Despite this ridiculous New York Times headline

Blair Urges Britain to Pursue an Aggressive Foreign Policy

in the sixth and final of a series of speeches he has given in the last year, the prime minister of Britain lays out the challenges facing his countrymen and the West:

“The frontiers of our security no longer stop at the Channel,” he said. “What happens in the Middle East affects us. What happens in Pakistan, or Indonesia, or in the attenuated struggles for territory and supremacy in Africa for example, in Sudan or Somalia — the new frontiers for our security are global.” …

To retreat in the face of global terrorism, he said, would be “a catastrophe.”
“There are two types of nations similar to ours today,” he said. “Those who do war fighting and peacekeeping and those who have, effectively, except in the most exceptional circumstances, retreated to peacekeeping alone. Britain does both. We should stay that way,” he said.

“My choice,” Mr. Blair said, “is for armed forces that are prepared to engage in this difficult, tough, challenging campaign [against jihadism], to be war fighters as well as peacekeepers; for a British foreign policy keeps our American alliance strong and is prepared to project hard as well as soft power; and for us as a nation to be as willing to fight terrorism and pay the cost of that fight wherever it may be.”

…

As he has done in the past, Mr. Blair said he believed that the campaign against jihadist terrorism would be long. “It has taken a generation for the enemy to grow,” he said. “It will, in all probability, take a generation to defeat.”

The mood among British elites is if anything even more anti-war than ours here at home, and the commentariat long ago wrote off Blair. The American commentariat never took him into account until he allied himself with Bush on Iraq—after which they took to ridiculing him, most recently for how he’s portrayed in the movie The Queen—in which I, for one, found him to be a surprisingly sympathetic if unserious figure.

I’d say he’s grown on the job, and that history will remember him as a leader who saw the writing on the wall and who tried—eloquently and articulately—to get his nation to come to grips with the world as it is and to do the right thing, on behalf of others and in its own defense.