The UK needs a hard-headed assessment of how to safeguard the national interest
PHILIP STEPHENS
Britain has spent much of the past 75 years in a struggle to avoid adjusting its international ambitions to diminished economic circumstance. Managing relative decline, this is sometimes called. Others prefer to talk about “punching above our weight”.
Ask serious students of defence why Britain is modernising its Trident nuclear missile and has just launched two aircraft carriers and the answer is summed up in two words: national prestige.
Standing alone in 1940 looms large in the nation’s collective memory. A stubborn reluctance to surrender imperial pretensions has battled a weak economy at home and decisive shifts in the geopolitical balance abroad. It has usually taken a series of economic crises to realign grand ambitions with actual capabilities. The shock of Brexit may well force another such reassessment.
There was nothing complicated about the outcome of this month’s general election. In Boris Johnson, the voters were offered a Conservative chancer waving the flag of English nationalism. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s pitch was that of a hard left ideologue who generally sees the west as a villain. Anyone with an acquaintance with George Orwell could predict that the working classes might well break the habit of a lifetime to lend their votes to the Tories.
Re-elected with a handsome parliamentary majority, Mr Johnson has confirmed January 31 as the date for Britain’s EU exit. The parting of the ways after 47 years will demolish the European pillar of Britain’s foreign policy. The prime minister says it will be replaced with an expansive vision of “Global Britain”. So far this amounts to no more than an empty slogan.
What is needed instead is a hard-headed assessment of how best to safeguard the national interest once Britain sits outside the framework of the EU — and a subsequent willingness to realign once again aspirations with available resources. Mr Johnson seems to think that all will be well if only the country “gets its mojo back”. In truth, if Britain wants to keep hold of a reputation as a well respected nation it cannot continue to pretend to be a great power.
The over-reach is obvious in the shape of the armed forces, calculated to convey the appearance of a pocket superpower. Refusing to admit that Britain no longer possesses across-the-board, or full-spectrum, forces, successive defence ministers have hollowed out many essential capabilities.
The money is being spent on aircraft carriers without any obvious strategic purpose and on hugely expensive state of the art American fighter planes to sit on their decks. Modernisation of the submarine-based Trident nuclear missile system is swallowing another large slice of the budget. What unites the two programmes is that they say a lot more about burnishing Britain’s prestige abroad than about meeting real threats to its national security. If the latter were the priority the resources would be going in to cyber warfare, airborne and seaborne drones and space defence.
The election changed decisively the arithmetic at Westminster. Everything else, though, remains the same. Mr Johnson’s insistence on an end-2020 deadline for negotiations with Brussels means the best Britain will get from the EU is a bare bones deal covering trade in goods. The damage to the economy inflicted by Brexit will thus be at the pessimistic end of expectations.
The facts of geopolitics are likewise unaltered. The Pax Americana is ending as power shifts to China and other rising states and the US grows ever more reluctant to assume global leadership. The rules-based international system is fragmenting. Coming decades will more closely resemble the great power competition of 19th-century Europe than the end-of-history liberal order many imagined would persist after the end of the cold war.
These are all trends that will leave Britain — a middle-ranking nation with widely dispersed global economic and security interests — more vulnerable than most comparable democracies.
The last time the UK claimed a serious global role was during the 1960s when it operated a string of military bases across the Middle East and south-east Asia. After sterling’s devaluation in 1967, Harold Wilson’s government beat an enforced retreat from the last outposts of empire east of Suez. The withdrawal from Singapore and the Gulf marked Britain’s admission it was a European rather than a global power — a shift cemented by joining the European Community.
Half a century later, Mr Johnson’s government proposes to turn things on their head. Britain, we are to suppose, is once again a global power. The prime minister intends to send one of the navy’s carriers for a brief spin in the South China Sea to prove the point. American F-35 fighter planes will fill many of the spaces on deck because the government cannot afford to buy sufficient aircraft for both ships.
This charade will soon reach beyond absurdity. The 2016 referendum and the election have settled the issue of EU membership. Britain is leaving the union. But the facts of economic life and national security have not changed.
The EU27 will remain Britain’s largest economic partner; and the main threats to its security will come from within or just beyond the European neighbourhood. The Nato alliance with the US will remain the vital pivot of national defence. Outside as much as inside the EU, Britain’s overall security will rest on these two sets of relationships.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario