Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, ConservativeHome foreign affairs columnist and a former Conservative MP.
What is the UK’s role in the world?
I ask because – yet again – there’s the ‘whither Britain’ debate: about being a declining or middle power, or whether we should/could lead an alliance of middle powers, and whether our failure to invest in defence is damaging our influence.
Talk of ‘middle powers’ especially seems to be in vogue.
Canada’s leader Mark Carney says ‘middle powers’ need to work together in a more anarchic world, like a band of nervous pilgrims on a journey through dark forests dominated by amoral superpower wolves. The Telegraph’s Adrian Bloomfield, in a generally excellent piece, argued last week that Britain should lead this ‘middle power’ pack. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has weighed in.
A problem with this debate is that everyone is using different definitions, like a doctor who diagnoses depression when you have Athlete’s Foot, or cancer when you have lumbago.
For example, in Bloomfield’s piece, both Japan, the world’s fourth largest economy, and New Zealand, the world’s 52nd largest economy, are ‘middle powers’. This definition is so elastic as to be meaningless.
So, let’s start from the position of diagnosing things correctly. In the great global league of nations, there are five brackets: superpowers, major, or great, powers, middle powers, the rest and struggling states. Where are we?
The two superpowers clearly are the US and China. These nations have undisputed economic and military power. The US has broader clout thanks to language, law and culture (which they got from us). China’s military power is heavily focused in Asia and not yet fully global, whilst it’s culture and linguistic power are much weaker. But they are both dominant powers. We again live in a bi-polar world.
Beneath them are perhaps 6-7 major powers, some declining, some rising. These include legacy powers such as the UK and France, effectively junior global powers. The UK, thanks to its greater empire, global reach and linguistic and soft power, is the more important of the two. France, by its leading role in the EU, is more powerful within Europe. Then there are economic giants such as Germany and Japan. Then rising regional giants such as India and Brazil. I’d also include Russia, which desperately wants to be a superpower and has great energy resources as well as thousands of nuclear weapons, but it’s economy is the size of Holland’s and it is void of soft power. It is in danger of being a middle power, or even a failed state. If people think the term great is too flattering, we can use the term major, but clearly these powers are not ‘middle’ powers.
Below great powers are the mid-ranked powers, the Hollands, Spains, Philippines, Kenyas and Swedens, etc. Some, like the Swedes, have tended to use their relatively modest resources intelligently to carve out an out-sized role for themselves in the world. Some are industrialising or have raw materials; Nigeria, Algeria or South Africa. In time, South Africa maybe a great power and India a third superpower. But for at least the next decade, they are not. After these are the rest; small but richer or large but poorer, and then the struggling states; the Sudans or Yemens, for example.
So, Britan is not a superpower and hasn’t been since 1956, when the US scuppered Israeli, French and British plans to seize the Suez Canal. We know this. But we should not underestimate ourselves. Sadly, on the British intelligentsia left, there is a long tradition of pointless self-denunciation and self-negation which tends to corrupt serious discussion about our place in the world. As the BBC and Guardian share this agenda, it often makes for predictably thoughtless and dull coverage. These self-flagellating poseurs often declare that we are a ‘middle’ power. The trouble is, it’s not really true.
Our role in shaping the modern world has given us not only alliances but many soft and hard power facets: culture, language, law, science and intelligence capabilities. We are a nation that has touched pretty much every corner of the earth and continues to do so. Whilst we have run down terribly our armed forces, we have not yet lost our martial culture entirely. Even the NGO-like Foreign Office, which sometimes gives the impression it would rather apologise for Britain rather than champion it, still has enough talent to reform and rebuild. Whilst the domestic BBC is failing, the BBC World Service remains a huge potential asset if only it was funded and directed properly.
So, Britain may not be, to quote the Victorian giant Alfred, Lord Tennyson; “that strength which in old days, Moved earth and heaven,” but we remain a major power. Those on the Left who argue against this tend to believe that parading their self-loathing marks them out as being in receipt of special wisdom. It doesn’t. It just identifies them as sanctimonious bores. Personally, what I find so daft is the way that Britain’s belittlers tell us how unimportant and morally wretched we are, and then, on the basis on this self-hatred, progress to tell others what to do or how to live. It takes a special sort of delusion to believe that advertising your own contempt for your own nation’s values, culture, history, etc., encourages others to want to listen to you. The British intelligentsia produce a unique sort of anti-colonialist liberal-imperialism. It’s probably why they tend to be so confused.
However, there are some smart people writing about this too, be it Canada’s Carney, former PM Blair or The Telegraph’s Bloomfield.
Carney talks of fundamental rupture in the world order and the need for ‘middle power’ alliance. He did so in light of US President Donald Trump’s foolish remarks about annexing Canada, which isn’t going to happen. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that Labour risks Britain’s status in the ‘premier league of nations’ without more defence spending. As a shaper of high welfare, mass immigration, slow economic growth Britain, I have a generalised disdain for anything Blair says, but on this he is correct. We risk, largely through our own poor decision-making, becoming a lesser nation.
As Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said: “If you want to be a global player, you need to back up your diplomacy with force … either you pay for it or it will wane.”
We need more hard power, and at the moment we don’t have it. For 30 years we have lived off the – literally – hard-won 20th Century military victories of the armed forces, whilst structurally weakening them through lack of funding and now DEI nonsense. Putin declared the new cold war back in 2007 at the Munich Security conference. We wasted years doing nothing when we could have gradually, but with purpose, raised our game.
But it’s not only about hard power. As Bloomfield rightly says, our strength is also in our ‘convening’ power because we are members of so many international institutions. What he is referring to is the most striking but yet one of the most underappreciated facets of our strategic history; the extraordinary range of our alliances, built of over four centuries. Only the US betters us in this.
But should we be, as Bloomfield suggests, a leader of a middle power block?
Possibly, but what does it actually mean? Good luck convening Turkey and Indonesia, Sweden and Kenya around a shared agenda. One of the few agendas we have tried to lead on its climate change, and our obsessive posturing has probably damaged our credibility and made us a bit of a laughing stock. The world has watched Britain charge off into the nirvana of economic self-harm in the name of net zero and collectively refused to follow us.
There are ways of showing practical leadership. We can champion our historic values; free trade, free thought and freedom from oppression. Indeed, the ‘variable geometry’ of modern international relations demands flexibility – and not a little opportunism.
Personally, I think we need to keep investing in those alliances we have, NATO especially. Within that framework, let’s think about potentially redirecting our military focus from being a legacy land power from World War II, to becoming again a naval power, which is what we’ve been for most of the past 400 years, whilst also focusing less on supporting Germany and Poland, and more on leading the Joint Expeditionary Forces group of nations (basically Scandinavia, the Baltic states + Holland and Iceland, with Ukraine as an interested and allied partner).
In the Pacific, AUKUS is the basis of our Pacific Alliance with Australia and the US. It’s potentially also a way of drawing other important allies, such as South Korea and Japan.
And we need to remain rooted in the Transatlantic alliance whilst pulling together, as Dan Hannan as often suggested, the five Anglo states: the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as close as we can. Let’s keep our closest alliances closer. And for the rest, I would argue we need to be a little less altruistic and a little more realistic – and selfish. We’d help the developing world, for example, far more by trading with it than by handing over wads of development cash for nebulous purposes.
Ultimately, we should remember a simple lesson: in poker terms, we still have a one of the best hands of any nation, we just need to play it better.