A Union Without Faith or Law: Part Two
Global Britain or Vanishing Kingdom?
In the second of two essays exploring the state of the United Kingdom post-Brexit, David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith argue that a woke foreign policy establishment and its academic apologists undermine rather than promote the UK’s national interest.
As we showed in Part 1 of our exploration of the post-Brexit world, the Conservative government has failed to make the domestic case for the union since its beginnings in 1707 or for its future as a coherent and stable framework for a sovereign parliamentary democracy. By 2022, Johnson’s chaotic optimism and his inability to exercise control over his office and advisory staff, undermined his authority and divided his party. The divisions in government and its civil service reflected a wider anxiety concerning the economic prospects and future stability of the realm. The incoherence at the heart of the government’s domestic agenda served to expose the constitutive dissonances in its post-Brexit foreign policy.
Since 2016, proponents of Brexit had envisaged Britain once more playing a global role promoting free trade and a liberal, rules based, multilateral, international order. In an early attempt at appraising Britain’s options in a paper entitled, Making Sense of British Foreign Policy After Brexit, the historian John Bew, now a key figure in the Downing Street Policy Unit, observed that the ‘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’.
Taking Bew’s paper as its cue, in December 2020, the Johnson government advertised its intention to undertake the ‘largest 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 to use the UK’s huge expenditure on international development, and the role of technology’. The fruits of this strategic review were eventually published in March 2021.
Whilst Global Britain in a Competitive Age: The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy clarified important aspects of Britain’s future military posture, it left several hostages to fortune: in relation to Europe; the liberal international order it seeks to promote: the rising totalitarian power of China; and the decaying authoritarianism of Russia. Events since the instauration of the new American President, who showed little inclination to pursue a free trade agreement or facilitate closer ties with the UK, merely added to a list of unresolved policy issues.
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