Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, ConservativeHome foreign affairs columnist and a former Conservative MP.
This is the third part of a series asking: What’s wrong with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and how to fix it? You can read part 1 here and part 2 here
Is there anything unique about how Britain thinks about strategy which is rooted in our history, culture and geography?
In the academic world, this field of study is sometimes called strategic culture. Thinking about it is a valuable exercise that prompts clarity of thought.
Specifically, it helps us understand how our nation has been shaped, and how previous generations thought and acted. In doing so, it helps generate strategic thinking, rather than just random and reactive policies, and as Britain’s former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Richards says, “policy ain’t strategy.”
The (very) likely new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, would do well to use it to consider how to view the world.
For me, three great realities stand out as being central to our strategic identity: one obvious, one rare and one unique. They represent the thinking that has shaped how we view the world for most of our modern history. They remain constants that continue to tell important truths for today.
First, the obvious: Britain is an island – and consequently has been primarily a naval power.
Our nation expanded – certainly initially – via trade over the oceans. This makes us the polar opposite, for example, of a country like Russia, whose borders expanded via military conquest over land. Once Britain had a modicum of stability at home, we needed to get our goods to Europe and beyond. Once we had ships for trade, we needed ships to protect them. As threats from Spain and France grew, so did the Royal Navy. Then came British and Irish emigration: the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Then came the need to protect the Empire and the struggle for survival in World War II. From the 1750s, for two centuries, the Royal Navy was the dominant global military force until the US Navy took over.
Our sea-faring brought us into contact with many more nations than if we had been a land-based power. It has also made our culture more open and less militarised – whoever heard of naval dictatorship – than others in Europe. We have been a nation which has influenced others, and in turn we have been influenced by others. That has often, if not always, been enriching.
By contrast, the land armies we put into the field prior to the 20th century were modest in size. Admiral Horatio Nelson had more artillery firepower on his flagship HMS Victory alone than the Duke of Wellington had in all his artillery regiments at Waterloo. It was George Orwell who said that throughout the British Empire, then one quarter of the earth’s surface, “there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state.” Britain only had massed, European-style conscript armies in World War I and II. The post-World War II British Army of the Rhine was an accident of history.
Second, our overseas policy has been values-driven for over 500 years.
This has been a truism since the Protestant Revolution replaced royal marriages as the primary diplomatic purpose of England’s foreign policy. So when the last Labour Government under Tony Blair said that the UK would have an ethical foreign policy, the truth of the matter was that we’ve had one since the days when Elizabeth I’s chief advisor, William Cecil and spymaster Francis Walsingham were plotting the protection of her throne.
Those values remained whilst Britain created the largest empire in human history. Indeed, by exporting our ideas of liberty and self-government, conservative thinker Dan Hannan has argued that ‘the empire had a self-dissolving quality’. It enabled the defeat of totalitarian socialism and nationalism and paved the way for the modern world of science, limited government and the international system. We assume our story is one of ultimate decline, but in fact it is the opposite, it is a story of seeding to the world a global culture founded on an English view of civilisation, with just laws, limited government, representative Parliaments and freedom of speech – obviously with huge help from the US, Australia and others who shared that culture.
We shaped the modern world. We should not be retreating from it.
Third, we have had a larger and deeper array of alliances than any country on earth.
This is arguably the most unique quality of our strategic culture, and one we recognise least. It’s due first, to regional geography – being part of the European states system; second, to the reach of the British empire and the development of our (sea-based) global trading networks, and third, the creation of the international system after World War II.
Okay, so those are the major constants in our history, culture and geography. What, then, are the ‘so whats’?
The basic one is that we are a global, trading, nation with an open culture, used to adaptation and flexibility, with a history of using hard and soft power – military power, finance, governance, law and cultural power – to achieve our aims. We see ourselves as being staid and conservative, but in fact, for most of our history, we were a nation of creative, global hustlers, outmanoeuvring our slower-witted rivals such as the French and using different tools to achieve our aims. The Russian accusation that we are the eminence grise behind the modern world has more than a ring of truth to it.
Why can’t we be global hustlers again, as we were from Elizabeth I till the mid-Victorian era, but using the international system – which is partially our system – to our advantage? Let’s prosecute a far more assertive policy. Let’s start thinking – sometimes at least – like an outsider. Our diplomats should not be afraid of using some sharp elbows. We’ve got this great alliance network, let’s use it to get more trade and wealth, more power and influence – and to stop being ashamed to do so.
Next, let’s ditch the foreign aid guilt trip. Yes, we need some money to help the poor, but the best way of alleviating poverty is through trade and selling goods and – especially today – services. We have to stop exporting the welfare mentality. We have subsumed our national interest far too much into the wider institutions created for the modern world. The epitome of this has been the treacherous attempt to give away UK sovereign territory, the Chagos Islands, under the guise of international law.
Next, on values, we still need to have an ethical framework through which we operate. We can’t just be Britain First without an understanding of what underpins it. Our overseas policy – and that includes not only ‘foreign’ policy, but defence, trade, cultural export, BBC World Service – should operate in support of three great freedoms which – as with our strategic culture – are rooted in our history, values and identity. These are:
The domestic BBC is finished as an organisation, so badly is its credibility tainted on issues ranging from climate and immigration to grooming gangs and trans rights. But the BBC World Service can still be saved, in part because it’s not staffed entirely by the products of woke culture. It can still be used as a weapon of freedom to beat dictatorships and their lackey broadcasters. Let’s have the World Service, BBC, properly funded, to drive a global freedom of thought agenda. It’s also a phenomenal tool of soft power. Any other nation on earth would have funded it to the hilt. We have run it down disastrously. What an extraordinary lack of imagination our leaders have; how we have unnecessarily weakened ourselves.
Third, when it comes to our strategic direction, we have hard choices ahead. Are we a global naval power or a faux continental land power? Our current NATO commitment – fielding divisions on the north German plain – is both unsustainable and, in reality, no longer plays to our strengths.
History teaches us we are a global naval power with a global trading reach. There is nothing fundamentally to change that point of view, apart from the negative whining of the Left, addicted to their pan-European identity as religious heretics were under the Tudors.
Reverting to a sea-faring role is not an excuse to weaken our army further. Instead, we need to ensure that it remains a highly professional body of elite troops whose skill reinforces our ability to build and lead alliances; in this case, perhaps primarily in the Joint Expeditionary Forces nations of Scandinavia and the Baltic republics in the Baltic and North Seas – nations that face the sharp end of the Russian threat.
Our navy, like our army, will still need enough mass to deliver effect – at the moment it simply does not have it. Mass will come from more large platforms; frigates, destroyers, tanks, fast jets, etc., but also from the ability to mount air, land and sea drones – and drone interceptor – activity from them. Human mass will also have to come from a larger, better trained and better paid reserve (but still incredibly cheap in defence terms), similar to what the US or Finland have. ‘Cognitive’ mass will come from large-scale information and political operations.
The answer strategic culture therefore gives us is this: that the emphasis has to be on rebuilding the Royal Navy, increasing the Army reserve (cost effective) plus not shrinking the professional army further but re-equipping it properly with swarm drone tech that provides a new form of mass. I would seriously think about whether we need the Tempest manned fighter project. Billions for a weapon that we won’t use for 15 years and may be redundant well before then. German start-up Helsing – a firm that didn’t exist a decade ago, unveiled its first unmanned fighter earlier this month. We need to reequip now, not for the 2040s.
The added advantage of being a naval power is that naval forces can support military diplomacy better than armies and our navy, with a beefed-up Royal Marines Brigade, can travel. The majority of humanity live near oceans. The majority of trade travels over oceans. Our Navy needs to play a greater role in supporting international trade routes, and being a visible sign for our allies. This is important. Our international trade makes up a far higher proportion of our wealth than many other nations, including the USA.
Therefore – and here’s another lesson – we cannot afford to flirt with isolationism. Britain first does not mean Britain isolated. So whilst Conservatives and Reform both agree that it is a national imperative to end mass immigration and prioritise our own global interests, we cannot confuse that with Victorian ideas of ‘splendid isolationism’ – which was isolation within the British Empire, then a very large chunk of the world. That ship sailed at the outbreak of World War I. The baby can’t go with the bathwater.
A final point, it is a statement of the obvious, but the scientific revolutions – modern travel, telecoms and AI – will continually shape modern life. However, these things don’t change the fundamentals. Britain was the first global nation, even before the age of globalisation. Through language, trade and travel, to say nothing of military and other commitments, we remain a global nation now.
These are just some ideas that need to be fleshed out by those writing the strategic direction of the next conservative government, whether Kemi’s Conservatives or Nigel Farage’s Reform.