Foreign Policy Prudence and the New Global Britain

“To govern,” Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France wrote, after the devastating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, “is to choose.” France eventually chose de Gaulle and a new republican constitution. After the Brexit referendum of 2016, a divided parliament, like the French Fourth Republic, chose indecision. The clarifying election of December 2019 changed all that, but beyond leaving the European Union and redefining its relationship with Europe, the Johnson government faces a number of hard choices. Some, like the HS2 project linking London to the North are of a domestic nature; others, like the roll-out of 5G broadband, not only affect UK infrastructure but also have geopolitical resonance.

One of the hard choices the new Johnson government made early this year afforded China’s state-linked telco Huawei access to 35 per cent of the “non-core peripheral parts” of UK telecom networks. To avoid delaying the installation of 5G, the government chose a quick economic fix over long-term strategy. The US President Donald Trump, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Australian government—which prevents the Chinese telco access to all its broadband—Johnson’s own Defence Minister, Ben Wallace, Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau all deplored the choice.

Huawei’s investment in UK infrastructure crystallises the problem Global Britain faces in co-ordinating its future economic and security interests. The decision evinced, if demonstration were needed, that Britain needs a foreign policy geared to its long-term national interests in a rapidly changing world no longer en route to a universal democratic end of history. This has become urgent in the wake of Brexit. Unlike the interminable process of ever closer European union, January 31, 2020, marked a seminal political event.[1] The event, however, needs a coherent strategy to govern what ensues. Since 2016, various alternatives to the EU have emerged that no one had considered while the EU set the economic and fiscal rules and its single regulatory mechanism governed trade and labour movement within the EU and trade negotiations with external trading partners outside it. Policy now must not only consider the economic dimension of Brexit, but also how economic and geopolitical interests are linked in an interconnected, but far from integrated, world. The agenda has implications for Global Britain’s reinvention not only in Europe, but also east of Suez.

In a 2016 pamphlet, Making Sense of British Foreign Policy after Brexit, the historian John Bew, recruited to Johnson’s Downing Street Policy Unit, observed that “the greatest challenge to the new government was to identify some guiding principles for a new global strategy” and take measures “to transform current uncertainty into opportunity”.[2] In December 2019, Boris Johnson advertised his intention to “undertake the deepest review of Britain’s security, defence and foreign policy since the end of the Cold War”. It would evaluate “Global Britain’s foreign policy: British alliances and diplomacy, shifts of power and wealth to Asia, how we can best use our huge expenditure on international development, and the role of technology”. The Queen’s speech later the same month announced the new government would conduct the review this year. What, we might wonder, were the core assumptions driving British foreign and defence policy since the end of the Cold War that the review needs to address? What are their limitations and what might a post-Brexit defence and foreign policy posture now require?[3]

At the end of the Cold War, successive UK governments, along with Western political, business, academic and media elites, welcomed globalisation as an immutable and desirable force. Globalisation announced the triumphant spread of liberalism and democracy as the only viable global political and ideological form. “The struggle for world hegemony by political ideology,” Tony Blair, an enthusiastic proponent of the new order, informed the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in 2002, “is gone.” [4]

Blair’s belief that the West drove the process of global convergence assumed continuing military and technological dominance. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web in 1990 not only unleashed a new “information age”, it also seemed to confirm “the West’s geostrategic reach and military edge”. In this new age, transnational forms of inclusive governance would replace increasingly otiose nation-states in what McKinsey director Kenichi Ohmae anticipated in 1990 would be an increasingly interdependent, borderless, democratic world. The only source of threat to this utopian vision came from “zones of chaos” like the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, together with the international terrorism, migration, arms and refugee flows that they spawned and which required doles of overseas aid and the occasional recourse to armed social work of the US-led counter-insurgency variety to curtail.

The meliorist clichés of Western-led global governance involved several presuppositions. They assumed that Britain’s over-riding geostrategic concern, as it had been for most of the twentieth century, remained the stability of the European continent. Britain also played a key role in the Euro-Atlantic System and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Meanwhile, the region east of Suez assumed, after 1990, growing importance for British economic and security interests, whilst the Indo-Pacific zone presented the UK and the EU with economic and investment opportunities. Developing and developed states in this new dispensation would, it was assumed, respect “shared spaces” like the South China Sea.

In this emerging transnational order, government, media, business and academic elites considered Britain a significant, but declining power. National security and economic growth still constituted core government concerns, but were best served by working with allies and partners, particularly the US, but also through ever closer union with Europe. Consequently, both the Blair and Cameron administrations from 1996 to 2016 embraced a progressive project to modernise British institutions through programs of global justice, multiculturalism and cherishing difference. National unity appeared anachronistic as the UK’s military and diplomatic power waned, or dissolved into what the fashionable German critical theorist Jurgen Habermas described as “post-national constellations”.

A series of events, however, conspired to overthrow this latest version of the Whig view of history. The intractable wars of choice waged in Afghanistan and Iraq educed unanticipated domestic and global consequences, shaking the progressive faith that political religions like Islamism were, to use Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, “non-viable”. The financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath dissolved confidence in the globalisation of markets and industrial production delivering wealth to all who experienced its borderless beatitude. Globalisation and the fourth industrial revolution were not liberal democracy’s soulmate. The deadly angel that spelt death to economic inefficiency was not necessarily at the service of liberty. It had once offered her some service but is not at her command, as the rapid rise of China after it entered the World Trade Organisation in 2002 and its growing big-tech and cyber ascendancy demonstrates. The rise of revisionist powers, Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, and their destructive impact on zones of chaos and globally shared spaces further fractured the progressive illusion of shared values leading to a “realistic utopia” of perpetual, progressive peace. The UK must face these facts, now compounded by withdrawal from the European Union. 

The resurgence of international competition in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis rendered globalisation unpredictable, increasingly contested and difficult to manage. In this altered environment, the assumptions informing British foreign policy after 1990 now appear outdated. A strategic review that recognises this altered reality must, as a matter of existential urgency, address the social cohesion that have been unravelled by identity politics and the progressive assault on the nation-state. It requires, as James Rogers observed, “re-centring and strengthening the union-state through policies to enhance national identity and Britishness and shut out foreign interference”. [5]

A renewed sense of national purpose would also reject both isolationism and the liberal tyranny of guilt that seeks to compensate all victims of Europe’s past imperial crimes. This dismal cosmopolitan mentality prefers a policy of neutrality in dealing with the authoritarian Goliaths that now strut the world stage. EU appeasement of Moscow and Beijing will not ensure peace. Nor will paying reparations for those soi-disant sufferers of alleged imperial wrongs alleviate poverty, achieve justice or restore regional stability, although it may briefly salve the excessively sensitive consciences of the Olympian Left.

Despite the rhetoric of appeasement, the UK has, alongside its allies, succeeded in projecting and installing a vision of economic and international order that takes the form of a wider rules-based international system. Not all of the core assumptions informing British strategic policy are, therefore, wrong. Several chime with the UK’s broader strategic aspirations, notably the spread of liberal principles and democratic structures in Europe and beyond.

But many other countries, particularly authoritarian regimes, do not see the world as Britain does. This difference in understanding has re-emerged in the form of geopolitical and ideological competition. If the UK is to compete successfully with larger but ideologically unsympathetic powers in the future, it will need to integrate its institutions to maximise their effectiveness. The 2018 National Security Capability Review’s “fusion doctrine”, envisaged a new National Strategy Council setting long-term strategic goals and distributing defence and aid funding in accordance with a new foreign-policy realism. This would require harnessing the UK’s vast aid expenditure to serve geopolitical interests, particularly in Asia.

Moreover, as Europe becomes less relevant internationally and less central to a post-Brexit economy, the UK will also have to resist the continued “offshoring” of its industries to countries where environmental standards were (and remain) far lower. Britain has become excessively dependent on importing foreign manufactured goods. To prevent state competition from intensifying still further, Britain should pursue “de-globalisation”, re-energising manufacturing in the British Isles. 

Europe, of course, will always occupy an important place in British strategic thinking. However, the continent is no longer the world’s economic or political cockpit. Brexit exposed the sclerotic and increasingly bureaucratic project of ever closer European union. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the European Economic Community (EEC) of ten democratic trading nations, first founded in 1956, expanded voraciously into a twenty-eight-member bloc. At the same time, it morphed into a union, a borderless empire founded on principles of subsidiarity and proportionality that eroded the sovereign institutions of its member states. The Treaty of Maastricht (1993) and the Lisbon Treaty (2008) framed the constitution of this increasingly centralised, imperial body. A number of EU states tried unsuccessfully to resist this remorselessly undemocratic process. France and the Netherlands, founding members of the EEC, held referenda that rejected the proposed European Constitution in 2005. To no avail. Ireland has twice held referendums that rejected the Treaty of Nice (2001) and the Lisbon Treaty (2008). Rather than respect the popular mandate, Irish governments held further referendums until they secured the result they wanted. In an equally insouciant vein, the European Commission and the troika overseeing Greece’s economy, debilitated by the Eurozone crisis, ignored the Greek referendum (2015) that rejected further EU financial bailouts and austerity programs.

Despite the concerted European and metropolitan Remainer elite effort to reverse the 2016 Brexit decision, Britain succeeded in leaving the union in 2020. The expansionary constellation experienced an unprecedented reversal. The bitter nature of the divorce proceedings has implications not just for the UK but also for those member states increasingly dissatisfied with Brussels and Germany’s political and economic dominance of Europe. Brexit also exposes the union’s failed economic model, opaque political processes and fragile defence arrangements. Without radical surgery, the weakened union body politic could itself experience a fatal stroke. What might this involve?

Brexit, in fact, offers an opportunity for those political parties across Europe, as well as member states like Hungary and Poland, disillusioned with the EU predilection for hyper-liberal policies on culture, human rights and migration. It could force the European Commission either to decentralise its powers, and acknowledge the very different perspectives and commitments that member states have towards the agenda set by Brussels, or risk further dissolution.

The EU Commissioners will also have to recognise that the neglect of Europe’s borders and its inadequate defence expenditure have revealed the Union’s military weakness and exposed it to transnational terrorism and the rise of revisionist powers on its borders. Europe offers no coherent policy response to China’s growing political and economic influence in Eastern Europe, Italy and Greece, or to Russian irredentism in Ukraine. Whilst Europe’s political class naively eschewed geopolitics, geopolitics happened on its doorstep.

Britain, as one of the few European bloc countries with a defensive capability, will continue to respect its treaty obligations and support NATO, but, like the US, will look unfavourably on those rich European states who fail to honour their defence commitments. Brexit, in other words, announces a new European era of realpolitik where states once again recognise the need for a balance of power where increasingly independent states, with very different historical experiences, prudently pursue their enlightened self-interest. In this context, the UK will leave the union but it is not leaving Europe. This will mean collaborative alliances in terms of security and economic ties especially with the Baltic and the Central European states, who will consider the UK an important ally, as they did during the Thirty Years War (1610 to 1648), which saw the emergence of the modern state system from the otiose cocoon of medieval Christendom.  

As a global power, the UK also needs to understand how global developments affect its interests, as well as the concerns of its allies, not least the US. A coherent national strategy must align policy-makers’ core assumptions about the world with the events and phenomena they address.[6] Although Britain lacks the economic heft of the US, the industrial might of China, or the demographic potential of India, Indonesia and Brazil, it has nevertheless frequently managed to synthesise a range of capabilities to considerable national effect, as its response to Covid-19 has demonstrated.

Realistically aligning strategic and economic interests will be crucial in the geopolitically sensitive Indo-Pacific zone. Brexit opens opportunities for a flexible, sovereign liberal market state. The difficulty of reaching a consensus between twenty-eight states, at different levels of development, on EU trade policy only complicated an already cumbersome decision-making mechanism. The UK can now liberate itself from the regulatory restrictions that rendered any Asian trade deal an interminable bureaucratic process.

Politics, however, is about “perception and momentum”.[7] A strategically aligned trade policy requires economic prudence imbued with enough dynamism to seize new opportunities whilst prioritising quality over quantity, and long-term over short-term interest. The UK is working on trade deals with the US and the EU. It is also considering free trade agreements (FTAs) with Australia and Canada, as well as pivoting to the Indo-Pacific and becoming a dialogue partner of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). What might this require? 

The Indo-Pacific has maintained growth rates across the region in excess of 5 per cent over the last decade. Foreign direct investment, openness to global production networks and bilateral, trilateral and multilateral FTAs have been central to this growth. This pattern of agreements, which evolved with the rise of China after 2002, increasingly links the economies of Pacific Asia with the United States and India.

“Asia is the single region of the world of most consequence for America,” Ashton Carter, the US Secretary of State, wrote in 2016. It is in its putative pivot to the Indo-Pacific where the vital importance of UK policy, leading neither to increased dependency on the US, nor kowtowing to China, will need most careful calibration. In this context, China considers the ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, amalgamating all ASEAN’s FTAs with regional partners in a coherent whole, integral to its Belt and Road initiative, improving connectivity by building land transportation corridors linking China to Europe, to South Asia and to South-East Asia.

However, the China model has a geopolitical trade-off. Xi Jinping’s China dream is to integrate the smaller ASEAN economies into a Sinocentric regional production network. China’s economic diplomacy in South-East Asia is part of a broader strategy that entangles its neighbours in a web of incentives that increase their dependence and make it difficult to stand up to China over territorial or economic disputes.[8]

China’s global reach also means that Easternisation[9] has implications for investment in the UK. Before Brexit, Sino-UK relations had allegedly entered a “golden era” with bilateral trade worth $75 billion in 2015. London accounts for two thirds of renminbi payments outside mainland China and Hong Kong. China considered the UK a gateway to Europe. Difficulties over the nuclear power station at Hinckley Point, being built by France’s EDF and the China General Nuclear Power Group, and Huawei’s participation in the UK’s 5G broadband roll-out, however, sharply emphasised the economic stakes and political risks Brexit might entail for enhanced bilateral trading and investment with China.

Instead, the UK might enter the Japanese and Australian-led Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) involving eleven countries in East and South-East Asia and the Americas. A renewed UK presence in Asia might also offer the opportunity, in terms of regional security, of reviving the Five Power Defence Arrangements with Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand as a counterpart to building a more comprehensive framework of FTAs with India, the ASEAN bloc, with which the UK is the second-largest trading partner after the Netherlands, and with Commonwealth countries.

Given the geopolitical complexity, it might be prudent, at least in the short term, for the UK to focus on FTAs with developed economies in the Commonwealth and with the US. These states share both liberal market values and common law. Special Administrative Regions like Hong Kong and sovereign Commonwealth states like Canada, Malaysia, India, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore followed a constitutional and economic legacy bequeathed by the UK. Unlike the UK, however, they never abandoned sovereignty for a utopian vision of closer political union. Instead, they understood that “the liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they themselves have made”[10] and focused at the end of the Cold War on adapting institutions to the challenges and opportunities offered by globalisation.

By 2015, states following some version of an Anglo-liberal rule of law enjoyed high standards of living and were among the most attractive places on the globe to live. Singapore had a per capita GDP of US$53,000, significantly above the UK and most European states.[11] Singapore, like Hong Kong, is a regional trading hub which facilitates foreign direct investment through its investment-friendly business climate and superb infrastructure.

Ultimately a geostrategic framework of FTAs could lead to more ambitious schemes such as James C. Bennett’s proposed CANZUK, or even CANZUKUS, adding military co-operation, liberalised migration rules, and other co-operative measures to free trade with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US and, in time, Singapore, Malaysia and India. A revamped Western alliance structure could afford a framework not only for evolving economic linkages but also geopolitical ones, in terms of a shared language (English) and a shared political culture based on sovereign institutions, the rule of law and mutual defence.

A revived UK presence east of Suez would reinforce ties with Commonwealth states like India, Australia, New Zealand and the more advanced states of South-East Asia. The Royal Navy’s latest aircraft carrier could also add its presence to the evolving quadrilateral security dialogues held by India, Japan, the US and Australia, reinforcing the group’s determination to uphold respect for “international law and freedom of navigation”. The UK, in other words, would add weight to those regional states seeking to balance Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea and the South Pacific, and reinforce ASEAN’s commitment to a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality and rule-based multilateral order across the Indo-Pacific.

At the same time, Australian and US experience in negotiating trade deals across the Asia Pacific could also improve the UK’s often inept calculation of the links between trade and security. Since 2002, Australia has negotiated twenty-three FTAs including those with China, South Korea, Japan and the United States. Australia is also committed to the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement with eleven Asian and American economies (but not the US). A 2014 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade study found that “Free Trade Agreements lead to an increase in exports, production and GDP relative to what would have been the case without the FTA”.[12] The Australian-US FTA alone accounted for “a massive increase in trade and investment” since the agreement entered into force in 2005.[13]

Australia would have referred major national decisions like Huawei or Hinckley Point to its independent Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB). In the US, the Office of National Assessments (ONA) exercises oversight over any foreign investment that might affect critical national security infrastructure. The UK does not have an FIRB or ONA, nor any effective mechanism to adjudicate whether such acquisitions and investments are in the national interest. Given the myopic response to Huawei, and its potential to threaten long-term strategic calculations, a comprehensive strategic review must recognise from the outset that, if the consequence of withdrawal from the EU plunges Britain more deeply into a role that can benefit from and take heed of challenges in the wider world, then it should do so with a condign awareness of how countries with similar values and interests also weigh events and decisions.

Global Britain needs to take great care if Brexit is to fashion a positive global event rather than an extended damage limitation exercise. An examination of the options for industrial strategy and free trade agreements suggest that some version of the FTA model offers the UK an environment to embrace global market prices rather than the over-regulated EU environment. The fact that English is the language of international trade and business and that the UK can draw upon its Anglospheric connections with the US, India, Singapore and Australia means that the UK already enjoys a comparative advantage in dealing on a global rather than a regional basis.

National power is born of more than a large land area, a large population, or even a large economic output. Power is also generated from a country’s geography, culture and political institutions. A realist, as opposed to an idealist, foreign policy would allow for the best elements of Britain’s post-Cold War global approach to be adapted and updated in accordance with the changing character of the international order.

[1] See Brendan Simms Britain’s Europe Penguin: London 2016 p.229

[2] John Bew and Gabriel Elefterieu, Making Sense of British Foreign Policy after Brexit Policy Exchange Britain and the World Project July 2016 p. 2

[3] James Rogers, Core Assumptions and British Strategic Policy: Towards the next Foreign, Security and Defence Review Henry Jackson Society Global Britain Programme, January 2020 p.9

[4] Ibid p. 10

[5] Ibid p. 37

[6] Ibid p. 40

[7] Bew and Elefterieu Ibid p.5

[8] Bonnie Glaser and Deep Lal cited in B. Schreer, “Should Asia be afraid?” The National Interest 20 August 2014 p.2

[9] Gideon Rachman, Easternisation War and Peace in the Asian Century London: Bodley Head

[10] A. Cowley, “Of Liberty”, The Essays of Abraham Cowley (London: Scribner 1869) p1.

[11] According to the World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD

[12] Australian Government The Impact of Free Trade Agreements upon Australia 2014 http://www.thecie.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/RIRDC-north-Asian-FTAs-report.pdf

[13] Australian Government Australia United States Free Trade Agreement 2016 http://dfat.gov.au/trade/agreements/ausfta/pages/australia-united-states-fta.aspx