Tag Archives: global britain

William Wallace writes: The contradictions of ‘Global Britain’

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 11th March 2021 - 11:51 am

A year ago Boris Johnson promised that his government would undertake the most fundamental review of the UK’s international priorities since the end of the Cold War. He promised that this would be the biggest review of our foreign, defence and development policy since the end of the Cold War, designed to maximise our influence and integrate all the strands of our international efforts.

Next Tuesday, March 16th, the first part of this ‘Integrated Review of Foreign and Security Policy’ will be published – several months later than planned. Changes in those responsible haven’t helped: David Frost was made national security adviser, then threatened to resign, then became instead the Cabinet minister for (mis)handling relations with the EU. Dominic Raab was distracted by the messy business of putting the FCO and the Department for International Development (DfID) together. The Prime Minister as usual wasn’t thinking things through. We expect a smoothly-written essay on ‘Global Britain’, without much detail on what that means in practice. The implications for defence manpower and resources will appear in a separate paper two weeks later.

Johnson has rhapsodised on ‘Global Britain’, without ever explaining what exactly that implied. Freed from the constraints of the EU, he saw Britain recovering its ‘buccaneering spirit’; he seems unaware that the buccaneers were licensed pirates. He’s been ecstatic about sending a carrier task force past Singapore to the South China Sea, though he never explained what the strategy behind that would be. Tory think-tanks have produced reports on ‘the tilt to the Indo-Pacific’, which others have labelled ‘the tilt away from Europe’.