The paper will interpret the Coalition government's liberal conservative foreign policy in two parts. The first part will explain the interpretive approach used to access the beliefs key foreign policy makers in the government have come to hold about British foreign policy, and how these beliefs have informed their foreign policy action. The second part will take the political language used to explain and justify the Libyan intervention of 2011 as a prism through which we see these beliefs being translated into ethically-informed but realist-inspired foreign policy action. The paper argues, overall, that the liberal conservative approach to foreign policy shares much in common with first term New Labour (1997-2001) and the Gordon Brown era (2007-2010), and that this reveals fascinating continuities in the British foreign policy tradition that interpretivist perspectives are well able to draw out.
