One thing that is immediately striking about the review itself is its balanced tone and realistic ambition for the UK. Britain is described as a “collaborative” and “problem-solving country”, and there is plenty of emphasis on co-operation and leading where the UK most excels. This is possibly a recognition of the UK’s status as a middle power, especially as it notes that the geopolitical influence of middle powers is likely to continue to grow, particularly in co-operation. Without being jingoistic, the review recognises the progress that the UK has made on a range of issues leading it to be able to provide strength for other countries: democratic values, transparent government, rule of law and human rights and gender equality. While we should not be complacent with the progress we have made, it is important that we work to ensure that this can be replicated in other countries.
Turning first to security and defence, there appears to be two main focuses: firstly, focusing on co-operation and alignment within the Euro-Atlantic sphere and secondly, a modernisation of the UK’s defence capacity. Unsurprisingly, given the current government, Europe is viewed through the paradigm of NATO and not the EU, and most of this cooperation is focused through bilateral relations with France and Germany rather than creating a policy to collaborate with more multilateral projects such as the proposed EU army. One of the effects of this is allowing the UK to concentrate more on ensuring that it is in complete alignment with the US on foreign policy issues, a theme that I will refer to later on in this article. While we might welcome this as the UK leveraging its existing position to increase its influence on the global stage, there is a risk to being too involved with other countries’ military projects, especially if this leads the UK to be driven involuntarily into conflict. Moving onto defence capacity, there are many positive elements to do with modernising the UK’s capacity and working with allies, there is a surprise in that the UK is committing to increasing its nuclear arsenal. While this could be argued to be a response to the recent increases in nuclear arms from Russia and China [2], this does make it harder for Britain to make the argument for multilateral disarmament. loo k a r oun d
Global Britain or Little Britain?
With the recent release of the UK Government’s Integrated Review, billed as “the most radical reassessment of our place in the world since the end of the Cold War” [1], it seemed worthwhile to see what this paper actually has to say about the future of Britain’s engagement with the rest of the world, and to what extent this represents a positive direction. Having taken a chance to look through it, my broad conclusions are that the UK government has a broad idea of the challenges that it faces going forward, but it is still unclear whether the steps which the review proposes are actually going to achieve its lofty aims. In this article, I’m going to take a critical look at what this review means for Britain’s relations with the rest of the world in a wide variety of areas: security and defence, development, science and technology, and the growing merging of foreign and domestic policy, before going closer into what this means for Britain in the Indo-Pacific region, in China, and in the Middle East.
Otto Barrow, PPE at Magdalen College
A look at the Government’s Integrated Review
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