Hard Choices E-Book

Peter Ricketts

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 393

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PARLIAMENTARY BOOK AWARDS 'Thought-provoking and well worth reading' Times Literary Supplement After decades of peace and prosperity, the international order put in place after World War II is rapidly coming to an end. Disastrous foreign wars, global recession, the meteoric rise of China and India and the COVID pandemic have undermined the power of the West's international institutions and unleashed the forces of nationalism and protectionism. In this lucid and groundbreaking analysis, one of Britain's most experienced senior diplomats highlights the key dilemmas Britain faces, from trade to security, arguing that international co-operation and solidarity are the surest ways to prosper in a world more dangerous than ever.

Leseprobe

‘Incisive, stimulating and highly readable. Peter Ricketts turns forty years’ experience of British foreign policymaking into a road map of where Britain should be going in the post-Brexit, post-Covid world.’

Professor David Reynolds, author of

Island Stories: An Unconventional History of Britain

‘Peter Ricketts has used his experience as one of the best diplomats of his generation to produce a book that is magisterial in its scope and analysis. Essential reading for all who care about Britain’s position in the world.’

Jack Straw, former Foreign Secretary

‘A sharp and salutary reality check from one of Britain’s wisest and most experienced diplomats.’

Andrew Adonis, author of Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill

‘Sharp and engaging... All of us who care about Britain remaining a major force in shaping the international order should pay careful attention to both the analysis and policy recommendations of Hard Choices.’

Kori Schake, Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute

‘A candid and sometimes brutal sizing up of past mistakes, of chances missed and of opportunities still open.’

Sir David Omand, former Director of GCHQ

‘No one is more able than Peter Ricketts to set out clearly and sensibly the parameters of Britain’s strategy in the age of Brexit, pandemic, climate change and threats from China.’

Chris Patten, former Governor of Hong Kong

Peter Ricketts has been at the heart of Britain’s foreign policy for more than forty years. He was Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, UK Permanent Representative to NATO, Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office, National Security Adviser and Ambassador to France. He has written for the FT, The Times, the New Statesman and Prospect, and regularly appears on Sky News and the BBC. He is a member of the House of Lords.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2021 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2022.

Copyright © Peter Ricketts, 2021

The moral right of Peter Ricketts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 183 2

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 182 5

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CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction

Part I: How We Got Here

1. Imagining the Post-War Order

2. Managing an Alliance of Unequals

3. Rethinking the Use of Force

Part II: What to Do Now

4. Picking the Right Threats

5. Reviving the Lost Art of Strategy

6. Finding the Power to Influence

Part III: Making Hard Choices

7. Triangle of Tension: Britain, America and China

8. The International System and the Lure of the New

9. Trade, Values and the Mercantilist Trap

10. How Far Offshore? Britain, Europe and the Indo-Pacific Tilt

11. Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

‘Where was Global Britain on the streets of Kabul?’ asked Theresa May during an angry debate in the House of Commons on 18 August 2021 after the chaotic evacuation of Western military forces from Afghanistan. The question homed in with deadly accuracy on the central weakness of Britain’s foreign policy – the yawning gap between the delusions of grandeur harboured by the government and the hard realities of Britain’s diminished role in the world.

President Biden’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan revealed much about his real priorities. After the damage done by Trump in walking away from America’s international commitments while cosying up to authoritarians like Putin, the new President’s ‘America is back’ mantra was greeted with something close to euphoria in Western capitals. He moved quickly to take the US back into the UN climate process and to restore a cooperative tone in dealings with NATO and the EU. In all the excitement, it was easy to forget that Biden’s primary focus was on showing his divided nation that he was relentlessly pursuing US interests. His commitment to end the ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan was popular domestically. He therefore pressed ahead with the rapid withdrawal of US forces, paying no attention to the views of America’s allies. Their loyalty and sacrifice through 20 years of shared military operations in Afghanistan counted for nothing.

This was particularly galling for the Johnson government. The UK had been the second largest troop contributor in Afghanistan and had taken the second highest number of combat deaths. To make matters worse, the case for Brexit had rested heavily on the assumption that, freed from the shackles of the EU, Britain would return to a central role in world affairs by leveraging its privileged relationship with Washington. But the high hopes had been disappointed. Biden showed no interest in a US-UK trade deal. The events in Kabul made embarrassingly clear how dependent Britain was on the US, and how little real influence it had on the big decisions in Washington.

A few weeks later, Australia, the US and UK announced a new security partnership. The timing could not have been better for the battered Johnson government. The new AUKUS pact, based on the sale to Australia of nuclear-powered submarines of the kind operated by the US and UK, was a presentational godsend for London. It provided welcome reassurance that Britain still counted in Washington, and gave some substance to the vacuous ‘Global Britain’ concept. But whether taking on this new security commitment is really in Britain’s longer-term interests is much less clear. If competition turned into conflict in Asia, would Britain be in a position to make much contribution, even if there was public support for doing so?

The strategic benefits were much more compelling for the other two participants. Australia had decided that the growing Chinese military threat made it necessary to buy the most capable submarines on the planet. For the US, the new partnership tied two close allies more tightly into a network of power in the Indo-Pacific. In the process, the three countries shouldered the French unceremoniously out of an earlier deal to supply Australia with diesel-engined submarines. That was to have been the centrepiece of a new partnership which President Macron was building with Australia, as a contribution to Western engagement in the Indo-Pacific region. The AUKUS deal left this policy in ruins and the French feeling betrayed. It inevitably led them to question the value of NATO if this was how their allies treated them.

The thread running through these two episodes was Biden’s single-minded focus on strengthening America’s position for the looming confrontation with China, and his willingness to ride roughshod over the interests of his allies in the process. This has reinforced the conviction in Europe that Washington has become an unpredictable partner who can no longer be relied on to take account of Europe’s security interests. It has therefore given new impetus to the French-led drive to increase Europe’s strategic autonomy. Support for the idea of a greater European capacity to act independently of the Americans is even beginning to be heard on the right of British politics. Tom Tugendhat, the Chairman of the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee, in the best speech of the August 2021 Afghanistan debate, called for a ‘vision, clearly articulated, for reinvigorating our European NATO partners to make sure we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader’.

The idea that European countries could replace what the US provides for the defence of Europe is fanciful in anything other than the very long term. But Biden’s unilateralism, coming after Trump’s destructiveness, has given European nations a new incentive to equip themselves to stand on their own feet in terms of military operations short of a major war. Britain should be involved in helping shape that important debate. The problem is that this is taking place not in NATO, but in the EU. The Johnson government’s ideological opposition to any cooperation with the EU in this area leaves Britain unable to influence thinking in an area which could have significant implications for our security.

I began to write this book because I was convinced that Britain faced some profoundly important choices about its role and priorities in a world where the familiar system of international rules was breaking down fast. Since I finished writing less than a year ago, it has become even more obvious that Britain is in urgent need of a new national strategy. My hope that the pandemic might lead to a new surge of international cooperation has not been borne out so far – the world has settled back all too quickly into the old rivalries. The British Government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence Development and Foreign Policy, published in March 2021, gave a compelling analysis of global trends and the challenges these presented. But on what Britain should do next, the Review fell into the trap outlined in Chapter 6. It assembled an impressive list of ambitions, but failed to set any priorities. It pledged, for example, that Britain would be a soft power superpower, a science and technology superpower by 2030, the leading defence power in Europe, as well as at the forefront of cyber technology and of combating climate change. In terms of geographical focus, the review promised a tilt to the Indo-Pacific, but also more engagement in Africa and the Middle East. There were some references to cooperating with individual European countries, but the EU was largely airbrushed out. Throughout the Review, measured official prose rubbed shoulders with grandiose claims, for example that Britain would be a global power ‘moving the dial on international issues of consequence’ and ‘shaping the international order of the future’. This flagwaving exceptionalism was left looking distinctly threadbare by what happened in Kabul.

The art of strategy is about making choices. The Integrated Review gave no clear sense of what the government actually plans to do. Indeed it left the suspicion that there is no real strategy, beyond setting out bold aspirations in all directions and then continuing to muddle through. That impression was borne out when some of the Integrated Review’s aspirations were immediately undermined by the government’s own actions. Having proclaimed, for example, that Britain was a soft power superpower and a force for good in the world, ministers then cut the aid budget by 40% in the middle of the pandemic. The G7 summit which the UK chaired in June 2021 was a golden opportunity to show what Britain could achieve at the centre of global diplomacy. The agenda covered weighty issues such as preparing for the Glasgow climate summit later in the year, and helping poorer nations recover from the pandemic. But the prime minister put most of his energy into a public spat with President Macron about the impact of the UK/EU Northern Ireland Protocol on the supply of chilled sausages to Northern Ireland. In a similar way, the Glasgow summit then took place against the background of a furious UK-French row over fishing rights around the Channel Islands. As long as Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours remains dysfunctional, this will keep getting in the way of London’s efforts to show global leadership.

The sun-filled Cornwall summit was also the setting for the first substantive meeting between Biden and Johnson. The British side seized on the opportunity to mobilise a piece of history on behalf of a prime minister who loves to see himself in Churchillian terms. They decided to propose a New Atlantic Charter, exploiting the fact that the date of the Cornwall summit fell close to the 80th anniversary of the first wartime US/UK summit in August 1941 which produced the original Atlantic Charter. The story of that remarkable document and its influence is recounted in Chapter 1, and I was intrigued to see how the 2021 version would match up to its illustrious predecessor.

The Johnson-Biden document re-commits the two countries to promoting shared values, supporting the rules-based international order and fulfilling their common responsibilities for maintaining security, international stability and resilience. It pledges that ‘our NATO allies and partners will always be able to count on us’ (this point seemed to have slipped Biden’s mind when it came to the Afghanistan pull-out two months later). However, the New Atlantic Charter also underlines inadvertently how much British influence has diminished over the last 80 years. In 1941, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt each persuaded the other to make difficult compromises. By finding new areas of common ground, they paved the way for the great post-war institutions such as the UN. The 2021 Charter broke no new ground and opened up no new paths to the future. It was a clever re-packaging of existing positions to serve an immediate public relations need, but it will not affect the course of international relations.

The hard choices for Britain set out in the closing chapters of the book are, if anything, getting starker. The evacuation from Kabul brings down the curtain on three decades of Western efforts to make the world a safer place by using military force to intervene in other people’s conflicts. There will be no more expeditionary operations involving Western boots on the ground for the foreseeable future. But the dilemma remains that not intervening also has consequences. It allows other powers with very different ideas about human rights and the rule of law to expand their spheres of influence, as China is now doing in Afghanistan. It leaves the wealthy democracies vulnerable to all the effects of state collapse, from refugee flows to safe spaces for terrorists to operate. Britain has much to contribute to international efforts to tackle the world’s problems, but to do so it needs to identify a few priorities and pursue them ruthlessly.

One of the book’s main themes is that democracies have lost the art of strategic thinking, and that Britain is suffering from a particularly acute case of this affliction. The difference between the two Atlantic Charters is a measure of the decline. Among the examples of powerful strategic thinking from an earlier era which I examine in Chapter 5 is the 1960 Future Policy Study. This was commissioned by Harold Macmillan to frame a new national strategy after the humiliation of Suez in 1956. Its starkest warning was that Britain should never find itself having to make a final choice between the US and Europe. The authors warned that any such choice would not be compatible with our vital national interests, and would mean the destruction of the Atlantic alliance. Macmillan took their warning very seriously, and acted on it. The risk now is that a combination of the Johnson government’s refusal to develop a working relationship with the EU and its opportunistic embrace of the new AUKUS pact is drawing Britain into ever closer alignment with a United States which is pulling away from Europe and its security concerns. At the same time, many European countries are losing trust in America’s reliability and resolving to reduce their dependence on the US.

The transatlantic gap is widening, and Britain is seen in much of Europe as having turned its back on its neighbours. The government’s pretensions to be a global power playing a key role in the Indo-Pacific are dangerously out of kilter with the reality that our economic and security interests are first and foremost in Europe. The economic and political damage done by Britain’s chaotic departure from the EU is becoming ever clearer as the pandemic begins to recede. The risks of making a fateful choice between the US and Europe are as great as in 1960. The country’s security and prosperity, the very unity of the United Kingdom, are at stake. Decisions taken in the years ahead will be the making or the unmaking of Global Britain.

Peter Ricketts, October 2021

INTRODUCTION

The mobile phone signal is always bad as the Eurostar train races across northern France on its way to Paris. It was no different on the morning of Saturday, 19 March 2011. But it was more than usually inconvenient. I was with Prime Minister David Cameron as his National Security Adviser and we were on our way to a summit meeting called by his friend President Nicolas Sarkozy about the crisis in Libya. The Prime Minister needed to give his final agreement, in suitably guarded language, for a British submarine to launch its Tomahawk missiles as part of a coordinated air strike on the military units of the Gaddafi regime heading to wreak revenge on opponents of his regime gathered in Benghazi. After several tense minutes, we got through on the phone, and before long we were disembarking in Europe’s worst station, the Gare du Nord.

On that Saturday morning in the Elysée Palace, Sarkozy had called together representatives from the thirty or so countries which had agreed to form a broad coalition to stop Gaddafi killing his own people and, in the process, snuffing out what was still known hopefully as the Arab Spring. The international news had been dominated for months by the series of popular uprisings in North Africa, beginning in Tunisia in late 2010 and spreading to Egypt. They succeeded in dislodging long-standing dictators in both countries. It felt like a moment of hope as young people began to mobilize using social media across the Arab world to demand political and economic freedoms. Cameron was the first world leader to visit Tahrir Square in central Cairo, in the days after President Mubarak was deposed in early February 2011.

The civic-minded young protesters we met on that trip were not seeking revolution but their rights to peaceful protest and freedom of speech under the rule of law. As Cameron and I were mixing with the crowds in Cairo, we were getting reports of a popular uprising in Libya. Gaddafi – a forty-year dictator – was responding with a brutal crackdown. Memories of previous atrocities cast their shadow over decision-making in Paris and London in those early months of 2011. Cameron and Sarkozy had both been young politicians at the time of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the massacre at Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. Both were determined to prevent a repeat in Libya. So they forced the pace of international decision-making in the face of the blood-curdling threats Gaddafi was making against his own population.

Before the full meeting in the ornate ballroom of the Elysée Palace, Sarkozy invited Cameron and Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, and their advisers for a quick coffee to align positions among the three main participants. The French President, fizzing with energy as always, was in his element as the impresario of his own show. As we sat in a semi-circle around his enormous desk, Sarkozy looked at his watch and announced theatrically that the French Rafale jets were in the air to bomb the leading column of Gaddafi forces before they could reach Benghazi. He had jumped the gun. It got him a good headline – and the Rafales did indeed catch some armoured vehicles while they were still out in the desert.

The really significant moment at that pre-conference session was when Clinton asked the American Chief of Joint Operations accompanying her to set out US plans. The imposing figure of the General rose to his feet, two rows of medals glinting on his chest. He proceeded to brief the small group of us as if we were several hundred on a parade ground. But the substance of his briefing was a lot less commanding than the General himself. He spelled out the implications of what President Barack Obama had already told Cameron and Sarkozy in separate secure phone calls several nights earlier – that this was to be the opportunity for the Europeans to take the responsibility for sorting out a security crisis in their own backyard. The US would take part in air strikes for the first week but would then take a back seat, limiting their support to some specialist assets that only they could supply, such as tanker aircraft and search and rescue assistance. To make the point even clearer, Obama had decided that US military officers serving in NATO posts would play no part in the NATO operation.

As I listened to the General on that Paris morning spelling out that the US would play a secondary role in the Libya operation, I knew that this was a turning point. Obama was sending the clearest of messages about changing US security priorities. For most of the twentieth century, the Americans had seen Europe and its neighbourhood as central to their security. When the Europeans appealed for help, the US cavalry came riding over the hill to their rescue, often with a delay, but usually with decisive effect. That was true from the First World War right through to the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. In Paris on that March morning, we learned that the global geometry of power had shifted decisively. US attention was turning to the emerging threat to their position in Asia from China. This decision to stand back from the Libya conflict was a harbinger of a fundamental strategic shift in Washington, which accelerated after Xi Jinping took the reins of power as Party Leader in 2012 and proceeded to mount a much more open bid to shoulder the US aside in East Asia.

There was another factor in play as well. Obama had been elected on a platform to get US combat forces out of Iraq. American public opinion had turned against an operation which had been a success in rapidly overturning Saddam Hussein’s regime, but which had descended into a long and bitter occupation in which Western forces had become the problem rather than the solution. Obama was still in the process of winding down the US operation in Iraq in 2011. He was in no mood to get caught up in a further open-ended commitment in the Middle East and most certainly not one which would involve putting large numbers of US soldiers in harm’s way.

None of the European countries were willing to put boots on the ground either. The question of deploying Western ground forces – either to defeat Gaddafi’s forces, or to stabilize the situation after his regime collapsed – simply never arose. Libya marked the end of a cycle in Western thinking about how to safeguard security and protect core values. During the Cold War, NATO members spent forty years at high readiness for full-scale war. In the ten years after 1989, the US regularly dispatched its armed forces to intervene in other countries’ affairs under the banner of upholding international peace and security, with enthusiastic support from the British and varying levels of support from other allies.

The experience of occupying Iraq after 2003 broke this cycle. It destroyed public confidence that the cost in lives and money produced any benefit, either for Western security or for the countries Washington and London were trying to help. The Iraq effect restricted the West’s options in Libya to using economic pressure and air strikes to try to protect the civilian population. Once the regime fell, the new National Transitional Council was never able to impose its authority across the country and prevent a slide into anarchy. So the careful preparations for the aftermath – the stockpiling of immediate humanitarian aid in Tunisia and the planning for longer-term support to a new government in Tripoli – could not be put into effect. Since NATO had no forces on the ground, there was no way to prevent the slide into lawlessness and violence which made it impossible for the development agencies to get to work.

By the time of the Syrian civil war in 2013, the reluctance of Western countries to get drawn into any military involvement was even clearer. The endless conflict in Syria led to terrible suffering for the civilian population and a huge outflow of refugees to neighbouring countries and then on towards Europe. The ISIS terrorist group exploited the anarchy in much of the country to establish a base from which to export terrorism. Obama’s unwillingness to play the traditional American role of crisis management in the case of Syria left the door open for President Vladimir Putin to strengthen Russia’s military position in the region. President Donald Trump’s sudden decision in 2019 to withdraw the residual US troop presence in Syria encouraged Turkey to invade Northern Syria, with the aim of crushing Kurdish forces which they regarded as terrorists. Wherever the US and its allies have pulled back, other powers with different agendas have filled the vacuum. Choosing to stand back from international crisis management also has consequences.

The shifting balance of economic and political power would itself have been enough over time to call into question the postwar settlement. All international institutions become obsolete sooner or later. China and India have been outperforming Western economies for decades. China is already by some measures the largest economy in the world and projections suggest that India’s gross domestic product could also overtake America’s in the decade after 2030.1 The impact of these deep trends has been magnified and speeded up by human error. The decision by President George W. Bush2 and Prime Minister Tony Blair to invade Iraq in 2003, without a clear mandate from the Security Council, undermined the moral authority of both countries to demand that others respect the UN Charter principles. It also damaged the public’s confidence in the competence of governments to make effective decisions for their security. The strangeness of the Libya operation – with the world’s pre-eminent military power standing aside and watching its allies try and fail to achieve a more stable post-Gaddafi country – was the first sign of how powerful the Iraq effect would be. The aftershocks continue to ripple out in the form of violence and civil wars in the Middle East, all of which has fuelled Islamist terrorism against the West and immigration into Europe from war-torn countries. Putin has seized the opportunity to pursue a much more aggressive foreign policy, sending his forces into Georgia, Ukraine and Syria, while using new techniques such as cyber attacks to pursue old Russian tactics of subversion and disinformation against Western countries.

The loss of Western credibility in security affairs happened in the same years as confidence in the financial system was undermined by the crash of 2008. The years of austerity that followed fanned public anger against globalization and the metropolitan elites who seemed to suffer no consequences. These multiple grievances, and the striking failure of political systems in Europe and America to spot them and deal with them, opened the door to populist leaders and sent a wider signal that the Western model was running out of steam.

China under Xi Jinping was quick to exploit the opportunity by mounting a direct challenge to US political and military dominance in Asia, coupled with a bid for global leadership of key areas of future technology. The Chinese have pushed out their defensive military perimeter in the South China Sea. With their Belt and Road initiative, they are building a strategic network of ports and rail links intended to give them control of Europe–Asia trade in future decades. China does not have colonial ambitions in terms of ruling large swathes of territory, but the technique of dominating transport routes to dictate the terms of trade is one that the eighteenth-century East India Company would have recognized.

The fact that Huawei won the race to bring the latest 5G telecoms equipment to market – offering more advanced and cheaper technology than anything US or European suppliers could produce – demonstrated the boldness of the challenge from China. It also shone a spotlight on the failure of Western countries to foresee the looming threat and organize themselves to meet it. China is in the process of disproving the long-standing Western assumption that economic progress and the growth of a middle class would lead to irresistible public demands for greater freedom of choice and expression. Instead, the Chinese leadership have clamped down hard on any sign of dissent from the Party line and have turned the internet into a tool for control and surveillance of the citizen. Russia seeks to dominate its neighbourhood and to destabilize the West. Putin is good at disruption but has nothing constructive to offer in terms of international cooperation. China aims to modify, replace or ignore a system which they see as imposing the US model of democracy, open markets and respect for human rights.

The impact of the challenge from Russia and China is all the greater because the US itself is losing interest in leading the system it was instrumental in creating. The trend was already clear when Obama wanted to stand back from conflicts such as Libya and Syria and shift more responsibility onto America’s allies. Trump rejected the whole idea that America had allies. In his world view, relations between countries are transactional, based on the raw politics of economic and military power to back up personal deal-making. President Joe Biden moved fast to repair America’s alliances and to rejoin international negotiations on climate change and trade. But he leads a deeply polarized nation beset by domestic problems. For all his Atlanticism, he is likely to continue on the course set by Obama of reducing over time the American contribution to European security.

That has major implications for America’s allies in NATO. For the first time since the Cold War, they are facing state-based threats. Preoccupied by interventions in what Blair called ‘other people’s conflicts’3 and by the threat from Islamist terrorism, Britain and other Western nations were caught off guard by the sudden shift in the strategic landscape and now find themselves poorly prepared to deal with it. They did not give enough collective attention to the mounting challenge from China and Russia.

Now, the world is changing faster than governments can adapt their policies or publics their long-settled assumptions. To make matters worse, Western governments have lost the art of strategic thinking. Governing in a democracy under the brutal pressures of the 24/7 media, amplified by the incessant drumbeat of social media, has become a continuous round of crisis management and campaigning. The demand for instant response to breaking news has raised the political tempo to the point where decisions are often rushed and ill thought-out. Ministers live in the chaos of the moment, with no time to pause and think about the longer-term consequences of their decisions. Recent British history could have been very different if Blair had taken the time for a strategic review before committing to George W. Bush in 2002 to be with him in Iraq come what may, or if Cameron had done the same before calling a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. Britain would have been better prepared for Covid-19 if the government had acted on the clear warnings in the 2010 and 2015 National Security Strategies about the risk of just such a pandemic.

Muddling through and making incremental changes on the basis of a few settled principles mostly worked well for Western democracies under the protective bubble of American leadership. But major disruptions make it essential to rethink the fundamentals of national strategy. This is one of those periods, as significant as the years after 1945, particularly for Britain. The decision to leave the EU was both a symptom and a cause of the wider upheaval, and leaves the country facing a series of difficult decisions. Outside the EU, Britain is more dependent on its strategic partnership with the US, but less useful to Washington given its lack of leverage in Europe. Its foreign policy will necessarily be heavily weighted towards securing trade deals. This mercantilism will mean a difficult balancing act between commercial interests and pursuing a values-based foreign policy standing up for democracy and human rights. Countries such as China and Saudi Arabia will not hesitate to use Britain’s need for export contracts and investment to press for criticism of their wider policies to be muted.

Life outside the EU is full of risks for Britain. But it does at least create the opportunity to come to grips at last with the uncomfortable truth that the country’s image of itself is significantly out of kilter with reality. Winston Churchill’s dream of sustaining a British place in the ‘Big Three’ with the US and Soviet Union was unrealistic in 1945 and evaporated with the onset of the Cold War. But Britain did leverage its prestige at the end of the war to play an outsize role in the design of the post-war international order. In the process, it ensured for itself the trappings of a great power, including its permanent seat at the UN Security Council, the status of a nuclear-armed state and the privileged relationship with Washington. These benefits have enabled successive governments to avoid facing up to the widening gap between the rhetoric and the reality. Britain’s glorious role in the Second World War, especially in the version constructed by Churchill, is a great source of national pride but a poor basis for policymaking in the modern world.

Over the decades, British governments have shown the capacity to make pragmatic adjustments to the country’s shrinking relative position in the world – the winding down of the Empire, the withdrawal from east of Suez and the long process of joining the European Common Market to take three examples. But in the process, a wide gap has developed between the reality of Britain’s position in the world and the public perception of it. This is largely because successive governments, while carrying out these strategic retreats from exposed positions, have failed to be honest with the British people. They have preferred to stick with sound bites such as Douglas Hurd’s famous phrase about Britain continuing to ‘punch above her weight’, with its comforting echoes of exceptionalism. I had my own experience of this when preparing the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review as National Security Adviser. I was told firmly by a senior minister that the overall message was to be ‘no strategic shrinkage’, even though the defence budget was massively overstretched and cuts were inevitable.

The changing dynamics of global power have consequences for every country which relies on a stable set of international rules. The EU without the UK is a different organization, with the fault lines more clearly exposed between member states. There are deep differences on whether the EU should have a genuinely global foreign policy, or concentrate its energies on its neighbourhood and internal reforms. America’s allies in Asia – Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea – are also having to adjust to the new reality of a generation-long struggle between the US and China for dominance in Asia. No other country, however, faces the same scale of disruption to its settled national strategy as Britain. And it does so at a moment of profound national weakness.

____________

When I started thinking about this book in 2017, my argument was that the world was becoming more dangerous and unpredictable as great power competition sharpened. I expected that Britain would face a greater upheaval than other Western countries because this changing geometry of power coincided with Britain’s decision to ditch its forty-three-year partnership with the EU and plough its own furrow as an independent country. As I wrote, everything that happened seemed to make the choices for Britain more urgent and more difficult. The country floundered into a much more decisive break with the European Union than even the most ardent Leave campaigners advocated during the 2016 referendum campaign, with no real plan for its future role in the world. The competition between the US and China sharpened into a generational struggle for dominance, pulling US attention away from European security at a time when Russia was becoming ever more reckless in its efforts to destabilize Western democracies. Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, weakening economies, prompting nationalist responses around the world and putting international cooperation under severe strain. It tested to the limit the competence of governments and the resilience of their crisis management capacities. In the case of Britain, the weaknesses it exposed were clear in two unforgiving statistics. The country suffered the highest number of excess deaths in the first wave of the pandemic of any European country except Spain,4 and the largest fall in GDP of any major industrialized nation in 2020.5 The Johnson government elected so decisively in December 2019 failed to rise to the challenge either of effective crisis management during the pandemic or of thinking strategically in the Brexit chaos about the country’s long-term interests.

Britain needs to make some fundamental choices. They will have a decisive impact on the security and well-being of every citizen. They will also define what Britain stands for in the world, how others see us and how much influence we can hope to have. Since the post-war years, Britain’s national strategy has been built on two pillars: influence on global affairs through a close partnership with the US, and a leading role in European affairs via involvement in the various schemes of European coordination and then integration. Both those pillars are crumbling. The US has moved away from global leadership. Outside the EU, Britain is less useful to the US and self-excluded from whatever direction European integration takes.

There is an urgent need for a new national strategy. It cannot simply be laid down in a government document. It needs to be widely debated and to win a broad measure of public support, because it will shape the country our children and grandchildren inherit. I hope that this book will contribute to, and even in a small way encourage, such a debate. I spent forty years representing British governments within the international system, and came to know well the strengths and weaknesses of the UN, NATO and the EU as they grappled with crises of all shapes and sizes. I have drawn on that experience in considering the choices involved in working out a new place for Britain in the world. The book is not addressed to specialists in international relations, but to readers who are concerned about the current state of international turmoil, and would like to know what the prospects are for restoring some degree of order, and the implications for Britain and other Western countries.

The book begins by exploring the intense period of US–UK cooperation that created the post-war system of international cooperation, the reasons it lasted so long and the damage done to it by the 2003 Iraq War. The second part explores the readiness of British governments to make the hard decisions which lie ahead. It highlights three vital areas where they will need to be much more effective: setting priorities among the many threats and risks; rediscovering the art of longer-term strategic thinking; and making the most of the country’s diminished powers of influence. The third section looks in more detail at the crucial choices about Britain’s international role: how to protect British interests in the growing confrontation between the US and China; whether to give priority to revitalizing institutions like the UN and NATO or cut a dash with an independent foreign policy and new alliances; how to balance Britain’s need for trade and investment with standing up for human rights and democracy; and whether close defence and security links with European countries should take second place to a new emphasis on the Indo-Pacific region.

With events moving at a disorienting pace, I am aiming at a moving target with the conclusions in this book. But whatever surprises are in store in the coming years, the hard choices are already clear. The global response to Covid-19 has shown how quickly the habits of multilateral cooperation developed so patiently over seventy years can break down under intense pressure. One possible path for the future would be a return to nationalism, protectionism and spheres of great power influence. This book will make the case for a different approach. Britain’s interest is to be at the heart of a new surge of international cooperation, matching the one which created the post-war institutions, and building on what has worked over the past seventy years. That would mean British governments giving priority to repairing the damage done in recent years to the country’s reputation, restoring confidence in the UK as a creative problem-solver at the heart of the international system and rebuilding relationships with our European neighbours. All these will be essential if Britain is to promote its interests successfully in the world of tomorrow.

PART I

How We Got Here

1

IMAGINING THE POST- WAR ORDER

The Atlantic Charter, the UnitedNations and global security

The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary-General1

Breakfast in Placentia Bay

As a young member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), I would sometimes be sent on a nerve-wracking errand to deliver a file to the Permanent Under-Secretary (PUS), who occupied a vast and rather gloomy room in one corner of the building, immediately below the Foreign Secretary. I remember being intrigued by a document that hung on the wall of the PUS’s office. It was a draft of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, with manuscript changes in Churchill’s unmistakeable hand.

When, thirty years later, I became PUS and moved into the same office, I asked the FCO historians to dig up the document and put it back in the same place. I would often look at it and think of the extraordinary circumstances in which it was produced, the way in which it had shaped the landscape of my working life, and the central role my wartime predecessor, Sir Alexander Cadogan, played in its creation.

Cadogan is now a largely forgotten figure, but he had more impact on British policy during and after the war than many more famous names of the period. As PUS from 1938 to 1946, he kept a tight grip on the whole range of foreign policy and was the closest adviser to three Foreign Secretaries: Halifax, Eden and Bevin. On top of that, he won Churchill’s trust for his mastery of detail and shrewd judgement. Like his military counterpart, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General (later Field Marshal) Sir Alan Brooke, he attended most meetings of the War Cabinet. These were often convened late in the evening and dragged on interminably as Churchill clashed with his ministers or advisers or both. Brooke would go in all guns blazing when he thought Churchill was wrong on military strategy, making no effort to conceal his fury and sometimes snapping pencils in his hands as a result.

A draft of the 1941 Atlantic Charter with notes written in Churchill’s unmistakeable hand. (© Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.)

Cadogan, although equally fearless in telling Churchill he was wrong on foreign policy when necessary, usually took a different tack – saying little, but making sure he was tasked with the followup. He would then labour deep into the night to come up with practical proposals to reconcile the differences around the Cabinet table. He had an uncanny ability to imitate Churchill’s distinctive writing style, which he put to good use, for example ghost-writing messages to Roosevelt or Stalin in his master’s voice. The next morning, he would take his work over to Churchill, who was often still in bed dictating to a secretary, cigar in hand, in the best of tempers, all the storm clouds of the previous night having cleared. The Prime Minister would sign off Cadogan’s drafts often with barely a glance. With one more problem solved, the PUS would return with a sigh to a new stack of papers on his desk.

Churchill rated Cadogan so highly that he took him to all the great wartime summits, while Eden stayed at home to mind the shop. The first of these took place in Placentia Bay off Newfoundland in August 1941. There Cadogan showed his true colours – this super-competent and unflappable civil servant was also a man with a powerful vision of the future peace and a gritty determination to see it through into a reality in the postwar years.

After two years of war, Britain stood alone in Europe and was on the defensive in the Mediterranean. Japan was becoming increasingly aggressive in the Pacific. Churchill was desperate to get some commitment from Roosevelt about the circumstances in which the US would come into the war. So the British team prepared carefully, while HMS Prince of Wales spent four days and five nights zig-zagging across the Atlantic to avoid the attentions of German U-boats. One of their objectives for the summit was to persuade the Americans to issue a pair of parallel UK and US Declarations, with the American one warning Japan that any further encroachment in the Pacific would put them on a collision course with the US. In this Churchill was to be disappointed – Roosevelt was only willing to give the Japanese a vague warning accompanied by a suggestion of further talks. But at their first meeting on 9 August, Roosevelt sprung a surprise. He proposed a different, joint, declaration on principles for the post-war world, and invited the British side to draft it.

Churchill jumped at the chance. Cadogan recalled in a memoir written in 1962:

Next morning (10 Aug), while I was having my breakfast on a writing table in the Admiral’s cabin, I heard a great commotion and a good deal of shouting. It turned out to be the PM storming round the deck and calling for me. He ran me to ground and said he wanted immediately drafts of the ‘parallel’ and the ‘joint’ declarations. He gave me, in broad outline, the sort of shape the latter should take. I hadn’t quite finished my eggs and bacon, but I pulled a sheet of notepaper out of the stationery rack before me and began to write.2

Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Sir Alexander Cadogan in his room at the Foreign Office in August 1941, the same month the Atlantic Charter was signed. (© National Portrait Gallery, London.)

Cadogan was the only expert on foreign affairs in Churchill’s delegation, on a warship 2,000 miles from home, and without the time or the communications to get any help from London. In his usual unruffled way, he got to work and produced a text. As he put it: