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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Britain is no longer the great power it once was. Caught between an unmoored America and a fractured Europe, it confronts rising authoritarian challenges from China and Russia, while its domestic debates drift into abstract moralising. Lacking a coherent vision for the future, the country risks sliding further into managed decline, its global relevance steadily eroding. Yet such a trajectory is not inevitable. In this clear-eyed assessment of Britain's economic, ideological and strategic vulnerabilities, Azeem Ibrahim identifies the essential building blocks of renewal. He outlines a programme of reforms that will allow a genuinely independent Britain to capitalise on its core strengths. After all, as a lean and specialised nuclear power with one of the world's most sophisticated intelligence networks, as well as world-class universities and a cultural reach second only to the US, the UK can still shape global affairs. A Greater Britain argues that a clear strategic anchor and bold leadership are needed if the UK is to convert its advantages into real influence. By formulating a pioneering Knowledge Power Doctrine, the book offers a global strategy for a once powerful nation, providing nothing short of a roadmap back to British greatness.
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i“Azeem Ibrahim has produced a powerful call for Britain to revivify some of the strategic traditions which served it so well in the past. In this important book, he advocates a shift away from cautious managerialism to a renewal of national purpose, in both domestic and international affairs.”
Professor John Bew, former chief foreign policy adviser to four UK Prime Ministers
“In A Greater Britain, Azeem Ibrahim highlights the qualities that have long made Britain a force for good. He outlines the reforms that are needed if the country is to realise its full potential and argues for a bold grand strategy – one befitting a leading middle power with strong strategic partnerships – to help shape a global order fit for the twenty-first century.”
Emma Sky OBE, founding director of Yale’s International Leadership Center
“Azeem Ibrahim offers a bold and thought-provoking contribution to the debate about Britain’s role in a changing world. Whether one agrees with every prescription or not, his strategic clarity and global perspective make this an important and timely book for anyone serious about the UK’s future.”
Sir Sajid Javid, former Chancellor of the Exchequer
“Azeem Ibrahim’s compelling book is a masterful and urgent wake-up call for Britain’s policymakers and thought leaders. It is an emphatic rejection of the idea of British decline and offers a powerful agenda for British regeneration and renewal, based upon the firm foundations of the transatlantic alliance. The bold ideas presented by Ibrahim, rooted in decades of experience as a leading national security expert, are essential reading on both sides of the Atlantic at a critical moment for the free world.”
Dr Nile Gardiner, director, Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation
ii“Azeem Ibrahim is one of the world’s most prominent commentators.”
Lord Robertson, former secretary general of NATO
“A closely reasoned, sober and compelling critique of British statecraft and how it can be improved.”
Brendan Simms, professor of the history of international relations, University of Cambridge
“A Greater Britain is a bold, intellectually rigorous and timely work that challenges conventional thinking about Britain’s role in a rapidly fragmenting global order. Azeem Ibrahim combines academic depth with real-world policy insight to deliver a compelling blueprint for British statecraft, growth and influence in this developing century. This is essential reading for policymakers, business leaders and anyone serious about the future of Britain.”
Sir Brandon Lewis, former Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
“A Greater Britain is a bracing call for the UK to rediscover the purpose, confidence and strategic discipline that once made it a global leader. Dr Ibrahim masterfully outlines how Britain need not accept managed decline as inevitable in an era when the threat of an increasingly authoritarian world order demands our attention. Combining sharp diagnosis with a coherent programme for renewal, he sets out how Britain can reclaim its voice through economic strength, institutional reform, strategic alliances and cultural confidence. This is an urgent call for a nation that must choose relevance over drift and purpose over paralysis, as it puts to work the potential squandered by years of timid leadership.”
Dr Alan Mendoza, chief foreign policy adviser, Reform UK
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Contents
Foreword
by Professor Sir Hew Strachan
This is a challenging book – in the best possible sense. You won’t agree with everything that Azeem Ibrahim says, and he would be disappointed if you did. He proposes a coherent programme of changes across areas of policy which, in most cases, government treats as though they are separate and independent. He seeks to create unity in the pursuit of the national interest. That objective does not mean that his is an argument for the resurrection of some imperial past. Although he can be ‘anti-woke’, he is not illiberal.
Azeem Ibrahim’s prescriptions are designed to shore up Britain’s place as a democracy and make it robust enough to be a leader in global multilateralism. Given that credential, A Greater Britain relies on debate and political difference, but it assumes that the final result of democracy in its best sense is consensus and a shared sense of direction. For Ibrahim, the lesson of populism is not that Britain is on a route to authoritarianism and certainly not to what he calls ‘managed democracy’ of the sort practised in Russia or Iran. Instead, it is that policies need to connect with the electorate, not with elite preoccupations forged according to the templates of academic theories or by the scaremongering of far-right nationalists. viiiThis is an argument from the centre, even if it can at times borrow from ideas which have been brandished by those on the extremes of British politics.
Ibrahim, a Briton originally from Scotland and now working in the US, sees both democracy and the UK as in decline. The latter was dealt a hammer-blow by the 2008 crash; the mechanism for its recovery saved the banks at the expense of their private account-holders. These taxpayers have still not recouped what they lost in real terms. As a result, falling productivity has required successive governments to increase taxes to generate sufficient funds to maintain expenditure, leading to a counter-productive spiral, worsened by the impact of the Covid pandemic. The result is that the status quo is not in fact static but, in Ibrahim’s term, ‘declinist’. His ‘grand strategy’ depends on ‘going for growth’. Britain cannot deliver on its ‘self-conception’ as a ‘moral, democratic nation’ unless it has the economic resilience to sustain that ambition. This is not some absurd request ‘to make Britain great again’ but a design to make it better at what it would like to do – and, crucially, at what it should be capable of doing. His vision for Britain, set out in the introduction, is for it to be ‘a lean, specialised, intermediary power’.
As the US pivots to Asia and as Britain confronts the costs of its withdrawal from the European Union, the UK should maximise the potential gains from its position between the two. The opportunities in the first instance are not so much those of geography but of political circumstance. The US is increasingly disinclined to sustain the multilateral international order which it set up after 1945; Europe is too bureaucratically and legally hamstrung to be fleet of foot. Britain, as a relatively small state, should build its relations with both but recognise its own dependence on the multilateral ixstructures – the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the principles of free trade – on which the post-Second World War system was built. China is manoeuvring itself into those structures but is not doing so as a liberal democracy. Although Britain cannot match China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it can provide access to financial markets that are transparent and uncorrupted.
‘Grand strategy’ is the label which gives these ideas coherence. When the UK last debated the need for ‘grand strategy’ in 2010, after the return of the coalition government led by David Cameron, both the Prime Minister himself and those close to him were inclined to pooh-pooh the term as redolent of empire. They were echoed by pundits in the US, who were wont to argue that only great powers can have grand strategies. That is nonsense. Expanding powers that have yet to face the competition which their growth generates don’t yet need grand strategies; contracting powers, facing relative decline, do. Britain did not need – or have – a grand strategy in the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was the first industrialised power in the world and when its goods commanded world markets. It doesneed one a century later when it does not have that primacy. One of the roles of grand strategy is prioritisation – the ability to accept the opportunity costs of hard choices without fudging the consequences (or not much).
Ibrahim puts national interest at the heart of a British grand strategy for the future. He addresses the unpalatable consequences which that objective creates for many: over climate change; refugees, asylum and migration; and human rights and international legal norms. Not for a moment does he dismiss those concerns. Rather, he suggests our preoccupation with them – and the need to find sensible ways through them – are part of Britain’s brand as a xmultilateralist power committed to global order. His crucial point is that their resolutions are not ends in themselves but means to an end.
Although this is a book about grand strategy, it has little to say about hard power. (A chapter is dedicated to soft power, but it rightly argues that soft power is not an end in itself but a means to exercise influence – not least if it ultimately becomes necessary to wield hard power.) Ibrahim praises the 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) for recognising Britain’s economic weakness, but takes it to task for not addressing the issues of energy, climate, diplomacy, statecraft and finance. His criticism takes us to the heart of the problem. None of these policy areas lay within the scope of the SDR: its remit was confined specifically to defence and its scope, however broad, was limited to what the Treasury deemed affordable. His target should have been not the SDR but the National Security Strategy (NSS): its task in the past has been to cover the breadth of Ibrahim’s demands. Perversely published after the SDR, the 2025 NSS was a much less substantial document. It failed to address wider policies left hanging by the SDR – and that is now the challenge.
The grand strategy which Ibrahim proposes is a task for the whole of government, not just the Ministry of Defence. Other departments, including the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and, above all, the Treasury (to name only the most obvious) need to buy in to its conclusions. They won’t do so of their own volition; for that to happen, all those agencies would have to subordinate the shibboleths of their own organisations to the demands of the national interest. Such change cannot be driven from the bottom up. For process to be replaced by results, xiits implementation must come from the top down – and, even if there is a will, there will be immense difficulties in finding a way.
The problems are both intellectual and institutional. The SDR reached most directly into others’ domains with its attention to national resilience, in terms of home defence, of deterrence, of societal engagement and of public responsibility. The response to the Covid pandemic at community and local level across the UK showed that society is more responsive and resilient than its government thought – or than the then government was itself. Although the Conservatives’ Integrated Review Refresh promised a National Resilience Strategy in 2023, it produced only a loose National Resilience Framework. Similarly, the Labour government’s 2025 NSS left its response to a Resilience Action Plan, which passed by largely unrecognised when it was published in July 2025.
Ideas governing and shaping the national interest will also only gain traction if they have an institutional home. The one department of state in the UK with the requisite breadth is the Cabinet Office and the person and the body which it serves: the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. In 2010, the coalition government created a National Security Council (NSC) to formulate shared solutions and appointed a National Security Adviser (NSA) to support the Prime Minister and to chair the committee of officials whose ministries were represented on the NSC. No Prime Minister since then has followed a common pattern in how he or she handles the NSC. Under Boris Johnson, the council scarcely met, and he and Liz Truss effectively dismantled what they had inherited. The NSC has regained some ground since then, but in 2024 its precise authority and remit were clouded by the Prime Minister’s appointment of Jonathan Powell as the NSA. Powell is undoubtedly a multilateralist and an experienced negotiator with a formidable reputation. xiiHowever, as a political appointee, he has no authority over civil servants; he is the first NSA not to have been a career civil servant. The government has refused to permit him, unlike his predecessors, to appear before the Joint Parliamentary Committee for the National Security Strategy. He is also operating out of No. 10, not the Cabinet Office. Such conditions are hardly conducive to creating either proper accountability, the committee’s raison d’être, or to promoting public understanding of national strategy.
If the ideas advanced by Azeem Ibrahim’s AGreaterBritainare to get oxygen, they need to be heard, discussed and debated. That process won’t start in government, or at least not at first. It will begin with you, the reader. The exchange of ideas can confront received wisdom and could ultimately shape policies. It is our best chance. According to the book’s author, there is not much time. ‘Britain is heading for economic and demographic decline so severe’, Azeem Ibrahim concludes, ‘that none of us may live long enough to see it recover.’
Introduction
Britain in a Fracturing World Order
In 1945, as the Second World War came to an end, a bankrupt but victorious Britain helped lay the cornerstone of a new international order. The post-war Bretton Woods agreement – which set up a new system of international monetary rules under the aegis of the United Nations, establishing institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank – promised stability, open markets and collective security under American leadership. When Winston Churchill returned to power in 1951, Britain still clung to all the trappings and accoutrements of a superpower. In fact, against every financial strain, Britain’s armed forces grew to 872,000 men in service in 1952, given oxygen by US and Canadian loans despite harsh austerity and rationing at home. The Suez Crisis of 1956 proved that Britain could not withstand US economic and diplomatic pressure and marked the symbolic end of its ability to act without coalition, but Britain’s direction of travel was clear: it was already dependent on the US and already anxious about its isolation from post-war Europe. Ambition and financial reality 2collided, but over the following three decades leaders failed to coalesce around a new foreign policy to replace the ‘three majestic circles’ doctrine advocated by Churchill: Commonwealth, Europe and the English-speaking world, particularly the US.
The drift and decline of the late 1960s and 1970s can partly be explained by Britain’s failure to choose a coherent path. Commentators of all political stripes often wrongly fall into a kind of teleological fatalism when discussing this period of British history: that we were fated to enter Europe or, equally, that we were destined to leave it. In fact, much came down to circumstance. The contextual reality of competing anxieties about the value of pound sterling, the US, our nuclear deterrent, the end of empire and a fear of missing out on Europe left many aspects of the British state in that paralysed dimension we now call ‘managed decline’. We clung to our old industries at great cost – just as we had once clung to our foreign protectorates. The great irony, of course, was that Britain was in one sense refusing to adapt to the very economic and geostrategic order it was pivotal in bringing about in the first place.
Britain’s position, post-Brexit and post-Covid, has so far been a frustrated repeat of those wasted decades. We are once again clinging to old habits and old assumptions and once more refusing to recognise our new reality. The new authoritarian threat coming from Russia and China, the dynamics of mass migration, the weakening of international institutions and the decline and impotence of Europe have together changed the way Britain must posture strategically. Yet no real change has been mustered. Revolutions in the digital economy, energy, AI and financial technology have given Britain considerable opportunities, yet our leadership has stifled them with tax, regulation and a naive and short-sighted energy policy. Just as in the late ’60s, in our refusal to adapt we have once 3more turned to high tax and high spend, and by clinging to the old we have crowded out the new.
A Greater Britain is an attempt, built fundamentally from strategic analysis, to describe the new world Britain finds itself in and to design the foreign and domestic policy that will best allow it to deliver prosperity at home and secure its interests abroad. The book argues that Britain must become a lean, specialised intermediary power – pivoted towards the US in terms of security, while leading in key future industries through aggressive economic reform, permissive trade policy based on mutual recognition and strategic diplomacy rooted in realism, not nostalgia or naive appeasement.
* * *
For decades, the liberal international order underpinned unprecedented global economic growth and relative peace among the great powers. Having seen off its final rival after the Cold War, many believed that Western liberal democracy had triumphed for good – the ‘end of history’ in Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase. Particularly after Margaret Thatcher’s reforms in the 1980s, Britain became a prime beneficiary of this international legal order – a highly globalised, high-wage, service-led economy deeply integrated in highly profitable value chains.
Britain and its allies assumed that open markets and democratic governance would spread inexorably. Our militaries are now therefore designed for counterterrorism, irregular warfare and peacekeeping operations rather than conventional war. Yet that democratising progress has gone into reverse, as conventional warfare returns to Europe and an alliance of authoritarian powers cooperates to undermine the democratic West, while offering an alternative power 4bloc for third countries to align with. The norms and institutions that once seemed unshakeable have been weakened by financial crises, geopolitical rivalries and a wave of anti-establishment sentiment. They are being replaced by new norms of non-interference and national sovereignty, which are more appealing to (and provide cover for) growing autocratic nations like Turkey, South Africa and even India to adopt a non-aligned stance, which gives yet more breathing room for autocracy. In my 2022 book Authoritarian Century, I argued that Western leaders after 1991 learned the wrong lesson from their ideological victory, embracing a complacent ‘total liberalism’ that ignores discontents and abandons dynamism in favour of a new orthodoxy. A global orthodoxy is less compelling and drives third nations away.
This hubris has had important consequences for Europe in particular, with the post-Maastricht Treaty (1992) European Union perhaps the purest institutional embodiment of ‘total liberalism’. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the suffocating lack of economic dynamism (in part a structural product of the single currency and the consequent protectionism) has meant that Europe has failed to return to the same significant economic growth that the US has gone on to achieve. Indeed, stagnation in Europe actually spurred leaders to lean further into their orthodoxy. From 1 January 2010, when the Lisbon Treaty came into effect, to 1 January 2024, the volume of EU regulation increased by 101 per cent. It is no coincidence that Britain shares with Europe the same disappointing trends on investment, innovation, productivity and energy policy.
The political demoralisation caused by the Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis in the West was being acutely felt by the second half of the 2010s. A new strain of anti-establishment academic discourse arose, which sympathised strongly with enemies of the West, 5and which quite wrongly saw Western interventionism as the root cause of most of the world’s poverty and violence. While headed by politicians including Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the view permeated wider society and did considerable damage to the moral confidence of the West.
Russia and China began taking a more openly confrontational stance against Western democracies, while Britain and Europe in particular failed to take notice, in the naive hope that the world was, after all, still bound to democratise. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, just as China began constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea. While Europe and the US did pursue sanctions against Russia, the sanctions were not coordinated with a coherent attempt to build strategic independence from, and capabilities against, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. High-profile espionage cases were ignored, as Europe continued to increase its dependence on Russian gas while relying on both the Chinese manufacturing base and Chinese rare earth metals. Let us not forget the UK announced a ‘golden era’ of relations with China in 2015.
Russia in particular specialises in hybrid warfare and disruption below the threshold of open war. China has capabilities exceeded only by the US in cyberwarfare and cyberespionage, while it also has the economic heft to create an array of parallel international institutions – such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS development bank – and projects like the Belt and Road Initiative (discussed in Chapter 1), to directly challenge Western soft power. Warnings about both Russia and China were consistently made at the highest levels of government. Yet much like our forebears in the 1950s, unreconciled with the realities of the end of empire, we were unwilling to recognise the risks and dynamics of the end of our unipolar world order. 6
The tumult in foreign policy circles following the return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2024 was therefore not an entirely unexpected jolt. Indeed, Trump’s United States has finally done what the country has threatened to do for at least the last two decades: definitively shift its geostrategic focus from Europe to the Pacific. While this shift is well reasoned and perhaps necessary, it has severed an important anchor of the Western alliance at the same time as Western leadership is becoming increasingly temperamental and inward-focused. It comes, of course, as the EU struggles to project unified diplomatic or military power, while most of its constituent nations, similarly to Britain, lack any significant, deployable, conventional military strength, and have no credible plan to change that.
* * *
The pivot of the US away from Europe heralds the ceremonial retirement of the Atlantic Charter. Signed in 1941, several months before the US joined the war, the Atlantic Charter was the seminal document upon which the rules-based international order was to be established. Decolonisation, the United Nations, NATO and the principles of self-determination saw their most coherent and forceful defence therein. The Charter also provided the foundation for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO). It bears repeating once more that Britain has benefited enormously from these organisations, even if they have faced two decades of decline.
Instead of deepening integration under shared rules, nations are increasingly invoking national security and fabricating findings of anti-competitive market distortions to justify protectionist tariffs 7and export controls. The WTO, once the guarantor of a rules-based trading system, has effectively been paralysed – its highest appeals court has sat defunct for years after the United States blocked new judges. The admission of China into the WTO at the turn of the century turned out to be a Trojan Horse – high-profile backers concede that China has been largely responsible for the destruction of the WTO. Former Republican Representative Kevin Brady, who was one such backer, concluded, ‘It’s now clear China had no intention of living within a rules-based trading system.’
The IMF and World Bank, the twin pillars of Bretton Woods, are not yet beyond repair. While their governance has failed to adjust to the rise of emerging economies, the economic need to manage unpayable debts and geopolitical need to compete with more predatory Chinese finance mean their role remains secure, even if significant reform is required. The UN Security Council is often paralysed in the face of atrocities and wars, as great power vetoes by the five permanent members (the US, the UK, France, Russia and China) stymie collective action. International courts like the International Court of Justice (ICJ) exist but are increasingly weaponised by warring parties rather than universally respected, while the voting patterns of judges suggest, to put it mildly, that rulings are frequently political in nature.
While we are witnessing a partial return to the great-power politics of the early twentieth century, international institutions will continue to play a role. Even as we enter a more coldly realist world, these frameworks remain legally enshrined and are the most convenient forum for certain kinds of dispute settlement. Analysts are correct that the following decades will see a decline in multilateralism as the global order fragments, but this does not mean that soft power or institutional influence will hold no sway, nor that many 8challenges of the twenty-first century will not play out through an international institutional framework. Practically, however, these institutions will have to learn to coexist with rival claimants to international legitimacy.
At a national level, Freedom House reports that 2023 marked the eighteenth consecutive year of worldwide democratic decline. Many of the world’s most established democracies have seen their norms eroded and institutions politicised, while outright autocracy has resurged in nations that once seemed on a path to liberalisation. Economically, decades of inequality and dislocation – aggravated by the 2008 financial crisis and rapid globalisation – left many citizens feeling betrayed by elites. Politically, mainstream parties often failed to address these grievances, creating fertile ground for firebrand outsiders. To a large extent, the economic and foreign policy failures associated with neoliberalism, or rather ‘total liberalism’, fatally undermined public faith in liberal democracy, yielding disaffected masses and opportunistic populists ready to capitalise on that anger.
In Brazil, and then in the United States itself, populists gained power and began to chip away at the very checks and balances that define liberal governance – attacking independent judiciaries and blurring ethical and procedural boundaries in pursuit of unchecked authority. In the case of Trump, perhaps the most totemic action was the suspension of access to federal buildings for firms such as Paul, Weiss ‘pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest’. Given that functioning as a law firm all but requires access to federal buildings – which includes the courts – this amounts to an embargo on any firm. Their crime was their politicised involvement in pro bono work against the government during Trump’s first term. Within a week, Paul, Weiss LLP had 9publicly renounced its DEI initiatives and promised pro bono legal services to ‘support the administration’s initiatives’.1 While, granted, firms like these had made themselves political while Trump was in opposition and could not command the trust of government, the fact remains that this would not have been possible only a decade ago. Both the law and the executive would have behaved better. We will explore the reasons for this, but it is important to note early on that there is intentionality in foreign interference to weaken these institutions.
Alliances founded on shared values have been strained by the rise of illiberal actors in member states. For example, the European Union has grappled with member governments in Hungary and Poland that challenge, if not the rule of law itself, then the principles of European and international law. Yet on the flip side, they have also intervened in Romanian elections, revealing that their opposition is consequentialist rather than strictly principled. Indeed, to a considerable extent, populists have succeeded precisely because liberal leaders, typified by those in European institutions, have felt empowered to ignore the votes and concerns of low-status voters. Liberalism must look inwards and recognise that elite control over the judiciary and bureaucracy has caused elite interests to come first, structurally. Concerns like the Chagos Islands, the transgender issue and net zero have been elevated to the very top of the British agenda, despite the fact that for the majority of Britons, these issues are moralising abstractions, while concerns about immigration, housing and price levels have only recently started to scratch through into concrete policy change.
Britain would rather remain engaged than give up on the institutions that have helped bring prosperity to the world, but loyalty must be to the rules-based order itself and not to the particular 10organisations and not at all costs. The reality Britain faces – and with which we must contend in this book – is that many international institutions are compromised by Russia and China and that we engage with these institutions ultimately to serve British interests. It is not for Britain to sacrifice its fundamental interests in order to serve international institutions but quite the other way around.
* * *
The key issue to unpick – in institutions as in foreign policy and defence – is the retreat of American leadership as the linchpin of the international order. The United States provided security guarantees, underwrote global institutions and acted as the ultimate backstop in most crises, at least those of significance for regional balances of power and global supply chains. The US’s new, unpredictable global posture, which is partially a response to costly entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan, demands that Britain acts with intentionality and strategy.
It is worth noting the shifting sands in geopolitics on top of the slower and more profound tectonic changes beneath. Recent US involvement against Iran may seem at first glance to indicate a renewed commitment to its former role as global policeman. Yet the details do not support that view. US involvement has for years been limited to strikes against key Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) generals. The US bombing of Iranian nuclear targets came only after the significant destruction of Iran’s proxies by Israel and in the context of a hot war between the two powers, in which the US’s role, bargained by Trump, was ultimately de-escalatory. At every moment in said involvement, the key US anxiety was not to 11get drawn into the Middle East and to preserve as much capability as possible in the Pacific Theatre. The underlying trends, beyond the flux and noise, are of a less interventionist US focused increasingly on China.
Trump withdrew the US from international agreements (most notably the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear deal), slapped tariffs on allies as readily as on rivals and even reportedly mused about quitting NATO. He strongly prefers transactional bargaining and leverage over the integrative bargaining intrinsic to diplomatic ‘repeat business’. Earlier missteps – particularly President Obama’s hesitation to enforce his ‘red line’ in Syria in 2013 – had already signalled to some that Washington’s resolve to enforce its rules was conditional. As Washington’s focus has also shifted towards the Indo-Pacific and competition with China, and European leaders contend with a possible vacuum in their region, Britain must make another choice. While economically the question of ‘Europe or America?’ need not be binary, in terms of military posture Britain must pick a theatre of focus for the coming decades. That requires a clear-minded assessment of revisionist and revanchist powers, terrorism and economic interest; an understanding of Britain’s strengths and specialised capabilities: technology, finance, cyber; and an operational analysis of where and with which allies Britain can best coordinate to further our interests.
Britain is no longer individually capable of projecting conventional power against near-peer rivals. Any operation it performs will have to be executed under the umbrella of the US Armed Forces. Compared to the UK pre-Suez, or indeed compared to the Britain during the Iraq War, our conventional hard power is wielded from Washington DC or alongside European allies. Yet, with Trump back in the White House, Britain now must deal with the reality that 12the rules-based international order is potentially losing its principal (and some might argue, sole) defender. While the indomitable US economy can survive outside the web of international treaties and agreements that it has constructed, the British economy cannot. A US in the process of disengaging from the world – with an increasingly isolationist stance from both political parties – combined with a growing anti-Western coalition of China and Russia, makes a tilt away from the United States less painful today than it has been at any other time in living memory.
Engagement from third nations in international institutions is key to Britain’s strategy to retain global influence through these diplomatic channels. The value of our permanent seat at the UN Security Council and our newly acquired independent seat at the WTO relies on the ongoing relevance of these institutions and their robustness in the face of authoritarian challenge. Bolstering these institutions and maintaining third nations’ engagement is contingent upon the West’s continued ability to offer valuable economic partnerships. Much of the West hopes that its climate technology will reinforce our key value proposition: that our finance, our technology and our security expertise make partnerships with the West more valuable than with anyone else.
Yet, again, this is becoming less true each year. Chinese investment across Asia, Latin America and Africa is granting them still better access to key raw materials and rare earth metals. These investments buy influence to sway more votes at the UN, thereby sapping away Western diplomatic leadership one vote at a time; China uses this influence to install loyalists within global institutions. China’s spending on research and development, the surest indicator of future tech dominance, now outstrips that of the United States.2 They are also promoting the use of the renminbi 13(RMB) with a $51 billion investment tied through their own financial system. As Foreign Policy has noted, the United States has long lagged behind China in overseas development finance. The International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), created under Trump, was intended to close that gap, but the shortfall existed well before his presidency. Moreover, with ageing populations and increasing demands for more and improved public services, a lack of growth is prompting politicians down a negative feedback loop of higher taxes to chase higher spending.
* * *
Many in the Global South view the US-led order as hypocritical or unfair, a perception that Chinese and Russian diplomats eagerly exploit. Moscow, for example, frames its clash with the West as a fight against neo-imperialism, claiming the US is a power in decline and that a moment of civilisational change is at hand. This has already had consequences around the world, not all of them bad. China’s role in brokering de-escalation talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran would simply not have been possible for the US to pull off. In a way that would have been simply unthinkable at the turn of the century, there is a new reality where the US’s diplomatic reputation and moral authority have diminished enough that it is possible to resolve conflict without them and without their pesky and demanding ‘principles’ getting in the way.
There is now a need to engage the wider world on terms that counter the appeal of the authoritarian model. But we must also recognise that the private interest of global leaders prefers non-interference and unconstrained power over the difficult politics and power-sharing inherent in liberal democracy. Once we have 14accepted this, we can start to compete with clarity of mind. We can – and must – start to strategise, post-Fukuyama, about how to leverage the strengths of liberalism and freedom to compete in the authoritarian century. The successful model, illustrated thematically throughout this book, will involve hard investment that plays to our strengths.
* * *
A central theme of Britain’s future will be the viability of achieving a subtle balance. How can the UK champion multilateralism and a rules-based order while also advancing its national interests? What balance can be struck between idealism and realism – between values and pragmatism – in Britain’s external engagements? A second theme is the power of incentives – and whether the government is aware of such power. Whether we’re designing climate policy, an immigration system or a tax regime, we must be willing to recognise how current policy creates perverse incentives that undermine our goals and push Britain down a path neither policymakers nor the public would have chosen. We need to be willing to hold our noses and make quite radical changes to ensure our foreign and domestic policies are incentive-compatible.
Fundamentally, this analysis rests upon the cultivation of economic growth and capability here on this island. Where can Britain exert genuine leadership or add value on the global stage? Which niches – be it climate action, conflict mediation, technology governance or development finance – offer the UK a chance to be a convener and problem-solver respected by others? What domestic changes are required?
No introduction to Britain’s position would be complete without a description of our dire economic situation. There is no point 15denying, therefore, that this book is political. The author’s prognosis regarding Britain is that our prospects are deteriorating faster now than at any point in any of our lifetimes. To be frank, Britain is heading for economic and demographic decline so severe that none of us may live long enough to see it recover. Indeed, Britain’s deterioration – political, moral, institutional – is accelerating. Our situation is far from unsalvageable; in fact, Britain has abundant opportunities and advantages that it continues, at present, to squander.
In recent years, both of Britain’s main parties have shown themselves incapable of constraining the bureaucracy or the judiciary. The government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves began with an unprecedented run of calamitous and unnecessary fiscal decisions characterised by a failure to understand incentives: a non-dom regime change that pushed 16,500 million-aires to leave within a year; a private school VAT imposition that massively underestimated the number who would queue up for state schools; a national insurance hike that beat recruitment back to its lowest level since the pandemic; and a public sector pay ‘settlement’ that simply elevated pay expectations elsewhere. It bodes very ill for any attempt to curb record levels of government spending, when the government could not cut winter fuel, disability nor welfare payments due to enormous backbench revolt. The country lacks serious economic governance, and it will pay not only through higher tax and inflation but through a collapse in the very ‘investment’ the government invited us to judge it by. Foreign direct investment therefore fell in the space of a year to the lowest level since 2007. Britain must find a way out of this broken consensus – and it has no time to lose.
The need for a balance between idealism and realism, between regional theatres, between multilateralism and independence, does 16not mean that Britain’s domestic policy must itself be ‘moderate’, ‘balanced’ or ‘subtle’ – at least not in the sense that these words are often meant in politics. When Britain’s status quo is so fundamentally declinist, proposals for incrementalism or rhetorical claims that the ‘adults are back in the room’ fail to notice the self-reinforcing tailspin the country has entered into. More of the same, or trimming around the edges, simply will not do.
Since the turn of the century, Britain has embarked upon three simultaneous experiments in economics and statecraft. The first saw an engorgement of the state and of those bodies and individuals which depend directly and indirectly upon it. This includes quangos, civil servants and human rights lawyers as much as it does the record-breaking constituency of thirty-six million who live in households receiving more in direct benefits than they pay in taxes.3 We may think only of the BBC and other state-owned companies, but large portions of the British private sector – from McKinsey & Company to the social care sector – have come to expect and rely upon extraordinarily ‘generous’ contracts from the taxpayer. The civil service outsources basic administrative tasks to such consultancies, while councils and departments have created such demanding and anti-competitive requirements that they have left themselves at the mercy of care monopolies of their own creation. As state-sector pay rises continue, the benefit bill proves impossible to cut; not only is a millionaire leaving every forty-five minutes but our young entrepreneurs and doctors are quitting Britain.
The second experiment is that of mass migration. With successive years of net immigration in the high hundreds of thousands, the places of these millionaires and young workers are replaced two or three times over by predominantly unskilled migrants. The jury 17verdict is in when it comes to low-skilled migration: it is simultaneously a fiscal, social and political drain, impoverishing Europe while dividing it socially and politically deeper and more hopelessly than at any time since the Thirty Years’ War.
The third experiment was the shifting of the legal foundation of the state from Parliament, the Bill of Rights and the law lords to the Human Rights Act (HRA), the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and the Supreme Court. The supplementary legislation and the quangos they spawned – including the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, Equality Act, Climate Change Act and the spectrum of organisations from Natural England and the Environment Agency to the Forestry Commission – have together worked to fundamentally disconnect the activity of the state from the mandate and will of Parliament. It is no coincidence that these produced the largest amount of lawfare, growth-blocking and cost-raising. These three experiments, linked in so far as they reinforce and overlap one another, have sent Britain perilously close to the point of no return.
The net effect is institutional damage, economic stagnation, social and political division and the demoralisation of Britain and her diplomats on the world stage. A generation of lawyers, politicians and professionals have been raised both to rely on the state and to sustain themselves through perpetuating the status quo of generous contracts. This has seen the gradual expansion of the HRA and the application of the ECHR to cover circumstances it was never envisioned to apply to, as well as the proliferation of political platitudes – such as that ‘diversity is our strength’ – to downplay, deflect and in many cases conspire to cover up the damage that these experiments have caused and continue to cause. No vision for a Britain that projects power and influence, mediates conflict and 18leads on technology, climate and finance, nor even one capable of defending itself against threats from without or within, can succeed without rebuilding these foundations.
Just as with an addict, the first step is to admit we have a problem and recognise the full extent of it before we start making grand promises about how we’re going to fix it. We will start by substantiating our two key premises. First, that the breakdown of the old international order is more profound than just Trump; it threatens fundamental British interests and will require us to abandon old assumptions and practices, or else the global balance of power will tip against us. Second, that British statecraft and domestic institutions are in terminal decline and are causing irreversible damage to the UK.
From this foundation, the body of this book is a treatise analysing and then proposing a way forward – a blueprint for each key decision: climate, foreign policy and soft power, refugee policy, international legal norms, trade, counterterrorism, domestic economic policy and international finance. In each area, Britain must break its historic habit and adapt fast; it must be ruthlessly pragmatic, cooperative but clear-eyed. Britain has key advantages that we must not squander. Having set about a programme of domestic reform – from cutting wasteful spending to instituting a more dynamic, lower-regulation economy with globally competitive taxation that will set it up for the coming century – Britain must invest in new sources of hard and soft power, including a tactical nuclear deterrent independent from the US. It must learn when to reinforce the international legal order, and when to start competing in the new paradigm. Britain cannot rely on dispersed sources of soft power to advance our interests on their own; we must actively and cohesively leverage our many sources of soft power. We must make these work 19in the same direction with a new strategic doctrine – the Knowledge Power Doctrine – through which we can convert soft power into strategic policy and agenda-setting influence. The stakes are high: our ability to navigate this authoritarian century will not only determine our national fortunes but also influence the future of the international order that emerges from today’s period of global convulsion and dissension. The task is daunting, but it is not beyond Britain to reinvent itself as a dynamic, solution-oriented power for the twenty-first century. 20
Chapter 1
The Challenges of an Authoritarian Century
In the West’s triumphalist moment, which reached its zenith in the years following the collapse of the USSR, it seemed the ideals of open society, human rights and market liberalisation had no serious rival. In this seductive vision of a world in which Western liberalism had ‘won’, the US-led order overplayed its hand, expecting that it could bring Russia and China into the fold while hitting down on incalcitrant regimes like those of Iraq and Libya. This belief that the US could democratise the world instead helped foment a coalition against it. Today, those very democratic ideals are in retreat across much of the globe. In both long-standing democracies and countries that only recently embraced pluralism, liberal norms are under attack. An authoritarian and populist backlash has gathered momentum – not driven by a new global ideology as in the twentieth century, but by an atavistic return to nativist, nationalist and xenophobic politics. Democratic institutions and practices that were once thought to be consolidating have begun to erode. From large emerging powers to smaller states, many regimes have slid backwards into authoritarianism, often degenerating from 22previously functional democracies into hybrid forms of autocracy. At the same time, international cooperation has weakened as countries turn inward, proclaiming the primacy of national sovereignty over the once prevailing spirit of multilateralism.
This global ‘democratic recession’ is illustrated by examples which themselves range from concerning to critical. India, the world’s largest democracy, has edged towards ethnic majoritarian rule under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, rewriting citizenship laws and electoral practices in ways designed to subtly disenfranchise its Muslim minority. Brazil, under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, witnessed constant assaults on democratic norms and environmental protections, propelled by a reactionary agenda. Under his successor, Lula, the country briefly tended towards outspoken support of Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, ostensibly because of affinity between their ideological positions.
The first watershed moment that suggested this might happen in the Anglosphere was upon Trump’s defeat at the 2020 election – culminating in major disturbances to the peaceful transfer of power. Since his re-election in 2024, Trump has blurred the lines of the US Department of Justice’s autonomy, using it to disrupt his enemies and turn a blind eye to his allies, arguably in exactly the same way as it had been leveraged against him by his Democrat rivals. In eastern Europe, Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland have backtracked on liberal principles: Hungary’s self-declared ‘illiberal’ government openly defies European Union standards on the rule of law, while Poland’s ruling party has made independent courts and media vassals of the presidential office. In Turkey, a NATO member, democratic institutions have been hollowed out by President Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian grip; he is also promoting Islamic Turkish nationalism and turning away from the 23secular Turkish state built by Atatürk. Russia has transformed from the fragile democracy of the 1990s into a personalised irredentist autocracy with a proven track record of interference in foreign elections. China, which never liberalised politically even as it opened its economy, now champions a confident authoritarian model on the world stage, bolstered by a terrifying technological panopticon. With the help of its terrorist paramilitary IRGC, Iran has built a narco-trafficking, gun-running terror cell network that spans four continents and an array of terrorist armies in the form of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Kataib Sayyid al Shuhada and the Badr Organization, alongside myriad smaller forces scattered across the Levant and Bahrain. In every region, examples abound of elected leaders abusing mandates to entrench their own power, stoke ethnic or religious nationalism and undermine opposition. Liberal democracy’s promise of openness and pluralism is being rejected by leaders and movements who claim that only a strong hand – their own – can defend ‘the people’ against threats and decadence.
Underlying this trend is a fragility within the liberal project itself. Liberal democracy, since its Enlightenment origins, rests on the principle of equal and inherent human worth. Its grand historical task has been to build societies in which all individuals are treated with dignity, enjoy fundamental rights and are free to pursue their own wellbeing. By its nature, a liberal society is always a work in progress – never perfect, but legitimised by steady movement guided by reasoned public debate. This Rawlsian concept of ‘public reasons’ – that matters of basic justice must use reasons accessible and acceptable to all members of a pluralistic society, rather than appeals to any particular comprehensive doctrine like religion or identity – put Western societies among the most open, tolerant, reflective and innovative societies in human history. This very openness, however, 24makes liberal societies vulnerable to reactionary forces that resist change and to disillusionment when progress seems to stall. The illiberal critique of liberalism, made by Carl Schmitt, an avowed German Nazi, is still perhaps the most visceral one, with his almost Hobbesian conception of politics as fundamentally about friend and enemy.1 Liberal democracy, Schmitt argues, has a tendency to exclude issues important to the fringes, and in many cases prohibit them, which provokes these elements either to break up democratic institutions or resort to violence.
Part of the backlash we are witnessing (at least in those formerly democratic states) is rooted in liberal democracy’s unkept promises: corrupt elites, stark inequalities, cultural dislocation, mass migration and economic stagnation have led many to lose faith in democratic institutions. Britain must guard against these at home and, where possible, abroad. Opportunistic demagogues exploit this loss of faith, offering simplistic answers and scapegoats in place of the liberal vision of gradual progress. As Schmitt warns, we embolden them if we become too squeamish to include their worries (at least those that stop short of calls to violate fundamental rights) in mainstream political debate. In short, the ideals of liberalism – tolerance, rule of law, universal rights – are under siege both from without and within. The world may be entering an authoritarian century regardless of what Britain does. Unless our fellow democracies can understand what went wrong and muster a strategic response, the rules of diplomacy, trade and warfare may revert to a struggle phase reminiscent of the interwar period where democratic and authoritarian nations club together to rival one another.
At its core, liberalism is a political philosophy of human equality and individual rights. It holds that all people are entitled to the same fundamental freedoms and protections, and that government 25exists to secure these rights, not to privilege one group over another. Upon this ‘egalitarian plateau’, as Ronald Dworkin puts it, a range of liberal political philosophies, from Rawlsian social democracy to libertarianism, are built.2 Out of these principles naturally emerges democracy – a system of government accountable to the people and conducive to human wellbeing. While, in concept at least, not all liberalism requires democracy, liberal democracy, in essence, marries this egalitarian ethos with representative institutions: regular free elections, the rule of law, constitutional limits on power and respect for dissent and minority views. Crucially, liberal democracy is an evolving experiment. It is relatively new in historical terms and remains imperfect even in the nations that have longest practised it.
Thinkers including (perhaps most prominently, in Britain’s case) Michael Oakeshott have argued that no such perfect institutions exist, and that they serve a particular people tending to the business of government and responding to events.3 Attempts to permanently enshrine certain views, or institute immutable organs of the state to guard certain interests, are the projects of pure rationalists who fail to recognise what they do not know – not least the future. The British constitution – unwritten though robust through practice – is precious precisely because it refuses to be beholden to the conceit of those who think they can design a perfect state to deal with our very imperfect world.
No democracy fully lives up to its ideals at all times; the project of expanding rights and improving governance is always ongoing. Yet again, such expansion of positive rights (rights to something as opposed to a right against something being done to you) may have the effect of shaking the very foundational democratic principle or precipitating a democratic end-state. Free speech, to name one example, has come under threat in the West through precisely this 26mechanism – a well-meaning expansionist conception of political rights that ends up criminalising speech. Liberalism therefore thrives on confidence – the willingness to debate and take on rivals – and the more expansive the scope of that democracy, the more resilient it will be to the threats Carl Schmitt described. Confidence to debate also ensures humility is built into liberalism – its strength is the capacity for self-correction and inclusion of genuinely diverse voices. However, when that self-correction falters, or when large sections of society feel excluded and aggrieved, the legitimacy of the entire system comes into question.
Opposing the liberal democratic model is an increasingly prevalent alternative we might call ‘managed democracy’.4 Managed democracies adopt the form of democratic governance – constitutions, elections, parliaments, courts – but gut them of substance. Power in such regimes is tightly controlled by a dominant individual or party, and explicitly illiberal values guide the state. Dissent is curtailed, the playing field is heavily skewed through media control and harassment of the opposition, and the ruling elite claims to govern in the ‘true’ interest of the people but without genuine accountability. In the world today, this model has become the most prevalent challenger to liberal democracy. After the end of the Cold War, many assumed the primary threats to democracy (fascism, Soviet communism, militant theocracy) had been defeated or marginalised. But in their wake, the managed democracy model has risen to fill the void.
It is observable in a diverse array of states: Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a paradigmatic example, maintaining the façade of elections and parties while in reality a small circle around Putin makes all crucial decisions and suppresses any real opposition. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary similarly keeps the mechanics of democracy (elections, 27a legislature) but tilts them so heavily – through gerrymandering, media domination and the muzzling of civil society – that the ruling party faces no real check on its power. In Iran, an unelected theocratic Guardian Council holds ultimate authority over which candidates may run and what laws may pass, ensuring that the electoral system can never alter the Islamic Republic’s core ideological character. Even formally democratic India shows signs of this pattern: the ruling party has worked to limit the electorate and redefine who counts as a ‘true’ Indian, for instance via citizenship laws that exclude Muslims and other measures that edge the country towards ethno-religious majoritarian rule.
These regimes share common features. All project a veneer of mass participation: they hold votes, allow some opposition on paper and maintain institutions that resemble those of democracies; but in practice they consolidate authority in one faction or leader. Elections may be held, but they are often rigged or tightly managed; opposition parties exist, but many are fake or systematically undermined; a press operates, but it is bullied or bought into propaganda service. Such systems have deep historical antecedents. In the late nineteenth-century German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, for example, voting rights were expanded without granting legislatures real governing power – an early form of managed democracy. What is startling is the return of this model in the twenty-first century after a period in which liberal democracy seemed ascendant. Over the past two decades, more and more countries have slid into this hybrid form. Most authoritarian-leaning states today are no longer outright totalitarian dictatorships; instead, they maintain enough democratic window dressing to mollify citizens or international observers, even as they entrench autocratic rule behind the scenes.
Crucially, I stress that managed democracies are not simply 28halfway houses en route to full democracy. Rather, they tend to become stable and entrenched systems in their own right, explicitly hostile to liberal ideals and capable of enduring over time. Such regimes are the de facto ideological and geopolitical rivals to liberal democracy in our era. They cooperate with and learn from each other, share tactics of repression and propaganda, supply one another with munitions and present themselves to the world as a viable alternative. This recognition leads to a sobering conclusion: if liberal democracy is to survive and prevail, it must treat these regimes as formidable competitors in a contest over the future of the international order. Naivety and hubris in foreign policy is not an option. Likewise, naivety in thinking that we can avoid this fate by legalising politics is a recipe for disaster.
The 1990s began with the Soviet collapse and China still relatively weak and inward-facing. At that time, it appeared that Western-style liberal democracy, coupled with market capitalism, had no serious adversary left. One model – often labelled the Washington Consensus – was held up as the template for all nations: open markets, deregulation, privatisation and liberal democratic politics, grounded in the belief that this combination would yield peace and prosperity everywhere. For a while, this confidence seemed justified. Many countries in eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia embraced democratic reforms and joined the global capitalist economy. The world saw more integrated markets, the spread of the internet and information flows and an apparent convergence towards liberal norms. By the late 1990s, liberal democracy appeared to be on an irreversible forward march.
Yet even at its zenith, this post-Cold War order contained the seeds of its present troubles. In hindsight, we can observe that Western triumphalists overlooked significant frailties in their own 29system. Industrial jobs declined in the face of automation and offshoring and whole communities were left behind in the rush of hyper-globalisation. Generally speaking, nations more than made up for the loss of less advanced manufacturing with a pivot to more complex manufacturing and high-skill service sector employment. But on a localised and individual basis, entire regions were left behind, from northern England to Rust Belt Pennsylvania. Traditional party systems have struggled to adapt to rapid economic shifts. Still, for a time, overall growth masked these stresses: the booming 1990s delivered higher living standards for many, and the memory of the stagnation and turmoil of the 1970s made the new consensus look comparatively successful.
Success dulled the urgency to address the model’s flaws with confidence, humility and reasoned debate. Financial markets were liberalised further, assuming that market actors would responsibly manage risk. Democratic oversight of economic processes waned; politics became increasingly technocratic and aligned with the interests of global finance. Meanwhile, outside the West, countries that adopted market reforms but not liberal politics (like China) were not pressured to democratise, under the assumption that economic progress would eventually bring political openness on its own. In hindsight, these were grave errors. We should have scored while we were ahead.
