Empowering British statecraft: Towards the new National Security Strategy
The Memorandum | No. 16.2025
On 25th February, Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, announced that His Majesty’s (HM) Government would compile a National Security Strategy (NSS) to help protect the United Kingdom’s (UK) national interests more effectively. This strategy will be published in June 2025, just before the annual summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This will be the fifth national security strategy in 15 years (see: Box 1). It will come after the publication of the Strategic Defence Review – the current Labour government’s national defence strategy. The previous Labour government of Gordon Brown was the first to publish a National Security Strategy – in 2008.
Box 1: British national strategies since 2010
National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review (2010)
National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review (2015)
Global Britain in a Competitive Age (Integrated Review, 2021)
Responding to a More Contested and Volatile World (Integrated Review Refresh [IRR], 2023)
Besides these five major strategies, there have been a plethora of sub-strategies, including the Modernising Defence Programme (2018), the Integrated Operating Concept (2020), the Defence Command papers (2021 and 2023) and the Defence Nuclear Enterprise (2024). This means that over 700 pages of national strategy have been drafted over the past 15 years – to which the NSS will undoubtedly add – far more than during any 15-year period during the Cold War, when Britain faced the might of the Soviet Union.
The Integrated Review and the IRR marked a significant departure from the prevailing orthodoxies.
Until the Integrated Review in 2021, most of these strategies rested on a plethora of ‘critical assumptions’ which had taken root after the Cold War, such as the notions that:
American-led globalisation is beneficial and unstoppable;
Ideological competition is over as liberal democracy takes root;
Warfare between the major powers has been transcended by a rules-based international system, especially in Europe;
Sovereignty is less relevant as multilateralism spreads;
Soft power is more important than hard power.
Based on these assumptions, Britain embraced a modest ‘middle power’ mindset wilfully. HM Government cut defence spending, contemplated scaling back the nuclear deterrent and reallocated resources to Official Development Assistance (ODA) – often in an uncoordinated way. It embraced a ‘golden decade’ in relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and failed to deter Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, leaving other European countries to pursue their own interests, which resulted in the forlorn Normandy Format and Minsk agreements. Economic and societal openness were pursued for their own sake, creating economic dependencies and sources of domestic division which have become weaknesses as authoritarian rivals have grown in strength.
The Integrated Review and the IRR marked a significant departure from the prevailing orthodoxies. Both identified geopolitical competition as the principal challenge, with Russia described as a ‘direct’ and ‘acute’ threat, and the PRC as a ‘systemic competitor’. Both explained how the rules-based international system had been so degraded that Britain had to form new relations with new partners with similar interests. The reviews rightly identified that the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic regions were becoming increasingly interwoven, and that new relationships and frameworks would be needed to draw free and open countries in both regions further together.
However, having successfully moved the debate about national security to the geopolitical realm, the Integrated Review failed to anticipate the speed of change. It was for this reason that HM Government initiated a new review in late 2022. The resulting IRR recognised that ‘the transition into a multipolar, fragmented and contested world has happened more quickly and definitively than anticipated.’ But there were still two areas where the IRR should have gone further:
Long-held assumptions about the United States’ (US) role in the world should have been put under greater scrutiny. Both the Integrated Review and IRR assumed American leadership would continue. At no stage did either strategy identify the possibility of the US ending its commitment to conventional deterrence in Europe, making territorial claims on Panama, Canada and Denmark (Greenland), or declaring tariff wars on its allies and partners;
Economic conflict should have been integrated more robustly into the logic of systemic competition.
With the imposition of blanket tariffs – and especially against the PRC – the US has signalled that it has given up on turning the PRC into a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the global economy. Washington’s new aim appears both to be the containment of Chinese economic power and rapid American reindustrialisation, brought about through economic statecraft. That end is logical, but it is contributing to an economic zero-sum game which is likely to last for the foreseeable future. The US will do whatever it takes to protect itself from the PRC; understandably, the economic wellbeing of the wider world will come a distant second to that objective. With the incorporation of economics, geopolitical competition has become genuinely systemic. There are few, if any, rules; raw power, and opportunism, will dominate.
So, what should the next NSS look like? For starters, the public version should be both far shorter – a maximum of 25-30 pages, with more graphics, maps and lists for ease of reading – and more hard-hitting than previous reviews. It should also identify Britain’s fundamental interests in a world where American policy is becoming more self-interested, and where the global economy is becoming less open. And it should give the public a clear understanding of the threats, and make the case for the resource allocation needed to deter, or, if necessary, pre-empt them.
In particular, the NSS ought to articulate a new set of critical assumptions to guide Britain’s national security formulation well into the 2030s. Based on prevailing trends, it is becoming increasingly clear that:
The neoliberal economic order is being replaced by growing economic restrictions: nations are regenerating and exercising state power to protect their economic sovereignty and vital interests;
Authoritarian models of national development are competing with liberal democracy and openness for global ideological dominance;
Warfare between the major powers is possible, even in Europe: adversaries are intensifying sub-threshold operations, involving economic and ideological offensives, against one another;
The importance of national power is growing: sovereignty, strategic advantage and freedom of action cannot be taken as a given, and must be actively generated;
Hard power, particularly nuclear deterrence, is more important than soft power.
Here, much of the ‘strategic framework’ outlined in the IRR remains pertinent: as systemic competition intensifies and expands, Britain needs to continue to shape the international order, deter threats to its national interests – including to its allies and partners – enhance national resilience and pursue strategic advantage (though it may need to think more about how the strategic advantage of rival powers can be degraded). All of this needs to be pulled together more forcefully: the NSS needs to determine how the UK can cultivate and integrate its national powerbase – its economy, political institutions, national cohesion, and its communications and transport networks – more effectively for international impact.
The NSS needs to address how Britain will practise economic statecraft and warfare.
But, in light of the changing international realities, the strategic framework needs to be updated in two key areas. First, economic competition needs to be incorporated. This involves economic statecraft and economic warfare, which lie on a continuum: their dynamics mirror those of ‘peace’ and ‘war’. Just as war is the ‘mere continuation of policy with other means’ (per Carl von Clausewitz), economic statecraft can be a means either to prepare for or deter foreign aggression, and may involve coercion.
Economic warfare can, like kinetic war, be defensive or offensive. However, it is in essence strategic: the typical aim is to inflict large-scale disruption and pain to the population of an adversary, removing the will and the means to resist.
While the NSS should confront the possibility of a worst-case scenario – war between two or more peer competitors – it should accept the fact that economic warfare is well under way: free and open countries have imposed comprehensive sanctions on Russia, frozen US$300 billion (£224 billion) of Russian foreign exchange reserves, and are using the interest from them to fund Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The NSS needs to address how Britain will practise economic statecraft and warfare. At present, the design and execution of economic statecraft is distributed across the departmental system – the Department of Business and Trade for exports and industrial strategy, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology for intellectual property, and HM Treasury for relationships with the multilateral institutions. Much of their practice is still based on the assumption that Russia and the PRC may become ‘responsible stakeholders’, rather than the reality of prolonged systemic competition, in which economic coercion plays a growing role.
Before the Second World War, the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) was incubated inside the Foreign Office; its design and personnel were well developed by 1938, with functions ranging from Legal, to Foreign Relations, to Financial Pressure and ‘Prize’ (i.e., the seizure of contraband goods at sea) and Intelligence. Today, there is a strong argument for establishing – in shadow form – a modern equivalent of the MEW: a body located in the heart of government which coordinates economic action in pursuit of British economic security goals. These would include:
Creating a methodology, a civil service and military cadre and a common professional language for economic statecraft, coercion and warfare;
Assessing the risks arising from economic aggression, manipulation and pressure from competitors such as the PRC and Russia. The public version should be backed by a deeper, professional, ‘UK Eyes Only’ assessment identifying the most critical economic and infrastructure vulnerabilities;
Laying contingency plans for a single centre of decision making for economic power projection and resistance, identifying the likely functions of such a ministry.
Second, the NSS needs to focus more on how Britain will pursue discursive statecraft, i.e., national efforts to articulate concepts, ideas and objects into new discourses at the international level in order to degrade existing political and ideological frameworks, or generate entirely new ones. Save for a brief moment in the mid-1940s, when Britain toyed with a ‘Third Force’ in international relations, HM Government has supported – and when needed, shaped – the American-led international order. This is why successive British governments have been so wedded to NATO. Not only does the alliance keep Russia out, but it also harnesses American power to dampen geopolitical intrigue and conflict within Europe. But what happens if the US is less willing – and able – to provide structure to the prevailing international and European orders?
For this contingency, the NSS needs to work out a vision for Britain’s own region. HM Government currently lacks such a vision. What will the UK’s offer be to its European neighbours and allies – and what does it want in exchange from them – if the US draws away from the alliance? What minilateral groupings within NATO and outside of it – and what capabilities – might Britain need to develop to assume leadership of the alliance or provide alternatives? And how can Indo-Pacific partners be drawn into the strategic effort?
Here, the NSS ought to focus on boosting HM Government’s ability to construct and project international narratives. During the Cold War, Britain established the Information Research Department in the Foreign Office to cultivate national messages and undermine those of rivals, both abroad and at home. Today, just as there is a strong argument for establishing a Ministry of Economic Warfare, there is an equally strong demand for a new version of the Information Research Department. This organisation could:
Identify hostile foreign narratives and discourses which aim to stir up domestic divisions, weaken Britain’s alliances or partnerships, depict the country in a negative light, or position it as a declining power on the international stage;
Craft factual counter-narratives to degrade or push back against hostile forces;
Draw universities, think tanks and other institutions in civil society together to engage in discursive statecraft – even ideological warfare – against foreign rivals and hostile powers, such as Russia and the PRC.
Finally, one of the most critical factors constraining UK national power, and freedom of action, has been studiously ignored in national security formation: namely the absence of domestic consensus around strategic goals, or even the values which guide how those goals are formulated. For this reason, the new NSS should start from an unflinching assessment of the strategic environment facing the nation and address, without euphemism, the problem of Britain’s societal resilience, which has been weakened by political, cultural and demographic change.
Put simply, any document which pledges a strategic course of action over the next ten years should confront the problem that large numbers of British citizens may be unlikely, at first, to agree with it. To build a consensus, the NSS needs to be evidence-based and have persuasive power, when needed, through the declassification of intelligence.
Paul Mason is an Associate Fellow in Defence and Resilience at the Council on Geostrategy, and a journalist, author and political researcher.
James Rogers is Co-founder (Research) at the Council on Geostrategy.
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Stronger beer needed for the near certainty that the USA will make an overt attack on European interests or territory, and will repudiate resistance to Russian aggrandizement.