It’s time to stand on our own feet and make painful choices – including on aid
4 min read
The UK must be clear-headed about what lies in front of us. That includes shifting our emphasis from soft power to hard power.
A decade ago, Britain’s foreign relations rested on two load-bearing relationships: membership of the EU and a special association with the US. The British electorate decided to dispense with the former, and we are watching the latter – along with our wider international assumptions – be vaporised in front of our eyes. It would be foolhardy to assume there will be a return to ‘normal service’. The road ahead seems more likely to become increasingly treacherous.
We now need European leaders to understand the scale of this new peril and respond with corresponding decisiveness and verve.
The relationship with the United States remains the most important show in town. It is Britain’s biggest security protector, intelligence collaborator and trading partner. All of these planks of our national wellbeing should be championed and defended with relentless focus and seriousness. We should avoid theatrical displays of distancing from Donald Trump: playing to a domestic gallery is juvenile politics when the circumstances are so consequential. Britain’s new ambassador to Washington is a seasoned and skilful operator, and we need him to be successful. We must also demonstrate our indispensable value to the US. Of course it is nothing like a partnership of equals, but nor is it insignificant.
Britain should also work closely with other European nations on common security objectives. That does not mean re-litigating Brexit: shared strategic resolve does not require political union. Britain must demonstrate constructive impulses and political maturity, and the rest of Europe also needs to be clear-headed about its interests. Britain is the EU’s second most important external partner after the US, not a supplicant. On defence and intelligence, Britain is a European leader, and we should act, and be treated, accordingly.
Meanwhile, Britain needs to extend its global networks with an unsentimental, strategic mindset. Feel-good, soft-focus diplomacy can serve a purpose, but our greatest adversaries do not indulge in it for a reason. They are hard-headed and pragmatic, always alert to their national interest, and the dangers are too great now for us not to match them.
That means finding new synergies with our most dependable allies. It means valuing the Commonwealth but not deluding ourselves that all its members are equally friendly. It means being honest about the reality of groupings like the BRICs: an explicitly anti-Western organisation, albeit partially moderated by Brazil and India. Britain needs greater imagination too. Latin America is a continent of democracies, with free speech, the rule of law and an attachment to human rights. Its countries are courted by China, while being neglected by the US, and largely ignored by Britain. It is mystifying that we seem so indifferent to the potential.
Let us be clear-minded and confront some difficult truths. Here are three: 2.3 per cent of GDP is not a big enough defence budget to frighten aggressors or fully reassure allies. Borrowing over £13bn extra every year to give that money away in overseas development aid (ODA) – sometimes intelligently; sometimes wastefully – sits uncomfortably with an under-resourced military. And our foreign diplomacy is being done on the cheap: too few people; junior staff making up shortfalls; senior employees underpaid.
We need to take a fresh look at the MoD, FCDO and ODA budgets in the round, shifting the emphasis from soft to hard power. That alone will not be sufficient to meet the scale of the challenge, however, so domestic priorities will also need to be examined. Confronted by greater threats abroad, spending freely at home to keep afloat an unrealistic social contract is not sustainable.
JD Vance’s Munich speech was spectacularly bad-mannered and, with his unwillingness to confront the realities of Russian barbarism, curiously negligent. But we would be foolish to just huff and puff and ignore it. Partly because, although the picture he painted of a bloated and compromised European political culture was cartoonish and simplistic, it contained elements worth contemplating. And partly because we cannot now say that we have not been explicitly warned. We need to learn to stand solidly on our own feet. And fast.
Jeremy Browne is CEO of Canning House and a former Lib Dem MP for Taunton Deane and Foreign Office minister.
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