The next government faces difficult choices about how to position the UK internationally when some of the country’s most important post-war relationships – those with the US and Europe – are fundamentally shifting. With limited resources for foreign policy, the UK must selectively play to its strengths as a global broker and singularly influential mid-sized power.
General elections rarely turn on foreign policy – except when they do. It is now eight years since the upheaval of Brexit, when a fracturing of public support for the UK’s alliance of over 40 years led to the rupture with the European Union. Although the bitterness around Brexit and its aftermath is fading, Europe remains a highly charged issue for both the Conservative and Labour parties, and relations with the EU have many loose ends. Elsewhere, the international landscape remains more challenging than ever. In the US, the approach of the 2024 presidential election – and with it the prospect of a second term for Donald Trump – threatens to rewrite one of the UK’s most enduring relationships. Meanwhile, the Israel–Hamas conflict has prompted demonstrations in the UK challenging government policy, and presents problems for a Labour opposition struggling to hold a united line in its response.
Nominally domestic UK issues also have their roots in shocks overseas. While the war in Ukraine threatens European security and has exposed weaknesses in European militaries – including Britain’s – it also precipitated a spike in household energy bills, contributing to a cost-of-living crisis that has become a political flashpoint (and remains so even as prices in international energy markets have dropped). Immigration remains toxic, even though the UK increasingly relies on foreign workers to staff its faltering health and social care services, a matter of prime concern to voters. In short, while problems at home may remain at the fore, foreign policy deserves prominence in this general election.
Arguments about how Britain’s standing in the world has declined, and what can be retained, miss a more interesting and urgent question: what kind of power should it be now?
More than that, though, foreign policy is a chance to set out a vision of Britain’s identity and its chosen role in the world. Establishing such a vision and compellingly communicating it to voters will affect how the country sees itself and how others see it, as well as whether the UK can help shape the world in line with its interests and values. Debates about the UK’s global role often count out degrees of national decline. Such exercises can be coloured by nostalgia and involve wistful notions about the UK recapturing something of its historical prominence as a great power – a narrative epitomized by the Conservative government’s insistent post-Brexit slogan ‘Global Britain’. They also reflect genuine tensions between ideas about UK strategy, whether centred on the pragmatic pursuit of national interests or on the UK’s role in upholding a system of international order. But arguments about how Britain’s standing in the world has declined, and what can be retained, miss a more interesting and urgent question: what kind of power should it be now?
This paper sets out some immediate priorities for the next government in order to manage unpredictable great power rivalry, invest in the UK’s alliances, repair weaknesses in defence, consolidate the UK’s advantages in science, technology and culture, and provide more consistent support for global systems of law and regulation. At the heart of our argument is the idea that a new government should pursue a foreign policy rooted in reality, without unduly giving up ambition in terms of national interest or the service of international stability.
Making choices in a more dangerous world
The range of problems confronting the next government is immense. After decades in which the UK shaped its military and diplomacy mainly around support for US-led expeditionary operations and the ‘war on terror’, it now faces a grinding war on the edge of Europe and continued risks from a revanchist and unpredictable Russia. The rise of China presents an ‘epoch-defining challenge’, as the UK government has put it, which tests the stability of the international order. So does the rivalry between the US and China, not least in terms of the possible impact on trade. This especially matters because the increasingly protectionist impulses of the US and Chinese governments, motivated in part by bilateral political grievances, are occurring just as the UK, post-Brexit, pursues a trade strategy dependent on access to open markets.
Other challenges of positioning abound for the next UK government. The global shift towards decarbonized energy is redistributing geopolitical and economic power from countries with hydrocarbon supplies to those with critical minerals and industries associated with green technologies. The UK is scrambling to work out what it can afford to invest in the energy transition; it risks getting left behind if the next government fails to pursue a vision for this.
At the same time, the war between Israel and Hamas, with terrible consequences in Gaza, has intensified old frustrations in many states about the perceived double standards of the ‘West’ and the international system. The countries voicing these frustrations are becoming more influential and activist. This adds to the pressure on the UK, along with other Western powers, to acknowledge the need to reform the post-1945 order (and help to achieve it). Domestically, the political difficulty of responding to the war is evident in demonstrations on British streets in sympathy both with Palestinians and with Israel.
Nor is the world short of other challenges. Conflicts in Sudan, the Sahel and Yemen are causing grave harm and threaten wider stability. Climate change continues apace, with 2023 the hottest year on record. Concerns persist about a lack of pandemic preparedness (amid suspicions that governments are forgetting the lessons of COVID-19), and about the risks from artificial intelligence (AI) in creating deepfakes or new cyberweapons. Some political will to manage these borderless problems is evident internationally. Recent climate negotiations have made progress on plans to provide climate finance for poorer countries. China has echoed some of the concerns of the US, the EU, the UK and others about regulation of AI. But on many of the problems needing global action, existing multilateral institutions struggle to coordinate a response.
In crisis, scope for change
The next government has a real opportunity to strengthen the UK’s role in tackling these problems, and at the same time to further UK interests and promote a more stable international order. With Brexit in the past, the UK has begun to show signs of a more thoughtful foreign policy. Shorn of some of the exaggerated claims about the opportunities that Brexit might bring, a more sober assessment has emerged – one that acknowledges that any benefits from Brexit will take hard work to secure, and that leaving the EU has had immediate costs too.
With Brexit in the past, the UK has begun to show signs of a more thoughtful foreign policy.
This steadier foreign policy has yielded results. The UK’s clarity on the need to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine has injected conviction into European and NATO responses to the war. In successive recent foreign policy reviews, the 2021 Integrated Review and the 2023 ‘refresh’ of the same, there is a clear focus on the need to address the rise of hostile or competitor authoritarian states (specifically China and Russia), manage their effects on the international system, and defend the UK’s interests. In the Indo-Pacific, the UK has found ways to strengthen its trade and military presence even though there must be doubt that it can play any significant military role in the region (and it is at risk of overstating what it can contribute). The AUKUS defence partnership with Australia and the US involves joint production of submarines as well as cooperation on advanced technologies such as AI, cyberwarfare and quantum computing. The UK has also recently agreed to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a free-trade bloc with 11 other countries. While the CPTPP’s potential economic value to the UK is limited for now, membership may enable the UK to develop strategic relations with allies in the Indo-Pacific.
The UK has strengthened some European relationships. Through the Windsor Framework, announced in February 2023, the government found a working compromise to improve trade with Europe, while enabling Northern Ireland leaders to object to EU rules if desired. This has helped to address some of the Brexit-created tensions over the UK’s new land border with the EU. And by rejoining the Horizon Europe programme – the EU’s leading research and innovation fund – in January 2024, the UK resolved some of the needless disadvantages that Brexit had created for the science and technology sector.
The UK has also had some success in leadership on global issues. On climate change, it has committed to relatively ambitious climate finance goals and has spearheaded the development of offshore wind power (although the Climate Change Committee warned in 2023 that the UK may miss emissions targets, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak diluted key policies). The UK has led innovation in global health research, having played notable roles in developing one of the first malaria vaccines, trialling COVID-19 treatments and producing a successful COVID-19 vaccine. It has had recent diplomatic wins on global governance, including on AI, with a UK-hosted AI Safety Summit in November 2023 bringing together the US and China to agree limited wording on jointly managing AI-related risks.
These achievements, though arguably modest, show some of the advantages the UK can bring to bear: a strong diplomatic network, a prominent presence in multilateral institutions, and many links (often historical) to the non-European world. The UK enjoys an outsized profile and level of importance in NATO and the Five Eyes defence alliance – partly reflecting the possession of nuclear weapons and extensive intelligence capabilities. It has a record of influence on defence and security, trade, climate change, the governance of emerging technology, and global health and development. The country also has a historical reputation – albeit not unblemished – for upholding international law, and has played a prominent role in the past in helping to reshape international institutions.
Yet UK foreign policy still contains contradictions which the next government will have to resolve. Relations with key countries are fudged. The UK’s actions at home undermine its credibility in calling on other states to respect international law and meet climate goals. Immigration remains politically toxic, impeding the UK’s alliances and muddling its economic goals. Dysfunction in political institutions affects many aspects of parliament and lawmaking. In its economy, the UK suffers from poor productivity growth relative to other advanced economies, and sluggish GDP growth. These problems undermine the government’s ability to make good on its promises at home, let alone play a global role.
The desire for a more strategic foreign policy is evident in parts of government now. But the resources, long-term focus and state capacity to implement it are not.
Above all, the UK is not allocating enough money to diplomacy, defence and foreign aid to meet the aspirations successive governments have set out. Meeting the 2.5 per cent of GDP target for defence spending is an urgent priority given the immediate risks the UK faces and the gaps in its current readiness. Nor is there enough time to do everything; the next government will need to prioritize not only its choice of policies but their sequencing. The desire for a more strategic foreign policy, one that proceeds from a clear-eyed assessment of the UK’s interests and responds to growing great power competition, is evident in parts of government now. But the resources, long-term focus and state capacity to implement it are not.
Although the UK cannot claim great power status, it plays more of a role in global politics and security than a conventional mid-sized power. It can reasonably aspire to be a broker of common cause in a more multipolar world, building not just on its historic links to the US and Europe, but on its wide range of relationships with countries such as Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Turkey. The next chapters explore what this foreign policy would entail, starting with one of the thorniest issues: navigating relations with the US and China.
