Bagehot Meet Liz Truss

Bagehot Wakey wakey

Britain’s foreign secretary wants to end the age of introspection

Britain 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 Johnson, a flop as foreign secretary elevated to Downing Street, uses international 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 American 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 lamented the “age of introspection” that followed the cold war, when democracies nodded off, cutting defence spending and becoming 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 international 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 Number 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 Instagram 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 marches 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 rival ministries. Some are returning: last year it swallowed the internationaldevelopment 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 internal 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; diplomacy means dealmaking in places where goodies and baddies are in short supply. Still, they were struck by her grasp during questions. 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 protectionist. 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 converges with President Joe Biden’s. Her rise coincides with a new British energy in defending European security. Britain is being noticed 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 rapprochement with European governments. She voted Remain, but has since changed her mind on Brexit, saying that it has enlarged Britain’s diplomatic toolkit. Still, she stresses a bigger picture: that despite 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 Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s new Russiasceptical foreign minister. 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