and an ardour for the European single currency, Britons might excuse their present prime minister his relative circumspection.
不妨看一下有些无聊的事实：如果对战后的英国首相进行排序，卡梅伦对世界的好奇心可以让他位列中等。他比哈罗德•威尔逊(Harold Wilson)更关注国际事务，但不像玛格丽特•撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)或者托尼•布莱尔(Tony Blair)那么敢于冒险。撒切尔和布莱尔奔波于世界各地参与全球事务，他们最近任期的表现影响了我们看待历史的方式——这两人实际上是他们自己的外交大臣。鉴于布莱尔的行动主义包括参与伊拉克战争以及热情支持欧洲单一货币，英国人或许会原谅现任首相的相对谨慎。
Critics of Britain’s insularity tend to come in two forms: those who do not mean what they say, and those who do not know what they mean.
批评英国孤立的往往有两类人：言不由衷的人和不知所云的人。
Take the first lot. In politics, when people accuse a leader of lacking a strategy, they tend to mean that they dislike the strategy he has. When they implore him to “engage” with something, they want him to engage on terms that please them. There is a lofty tier of British public life that dislikes Mr Cameron’s mercantilist take on the world and his desire to revise the terms of EU membership. They regard the first as vulgar, like winning a hand of poker at their members’ club without putting the money back into the coffers, and the second as foolish. But both are foreign policies: trade promotion and reform of the EU along liberal lines, however fanciful a project that might be, are ways of engaging with the outside world. The carpers should say what they mean: their complaint is with Mr Cameron’s ideas, not his lack of them. We can then discuss those ideas.
第一类人有很多。在政治上，当人们指责一位领导人缺乏战略时，通常他们的意思是不喜欢他当前的战略。当他们恳请他“参与”某事时，其实是希望他能以取悦他们的方式进行。英国公共生活中的上层社会不喜欢卡梅伦以重商主义的眼光看待世界以及他修改欧盟成员国条款的诉求。他们认为前者有些庸俗，就像在俱乐部赢了一手牌后没有把钱放回保险柜一样，而后者则有些愚蠢。但这都是外交政策：沿着自由主义路线促进贸易以及改革欧盟（不论多么不现实），都是与外部世界打交道的方式。吹毛求疵者应该心口一致：他们抱怨的是卡梅伦的想法，而不是他缺少想法。我们可以接着讨论这些想法。
If this type of critic is disingenuous, the other is sketchy. Foreign policy debate is given to the most excruciating waffle, usually couched in an airy language you might call Grandese. People talk of strategy, vision, geopolitics, the world stage, but surrender specific proposals as readily as a baby gives up a pacifier clenched between its gums. At its best, diplomacy is politics at its most civilised. At its worst, it is a world made predominantly of smoke.
如果这种批评有些虚伪，那另一种则有些粗陋。外交政策辩论往往是最折磨人的胡扯，而且经常以一种你可能称之为“宏大”(Grandese)的轻快语言表述。人们谈论战略、愿景、地缘政治和世界舞台，但让他们提出具体建议时，他们就像婴儿吐出紧咬住的奶嘴一样轻易放弃。在最好的时候，外交是最文明的政治表现。最糟糕的时候，它就是一个乌烟瘴气的世界。
Britain is a medium-sized power whose global reach has waned for about 70 years. It has traumatic recent experiences of war. It has not balanced a budget since 2002. What should its international strategy be? Why does it need one? Do similar countries really have one? If there is something screamingly obvious that Britain should be doing abroad right now, what is it?
英国是一个中等规模的强国，其全球影响力70年来一直在下降。它在最近的参战中受过创伤。自2002年以来，它一直没有实现预算平衡。英国的国际战略应该是什么样的？为何英国需要一个战略？类似的国家真的有战略吗？如果现在海外有一些显然需要英国去做的事，会是什么事呢？
In the absence of precise answers to these questions, the criticism boils down to a hunch that Mr Cameron should put himself about a bit more, as if a prime minister is delinquent in his duties by not maximising his country’s visibility. We chuckle at armchair football coaches who yell at players on screen to run about more and get stuck in, but this mania for perpetual motion in foreign affairs is not much different.
在这些问题没有明确答案的情况下，这些批评只能归结为一种直觉：卡梅伦应该再多出份力，好像一位首相如果不把他的国家最大限度的呈现在国际社会，就是他工作失职。我们对坐在扶手椅上对着屏幕上的球员大喊、要求他们拼命跑动的人暗自发笑，但这种对外交事务“永动”的热衷也没有太大区别。
Britain’s recent efforts abroad deserve criticism. There is the agony of Libya, which we have learnt not to talk about. The sanctification of aid looks quixotic next to the defence squeeze. But it is wrong to conflate bad choices with retreat. Sonorous, multilingual nonsense is still nonsense.
英国近期的海外行动应该受到批评。我们目睹了利比亚的苦难，但学会了不去谈论它。在刚刚缩减完国防预算之后就进行神圣的援助显得不切实际。但将糟糕的选择与退缩混为一谈是不对的。用多种语言大声说出的废话仍旧是废话。