An effective post-Brexit foreign policy will require more resources than before. Dealings with the EU will be time-consuming and complex, while the necessary expansion of the UK’s diplomatic footprint will also raise costs.
Given the international context described above and the opportunities as well as risks it presents to Britain, it will make no sense for the country to reduce spending in relative terms on its global goals. Total spending on all of the UK’s international commitments is equivalent to only about 3 per cent of GDP, or 7 per cent of government spending. Retreating from any one of its vectors of international influence after completing the process of withdrawal from the EU will make it harder for the UK to meet its current and future objectives. In fact, there is a strong case for Britain increasing the resources it commits to pursuing its international goals.
It is the job of the government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy to propose how best to invest in the UK’s assets for international influence, alongside making any necessary adjustments to the relative balance of spending between different policy areas. But the following broad parameters stand out from the preceding assessment of the international context and Britain’s potential to influence its direction.
Spending on defence should not fall below 2 per cent of GDP, given the ongoing rise in geopolitical tensions and the UK’s interest and role in helping prevent these from escalating into conflict. Notwithstanding the government’s recent temporary cut, development assistance should return to 0.7 per cent of GNI as soon as possible, given the critical importance to the UK of developing countries meeting their SDG targets. Investment in intelligence and cyber capabilities should be sustained, given the growing risk to UK interests and citizens from asymmetric conflict and threats from terrorists, cybercriminals, and state-sponsored espionage, hacking and disinformation. Importantly, spending on any one of these areas can complement activities in another. For example, the capacity to deploy troops to support the training and professionalization of local African military forces is a useful adjunct to UK development assistance in the countries involved. And the government’s capacity to deploy even limited military assets – ships, aircraft or troops – to support partners and allies in and beyond Europe can buttress trade and investment negotiations. Sharing world-class British intelligence similarly supplements all these vectors of influence.
Spending on diplomacy will need to rise significantly to help promote UK interests around the world, and to promote British perspectives and positions in a highly competitive global marketplace for norms, rules and governance structures. In fact, additional spending on UK diplomatic capability will be necessary just to retain the same level of global influence the country enjoyed when it was an EU member. Whatever adjustments the government makes to its bilateral and institutional relationships will involve a significant increase in demand on the human and material resources of British diplomats and government departments managing the UK’s international interests – including the Department for International Trade, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs – and on the time of ministers.
Additional spending on UK diplomatic capability will be necessary just to retain the same level of global influence the country enjoyed when it was an EU member.
The UK will no longer be able to rely on the European Commission, the European External Action Service and other pooled assets of the EU to manage complex and simultaneous international negotiations involving economic statecraft, whether towards regions around Europe’s periphery or towards key emerging markets. Nor will Britain be able to piggyback on the division of labour that the EU offered, whereby the UK could leave Germany and Central European states to take the diplomatic lead on shared approaches towards Belarus and Ukraine, for example, while the UK focused its efforts on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The UK will also need to expand significantly its presence in Brussels to monitor and try to influence the decisions of EU institutions, as well as in key European capitals such as Berlin and Paris, which have outsized influence on EU policymaking. At the same time, it cannot afford to ignore other key European players, such as the Netherlands, important for its leadership of the more Eurosceptical group of member states and for its voice in EU trade policy; or Italy and Spain, given their economic size and voice on foreign policy; or Poland, given its role in Central Europe and in EU–Russia relations.
Even while expanding its European networks, the UK will need to enlarge its diplomatic presence in key capitals and consulates in major cities. Part of this will be for purely economic reasons, as the UK seeks to expand its trade and investment relations with emerging markets. But, as noted earlier, there are also broader geo-economic and geopolitical reasons to do so. A greater number of countries will play proactive roles in global economic negotiations and in international and regional security – as evidenced, for example, by Turkey’s more assertive policy around its neighbourhood and by the much more assertive interventions by Saudi Arabia and the UAE across the Middle East and North Africa.
The UK will also face additional demands on its resources at the multilateral level. It will need to supplement its current presence in institutions where it no longer forms part of the EU camp, such as the WTO and World Intellectual Property Organization. And, to compensate for no longer having a leading voice in the policy positions of the world’s largest single market, the UK will need to have a stronger presence at the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions. British officials will also need to expand their presence beyond the well-trodden corridors of the UN in New York and Geneva, or the IMF and World Bank in Washington; they will need to project Britain’s voice into the deliberations of new regional actors, such as the African Union in Addis Ababa and the AIIB in Beijing.
Lacking the clout of the US or China, nor able to leverage that of the EU, the UK will need to work hard to insert itself at the nexus of the contentious debates on how to regulate and govern the new frontier areas of international affairs, such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cyber governance and outer space. Finally, becoming the broker of global solutions to any combination of the six priority goals outlined in this paper will require the UK to host regular gatherings of the official and non-governmental actors engaged in their management. Summits at the scale of COP26 carry major financial, logistical and security costs, but even smaller and more targeted convening is resource-intensive.
Unfortunately, the UK is currently on the back foot. On the surface, the situation may appear to be improving. The financial resources applied to the country’s diplomacy (still only 0.1 per cent of GDP) have risen by 18 per cent since 2010/11, and the total number of diplomatic personnel, including those based at home and overseas plus local staff, has climbed back above the level of six years ago. However, these figures disguise a fundamental shift in where the resources have been allocated. The proportion of activity supporting ODA and the ‘prosperity’ agenda has risen significantly in relation to more traditional areas of diplomacy.
In addition, the government closed or downgraded 11 consulates and diplomatic offices between 2016 and 2019, leading the UK to fall from ninth place in terms of its global diplomatic presence to 11th today. And the UK has yet to fulfil its commitment to open three new posts in the Pacific and an additional 12 around the world.
On the military front, there are few viable options for achieving meaningful savings on defence spending so long as Britain wants to remain a leading member of NATO and a credible permanent member of the UN Security Council. Rather than being able to save money, the country will need to spend more on a net basis. Africa provides an important example: the Royal Navy is currently committed to patrol important chokepoints and sea lanes of communication in the Red Sea and western Indian Ocean. But it now also has to combat piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea. From an equipment standpoint, the funding already committed to upgrading the UK’s submarine-based nuclear weapons system creates an inescapable structural competition for resources, as does the commitment to make the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers effectively operational by the middle of this decade. This is an increasingly tall order that will have knock-on effects for UK naval power projection with allies around the world, given the growing urgency of ensuring carrier force protection against new anti-ship missiles.
The government has recognized this reality with its commitment on 19 November 2020 to contribute an additional £16 billion to the armed forces over the next four years, with a significant portion earmarked to increase the UK’s naval capabilities. But this sum will at best plug the shortfall that already existed between resources and commitments. Trade-offs will still have to be made: between retaining the capacity to project conventional armed forces at scale and investing in lighter special-operations capabilities; between investing in new-generation air combat platforms and making a major commitment to unmanned aerial vehicles and drones; and between building up further the country’s cyber defence and offence capabilities and investing in its nuclear deterrent. However these trade-offs play out, the resource demands will not diminish.
What has come to be known in popular British circles as the ‘Eurovision effect’ could come to blight the country’s foreign policy.
On the development front, absorbing DFID into the FCDO may create new synergies between the government’s foreign and development policies and enable a better return on the funds invested. But it is unlikely to lead to any cost savings, and not only because of the greater demands on traditional diplomatic capabilities. The day-to-day business of diplomats will still be driven by a mixture of crisis management and promoting the UK’s near-term national interests – whether commercial, security or institutional. The FCDO’s development professionals will continue to focus on using financial resources to deliver long-term positive change among some of the world’s poorest and most challenged countries, many of which will spend the next decade trying to recover growth trajectories knocked off course by the spillover effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this context, the government’s intention to cut development spending by nearly a third as a proportion of GNI as part of its post-COVID-19 cost-reduction efforts is at best short-sighted, especially when the expected fall in GNI would have cut the absolute amount allocated to foreign assistance in any case. However, it may force British ministers and officials to focus their resources where they can have greatest impact. A focus on the poorest countries in South and Southeast Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa – like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique and Madagascar – could prove effective.
Whatever their ultimate global ambitions, this and future British governments will ultimately have to dedicate additional financial resources to the country’s external capabilities. Otherwise, what has come to be known in popular British circles as the ‘Eurovision effect’ could come to blight the country’s foreign policy. Shorn of the loyalty of its immediate EU neighbours, but with no other countries feeling obliged to prioritize relations with the UK over those with regional neighbours or the big powers, Britain could find itself squeezed to the margins of international negotiations or picked on by groups of states as a way of sending messages to others. Recent UK humiliations at the UN – its failure to win a seat on the International Court of Justice in the election of judges in 2017, and defeat in a vote over the fate of the Chagos Islands in May 2019 – are warnings for the future.
