British Strategy, Britain's Place in the World: Some Idle Musings

Lately on KOW we have been talking about strategy, in particular British strategy. For myself, and I suspect many others, these discussions while interesting have also been somewhat frustrating. I can’t help but think that the questions being asked are not the correct ones—or more accurately they are not the fundamental ones. It is as though we are debating whether to build a castle with round towers or square towers before having agreed where to plant the foundations. It brings to mind the logic of the King of Swamp Castle from Monty Python’s Holy Grail.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJEgqhzwz0o]

Belatedly I noticed this article in the Daily Telegraph from a couple of weeks ago ‘We need to completely rethink our foreign policy’ by David Howell, Shadow Foreign and Commonwealth Minister. In it, says he:

…an amazing new world has evolved around us. The US remains a great and powerful nation, but its unipolar moment has passed. It no longer leads the world, because there is no single “top dog” in the old sense. Pax Americana is no more; and Western hegemony is in severe decline.

This is why it is surely time for a clean break, and a new strategic direction – or, at the very least, to answer some immediate and important questions for British foreign policy. Do we have the right stances and tones, as well as the right distribution of diplomatic resources, in our relations with Brussels, with the new rising powers of Asia and the Middle East, and especially with Washington? Or does President Obama’s brush-off of Gordon Brown in New York this week now tell us a different story?

Following on from that, do we have the right military and security dispositions to meet these new conditions? Are the international institutions of the 20th century the right ones for the new century? We take pride in belonging to so many of them – Nato, the EU, the United Nations Security Council, the World Trade Organisation – but are they still the best channels for projecting our aims and guarding our security today?

Are we investing in the Commonwealth as a power network of the future, embracing as it does some of the fastest growing and most dynamic nations on earth? Are we right to invest so much time and effort in institutional reform of the EU, and to channel so much of our overseas development efforts through it? Have we adjusted our foreign policy priorities to our new pattern of energy needs, environmental imperatives and climate change concerns?

Perhaps above all, do we have the right ministerial and administrative systems in London to adjust, flexibly and swiftly, to the new conditions, and the right balance and co-ordination between our major departments concerned with overseas affairs?

There is a single answer to all these questions: a blunt “no”.

Well, I agree the answer is no and since he has thrown down the gauntlet I might as well pick it up and have a go at his first question, do we have the right understanding of our place in the world? To his credit, Howell asks not just whether we’ve the right tone and balance in our relations not just with Brussels and Washington but also with the rising powers of Asia. Typically, the debate here tends to involve our relationship with just two major forces –the USA and the EU—and our potential role tends to be defined as fitting into one of three slots:

• pro-American;
• pro-European; or,
• Atlantic Bridge.

What’s wrong with this, as Richard North noted in comments on KOW is that we can be guaranteed to fudge the question. It is worth a long quote:

Herein lies the unresolved problem. There are those two competing matrices, the US-led coalition, and the Euro-centric coalition (ERRF etc). In doctrinal and objective terms, far from being compatible, these are effectively mutually exclusive – and we cannot afford to take an active part in both. Thus, we are going to have to make a choice … which is not possible in the context of our membership of the EU, when we have treaty obligations, while at the same time we are committed to supporting the US-led effort in Afghanistan. One or the other must go.

One can see, however, the new administration – as did the current one – refusing to make a choice, and even refusing to accept that we have to make a choice, thus continuing the fudge which has dogged current defence planning. The defence problem is insoluble until or unless we make the choice and since we have no intention of making that choice, the problem is insoluble.

What bothers me is that each of these three putative foreign policy choices is flawed in one way or another. The ‘Atlantic Bridge’ option is brining diminishing returns. This bothers me because were the choice mine I would think this to be the best one. In a world of rising non-Western powers there is a compelling case (i.e., fear—see Domenique Moisi’s Geopolitics of Emotion) to be made that Europe and America need to stick together pretty forcefully. But things are not really headed that way at the moment anyway. On the other hand, the ‘pro-American’ option, where my  gut feeling also might take me, runs aground on the fact that most of the rest of the  UK population considers that it is reducing us to the status of a vassal. I don’t agree with this; in fact I think there is a ‘special relationship’—just not in the place that people usually look for it. At the political level I reckon Americans scoff at Britain’s pretention of playing Greece to their Rome, as Patrick Porter puts it. (Perhaps he’ll weigh in with some thoughts on the elusive special relationship about which I know he has been writing lately). But in the military? A while ago I was invited to take part in a 3-day exercise of the ABCA armies. I blogged about it ‘ABCA: The Alliance You Never Heard Of’. I found it eye-opening the degree to which American, British, Australian and Canadian (and New Zealnad) officers genuinely seemed to consider each other part of the same ‘team’. It was described to me in the bar as ‘the alliance that works’ (or ‘fights’, I can’t recall the words precisely though I think in this instance they meant the same thing). In another comment on the earlier British strategy post somebody asked why there were American officers in the MOD Strategy Unit. A fair question, perhaps, but I wonder if the questioner was aware that a lead drafter new US Quadrennial Defense Review, Shawn Brimley, is a Canadian? A month ago BGEN H.R. McMaster was in the UK consulting widely on the US Army Capstone Concept which he is drafting. Honestly, I think the Americans are prepared to listen. Are we prepared to say anything useful is an apposite question.

On the other other hand, the ‘pro-European’ option fails by virtue of the fact that it is epically unpopular. A problem with the recent IPPR report on British security policy which I blogged about a while ago in ‘Her Majesty’s Wasting Assets’ is that an approach that favours European integration runs up against two factors: 1, we’re going to have a Tory government and Tory opinion will not wear it at any price; and, 2 The EU is simply very unpopular in this country, which is why no one dares to let the public have a  say on the matter for, by and large, the polls show that less than a third of the public are pro-EU, close to a majority wants out at any one time (would they actually vote for this if push came to shove?) and a lot of those who want in only want in as part of a very loose free trade agreement. An alliance is based in part, ultimately probably a large part, on sentiment. Regardless of any structural issues that suggest European integration, in the abstract, is the best move there is really insufficient sentiment behind it. Frankly, FWIW, I detest the idea.

Speaking of sentiment, one hears a lot lately about a growing cultural rift between the USA and the UK whose values and worldviews are drifting apart but I don’t see it; on the contrary, in fact. This department has more and better American PhD students now than ever, many of whom are coming from or headed to influential positions in US government. There’s a massive cultural interchange between Britain and America—as much as before, and probably more. Furthermore I would argue that it is less biased toward Americanisms being imported into the UK than it has been in the past. Case in point: I can say ‘the theory of a cultural rift between the US and the UK is bollocks’ and Americans will get it just fine. You might say that none of this speaks to more profound issues of policy and worldview, that it has no impact on the broader strategic question, or on the dynamics of power relations. I humbly submit that you would be wrong; I’d say we’re gradually creeping together.

So if neither of these three frameworks are really doing it for us, are there any alternative approaches? I will concede that merely because I find unappetizing all the options on the menu that the chef can/will cook something more palatable; perhaps the ingredients are what they are and the the world is as it is. But… and here’s where I come back to David Howell’s question about the Commonwealth—an institution I have long thought underutilized—is it not sensible to explore the possibility of bandwagoning with other powers that are allied/aligned with the USA but which suffer, as the lion (beaver, marsupial, whatever) sleeping with the elephant, in a similar manner to ourselves, from a disparity of power. Why not pursue closer relations with Australia and, particularly, Canada? When I wrote earlier about the ABCA I said its aims were ‘… more limited and short-term than they really ought to be.’  What if the situation with respect to the ABCA was less A + B + C + A, with each of the lesser powers being bruised and feeling used in turn by the affectionate embraces of the leviathan, and more A + (B+C+A)? And so on. This would be good for all. It would also be good for Britain which is still perceived in many quarters of the world (notably in the region of those ‘Rising Powers’ which concern us) as a useful ally, on the basis that we’re powerful enough to be a useful contact but not so powerful as to be able to dominate anyone.

There is clearly a strong institutional bias against this. I can also anticipate critics saying this is all some longing for a half-imagined long since past state of affairs. That might even be true—at least partially!–I confess.  But if we’re to think strategically about our foreign and defence policy we must understand clearly where we are and what we want to be. If we don’t like the status quo on the former and we fear where aimless blundering will take us on the latter then isn’t it time to think ‘out of the box’ just a bit? Would it really be unworkable? Are we not doing something like this because it is a stupid, unworkable idea or is it strategic myopia and bureaucratic inertia? All comments accepted. Fire away.

**With thanks and co-authoring credit to my brilliant student and esteemed colleague Anthony Cormack with whom I have been corresponding about this by email and who will recognize his words and thoughts in this post.