How can Britain make its foreign policy more impactful?
The Big Ask | No. 22.2024
The United Kingdom (UK) faces a world defined increasingly by geopolitical competition, even confrontation. A ‘CRINK’ is taking shape as Russia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Iran and North Korea coordinate to strengthen their grip on the international system. Britain’s closest ally – the United States (US) – may, under Donald Trump’s second administration, become more transactional and less interested in European security. And traditional European allies, such as France and Germany, are facing their own political challenges. So, in this week’s Big Ask, we asked eight experts: How can Britain make its foreign policy more impactful?
Senior Lecturer in National Security Studies, King’s College London
In a world defined by intensifying geopolitical competition, it is increasingly important for Britain to lead by example and uphold the free and open international order which it expects others to abide by. Among the foremost champions of this order are small states, which have been the pioneers of international legal mechanisms ranging from the law of the sea to the protection of medical care in situations of armed conflict.
Besides building like-minded coalitions, given the niche expertise that many of these small states cultivate, the UK can find partners to address emerging challenges. This includes cooperating with Nordic and Baltic partners on cybersecurity and hybrid threats. Likewise, as the COP29 climate summit drew to a close last week, it is clear how genuine partnership with small island developing states in the Caribbean and Pacific – recognising their pragmatic needs – can reinforce Britain’s climate diplomacy credentials and convening power, while also countering growing Chinese influence in these regions.
In nurturing these partnerships, Britain should not forget to draw on its longstanding assets. The UK’s Commonwealth network connects it with 33 small states, many of whom share historical ties, English as a common language, and legal systems based on British models. Under Shirley Botchwey, the incoming Secretary General of the Commonwealth, renewed emphasis on how Commonwealth engagement, particularly through trade and capacity-building initiatives, can bolster Britain’s global presence, with a particular focus on technical assistance on governance, climate adaptation, and digital transformation.
Overall, in a geopolitical environment where alliances are fragmenting and traditional powers are recalibrating, a robust engagement strategy with small states could provide the UK with versatile, values-driven partnerships that enhance its resilience and influence. But to be impactful, British policymaking should be attuned to the agency and aspirations of small states, rather than treating them as secondary players in a larger geopolitical game.
Senior Director of Policy, China Strategic Risks Institute
To meet a geopolitically unstable world increasingly dominated by hard power and defined by competing nation states, His Majesty’s (HM) Government should consider practical measures to expand its diplomatic tools, expertise, and capacity to act strategically.
British foreign policy interests should not be a part-time pursuit. The Government’s Chief Whip should exempt all serving UK foreign ministers from voting in parliament unless it is a vote of conscience, freeing their time to spend overseas.
Integrating UK trade into the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) would empower the foreign secretary to fully control trade, aid, and diplomacy. All three of these foreign policy tools should be aligned to further UK interests.
HM Government should appoint country specific and thematic envoys to work full time on challenging policy areas, including the Israel-Palestine peace process, support for Ukraine, climate, emerging technology, and the PRC.
At the same time, HM Government should set up temporary policy-units to inject outside policy experts into government. This could be done by hiring them as temporary contractors and in a format similar to the European Commission’s IDEA think tank.
Finally, HM Government should introduce a target to increase the size of diplomatic staff overseas by a third by 2030 and commit to increase or at the very least ring-fence the UK’s core diplomatic budget over the parliament.
Director, Strategy, Statecraft, and Technology (Changing Character of War) Centre, University of Oxford
In his third and final volume of the history of the Royal Navy, Nicholas Rodger articulates that, as a nation dependent on the sea for its commercial survival, a large fleet was essential. It also provided the means to project global influence, connected the Anglophone world, and hemmed in aggressive continental powers.
The shrinking of UK defence capabilities since the 1990s and the assumption it could continue to be influential by ‘burden-sharing’ with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) are about to be exposed. While Britain has managed to protect the integrity of its territorial waters and airspace, it has been unable to prevent the illegal immigration of 10,000s of people across the Channel. Governments which have a preference for proactive humanitarian intervention or are asked to support the free navigation of the Red Sea, protect British Overseas Territories, or police global waterways, may find themselves unable to fulfil these essential obligations.
An American officer was recently asked: ‘what must the UK do in the coming years?’ His answer was crisp and honest. One, expand your conventional forces; and two, be self-reliant and self-contained. At a time of greater international instability, the UK should once again, as in its past, look to its armed forces, especially its navy, to provide its ‘no regrets’ security.
Associate Fellow, Council on Geostrategy
In the 1930s, British foreign policy – tactical appeasement to buy time to rearm – failed essentially because the policy elite did not possess a theory of evil. They assumed they could deter Hitler by building a sizable air force. He was not.
Today, Britain’s security policy community is still failing to adapt fast enough to the fragmentation of the rules-based international order. In the next five years, it’s not a case of ‘shoring up’ what we can: the UK’s adversaries are demonstrating proof of concept for a new way of operating – through constant hybrid aggression combined with signal kinetic actions.
Britain and its allies should, of course, attempt to divide the CRINK, showing the PRC through persuasion of what it stands to lose by handcuffing itself to the corpse of Putinism and the Iranian clerical state. But the UK should also act more assertively, shutting down London as a playground for dirty money and CRINK-aligned organised crime, while also projecting hard power proactively where necessary.
Britain is up against evil people who only become rational when confronted by force. The UK has force and it should be prepared to use it judiciously.
The Rt. Hon. Baroness Neville-Jones DCMG
Member of the House of Lords and Member of the Advisory Board, Council on Geostrategy
As the CRINK gang up further against global democracy – as seems likely – and to counter the divisive effects among allies of Trumpian transactionalism, it will be vital for the UK to do its diplomatic best to prevent fragmentation of not just of UK-US trade and defence relations but also those between the rest of Europe and the US. Britain should avoid being forced to choose. Efforts to promote dialogue across the Atlantic on long-term issues will, however, lack credibility in Washington, DC unless HM Government takes early action materially to increase British defence expenditure.
Charles Parton
Chief Advisor, China Observatory, Council on Geostrategy
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants to reshape global governance and values in line with its interests, and that while Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CCP, remains in power – and probably beyond – it will continue to threaten the free and open international order and Britain’s way of life. The CCP’s determination is ideologically driven and consciously implemented, through informal alliances with other revisionist countries, and through economic and other inducements for the non-aligned. So far, there is little indication that the new Labour government has recognised this verity. It has accused the Conservatives of being at sixes and sevens over its China strategy – true, it never had one – but we have to wait until spring 2025 at the earliest to see if Labour can produce a set of coherent policies with impact.
Having impact will not be easy. Free and open countries will need to act in concert. Yet HM Government should work with a capricious Trump and an European Union (EU) disunited in its dealings with Beijing. And neither will give the UK a free pass, for example, with tariffs on electric vehicles: HM Government is living in cloud cuckoo land, if it thinks that the US and EU will not take measures against imports of British-made vehicles and components which benefit from no or lower tariffs on Chinese inputs.
If the UK is to be a global leader, the first step is to have a clear understanding of the CCP. The second is to have a clear strategy for protecting its economic and national security. The third would be to sell that strategy to its allies. To date, it is hard to detect such clarity.
Co-founder and Director of Research, Council on Geostrategy
To be more impactful, Britain needs to be more Bevinite. Ernest Bevin was the most insightful foreign secretary of the 20th century; he understood the need to shape the international order to uphold the interests of the British people and to ensure that his country’s closest allies and partners would not fall to expansionist autocracy. He built the Euro-Atlantic area.
How can Britain be more Bevinite? First, in a geopolitical age, Britain should be far more ruthless. It still needs to come to terms with the fact that it faces determined opposition – even enemies – whose foreign policies are completely antithetical to its own. These rivals – the so-called CRINK – need to be constrained, and then pressed down.
Secondly, Britain ought to be more disruptive. Tenaciously clinging to the so-called ‘rules-based international system’ while rivals (and allies) are degrading it or replacing it with their own regional orders will simply weaken Britain’s hand. Minilateralism is the way forward: the UK should put itself at the centre of an overlapping network of small groups of countries with common objectives and interests. These should be cultivated with aplomb.
Third, Britain needs to pursue power. The FCDO should ask itself if every policy it proposes increases the nation’s leverage relative to other countries. If a policy does not, or worse, if it weakens the UK’s hand, it should be rethought. To this end, Britain needs to do more to cultivate the coercive and discursive dimensions of its power, not so-called ‘soft power’ – which is nothing but an attractive illusion.
Finally, Britain should put the British people back at the heart of its foreign policy. If HM Government’s efforts do not make them wealthier and more prosperous – in the long term – then what is the point of foreign policy?
Senior Research Fellow in Science, Technology, and Economics, Council on Geostrategy
Previously, the UK had an outstanding reputation for doing international development well. Now, as a result of conscious decisions, Britain has diminished its voice and influence in the world as a force for reducing human poverty and suffering, and damaged its relationship with partners by earning a reputation for being unreliable.
If the UK wants to be more impactful in its foreign policy, it cannot simply set out good intentions in policy documents and send out positive vibes in speeches. It needs to do the hard work of rebuilding trust and relationships to become a respected and reliable development partner once again. This will require, above all, integrity; countries will find it hard to respect Britain if its foreign policy has a whiff of hypocrisy.
At the same time, the world is an increasingly contested and volatile place, and the UK should be in no doubt that there are countries who are actively working to diminish Britain’s standing in the world, and to fight against the values the UK holds dear. This means HM Government needs to think about development differently. The world is moving quickly, but the development sector is having the same debates it’s been having for decades.
Britain’s adversaries are using aid budgets and infrastructure projects to bind countries to them. We are seeing a more overt return to the origins of aid – where first world and second world countries sought to bring non-aligned (‘third world’) countries into their respective spheres.
Britain’s development policy needs to be centred around a more realistic understanding of where we are in world history. To ignore this geopolitical reality would be naïve.
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