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Britain
The Economist December 18th 2021
Bagehot Wakey wakey
Britain’s foreign secretary wants to end the age of introspection
B
ritain can look rather selfabsorbed these days. It spent four years wrangling over Brexit, which was often more to do with how Britons felt about each other than about Brussels. Boris John son, a fl op as foreign secretary elevated to Downing Street, uses in ternational summits for playfi ghts with the French over fi sh and sausages. Revelations about Downing Street’s illicit Christmas parties fi ll news channels; the fate of Ukraine does not. Tory mps are tiring of their prime minister, and many like what they see in Liz Truss, who became foreign secretary in September’s reshuffl e. She is the fi gurehead for a new foreignpolicy doctrine: ideological; unhitched from Europe; seeking alliances beyond America; pitched squarely against China and Russia. The themes were spelled out in a securitypolicy review in March, but she is their most forceful advocate. If Global Britain means anything, it will be defi ned not by Mr Johnson but by Ms Truss. Her speech to Chatham House, a thinktank, on December 8th was dismissed by critics as facile and reductive. That misses its signifi cance. It had a Manichean quality more familiar to Ameri can ears than to British ones. According to Ms Truss, an ideological battle is under way between the “free world” and the autocratic powers of China and Russia: a struggle between systems that serve the individual and those that put individuals at their service. “Nonaligned” states are pulled between the two orbits. She la mented the “age of introspection” that followed the cold war, when democracies nodded off , cutting defence spending and be coming distracted by home comforts and campus culture wars. Preoccupied abroad by the war on terror, they sucked up China’s cheap technology and Russia’s cheap gas, and kidded themselves that those countries were their partners. Her response is to revive economic diplomacy, which she thinks is neglected. She imagines a “network of liberty”, spanning democracies and undemocratic allies that at least uphold interna tional rules. She is keen for Britain to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for TransPacifi c Partnership, a trade deal of modest economic value but in which she sees a bulwark against China. Britain is joining its allies to off er poor countries a rival source of infrastructure fi nance. Since David Cameron left Num ber 10 in 2016, Britain has made a Sinosceptic uturn, but the shift
was painted as pragmatic and technocratic. Ms Truss recasts it as something approaching a struggle for civilisation. Her vision is, in its essence, Thatcherite. The Chatham House speech held echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s warnings, as the Berlin Wall fell, against complacency and what Francis Fukuyama, then an upandcoming political scientist, called the “end of history”. Some Tories think her a grating pastiche: she can be found on In stagram riding British tanks in Estonia (“the frontier of freedom”). She brushes off the comparison to Thatcher—it is made of any Conservative woman with strong views—but her supporters say she is a loyal student. She spent her childhood on antiwar march es with her parents, but was struck by the grim reality of their friends’ lives behind the Iron Curtain. She ditched their politics but kept their radicalism. She is one of several cabinet ministers itching for the supplyside reforms Brexit was meant to usher in. Over the past three decades the Foreign Offi ce’s budget has been cut, and may yet be cut further. Ministers and mandarins holidayed as Kabul fell to the Taliban. Powers were hived off to ri val ministries. Some are returning: last year it swallowed the in ternationaldevelopment department. Ms Truss would like it to have more infl uence over trade, her previous remit. For British diplomats, she is a culture shock. Like Thatcher, she fi nds them too prone to abstraction. She was irritated by an inter nal memo describing their diplomacy as “honest and humble”. She wants them to be patriotic, and to advertise the freedoms that make Britain great. Sceptics in the Chatham House audience found the boosterism too much and the analysis simplistic; diplo macy means dealmaking in places where goodies and baddies are in short supply. Still, they were struck by her grasp during ques tions. Unlike Mr Johnson, she is good at getting Whitehall to do what she wants, says a former minister. Civil servants who don’t, and particularly the publicschooleducated men who tend to get on her wrong side, can get a putdown and an eyeroll. Mr Johnson has damaged Britain’s standing in Washington, which sees him as a threat to peace in Northern Ireland. The trade deal that Brexiteers hoped for has not materialised. Ms Truss, for her part, fears America is becoming inwardlooking and protec tionist. The relationship is now “special but not exclusive”; Britain is strengthening security links with Australia, India and others. Still, Ms Truss’s idea of an ideological struggle with China con verges with President Joe Biden’s. Her rise coincides with a new British energy in defending European security. Britain is being no ticed again as a player if not a leader, says Ben Judah of the Atlantic Council, a Washington thinktank. It has been vocal on Russia’s threat to Ukraine, and quick to impose sanctions on Belarus and send troops to Poland to aid a migration crisis. Rise and shine Tory Europhiles think Ms Truss is their best chance of a rapproche ment with European governments. She voted Remain, but has since changed her mind on Brexit, saying that it has enlarged Brit ain’s diplomatic toolkit. Still, she stresses a bigger picture: that de spite scraps over fi sh and sausages, European countries are fellow freedomlovers in a tough world. It is a truth often lost on those Tories who mistook Brussels for tyranny. She thinks highly of An nalena Baerbock, Germany’s new Russiasceptical foreign minis ter. At Chatham House she off ered a modest olive branch, praising an eu aid scheme to counter Chinese loans. Setting aside quarrels with the neighbours will be the true test of whether Britain’s age of introspection is drawing to a close. n
