In the service of global security and prosperity, as well as self-interest, the UK should make common cause with mid-sized powers and with states across the Global South on shared concerns from climate change to reform of multilateral institutions.
The next UK government should aspire to play a bigger role in addressing global problems, by involving itself more expansively in the design of solutions to them. This is important at a time when many countries are frustrated with the dysfunction of the multilateral system. Recent complaints include the slow response of international financial institutions to debt and climate crises in developing countries, and the global health architecture’s struggles to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries during the pandemic. Perceptions of inconsistency in the Western responses to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza exacerbate the sense of dissatisfaction, and are giving new potency to accusations of double standards and hypocrisy. This has undermined the already strained institutions of post-1945 international order, agreement and law.
The UK, like other mid-sized powers, derives huge benefits from operating in a predictable, stable international environment. It has a strong interest in maintaining a functioning multilateral system. The issue is also strategic: China and Russia challenge and aim to revise the international order; they contest the legitimacy of multilateral institutions and seek to build alternative networks of influence.
The UK, like other mid-sized powers, derives huge benefits from operating in a predictable, stable international environment. It has a strong interest in maintaining a functioning multilateral system.
This global competition has seen the emergence of what the UK government has called a ‘middle ground’ of states becoming more active in international affairs, and reluctant to align themselves too closely with the major powers. The trend is manifest in diplomatic initiatives such as African and South American leaders’ peace proposals for Ukraine; in the expansion of the BRICS grouping, with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) offered membership from January 2024; and in the addition of the African Union to the G20 in 2023. When India held the rotating presidency of the G20 in 2022/23, it emphasized the importance of the Global South and sought to play a leading role in a Global South agenda; Brazil, which holds the G20 presidency in 2023/24, has done the same.
Many of these countries will play an important part in managing US–China tensions. Their actions will also affect the green transition, given that many mid-sized powers as well as low-income states hold a big share of the critical minerals and resources required for decarbonization. This redistribution of critical energy resources redistributes geopolitical leverage. Prioritizing relations with institutional groupings and allies that include a broad category of developing countries, medium-sized powers and ‘middle-ground’ states – particularly leading regional brokers like India, Japan, Nigeria and Turkey – should continue to be a goal for the UK.
The UK can build relationships by seeking a consistent role in domains where it has credibility and expertise – poverty reduction, climate policy, technology governance, arms control, scientific research. It can also aim to play a role in ‘reforming to preserve’ the post-1945 institutions; this could include supporting reform of outdated conventions on membership, leadership and voting rights within multilateral organizations, and pushing to make these bodies more effective in addressing global problems. Despite limited resources and the effects of recent government dysfunction in compromising British influence, the UK can still be a ‘global broker’ in this dangerous and shifting world.
Conflict resolution – leveraging diplomatic capabilities
This global broker’s role includes helping to resolve conflict. For a start, the UK could aim to re-energize the push for arms control and non-proliferation in the way that it has done so effectively over the Arms Trade Treaty, which regulates the trade in conventional arms. Reinforcing restraints on nuclear testing and continuing to uphold the taboo of nuclear weapons use would help cement the UK’s support for developing countries and increase its influence on connected issues.
The UK also needs a clearer approach to managing the risks of regional conflicts. Its 2021 Integrated Review made a case for a tilt to the Indo-Pacific, focusing on the threats and challenges posed by China and other authoritarian states. This had a logical basis, especially as the ‘war on terror’ became less of a prominent concern. But in practice one consequence of the ‘tilt’ was a reduction in the UK’s security and diplomatic engagement with the Middle East. Combined with cuts to the aid budget that hit some of the UK’s conflict prevention resources, not just in the Middle East but also in Sudan and the Sahel, there is a case now for some limited rebalancing to focus on conflicts and flashpoints on the periphery of the UK’s neighbourhood.
In the Middle East, the UK has long-standing ties with Israel and has been one of the country’s most vocal supporters since the attacks by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Nonetheless, as the death toll in Gaza from Israel’s pursuit of Hamas has risen, the UK has put pressure on Israel by calling for a pause in military action and by saying that it would recognize a Palestinian state even if negotiations on such a state with Israel had not advanced. Given that the UK is one of Israel’s main supporters and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, that switch in position has symbolic value, even if it does not compare with the US’s leverage.
The conflict has demonstrated the value of the UK’s diplomatic links in the Middle East. It has had a defence partnership with Saudi Arabia for years, and a close relationship with Jordan stretching back to the First World War. It has close military ties with Oman, with which it has held a number of large joint exercises since 1986, and it was instrumental in the creation of the UAE. Even on Iran, with which relations are frosty, the UK played a key part in negotiation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), at the time a breakthrough in international efforts to contain the Iranian nuclear programme. The UK retains enough diplomatic ties with Iran to allow it to explore different discussions on regional security from those convened by the US.
However, mediating in the Gaza conflict has been made harder by the UK’s change in foreign policy priorities in recent years. It is now clear that the downplaying of the Middle East in the 2021 Integrated Review, and in the update in 2023, was a form of wishful thinking. While the UK focused on trade and military ties in the region, it nonetheless axed its dedicated Middle East minister in 2022, only restoring the role as a combined position also responsible for South Asia and relations with the UN.
The war in Gaza is now one of the most pressing international problems for UK foreign policy. The next government will need to be alert to the war’s impact and to the longer-running costs of ignoring the Middle East.
The UK’s 2020 aid cuts included a reduction of £90 million in its conflict prevention budgets for the Middle East and North Africa. In the summer of 2023, the Conservative chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Alicia Kearns MP, raised concerns that the UK was neglecting its relations with the region and called for the appointment of a UK special envoy for the Middle East peace process. The war in Gaza is now one of the most pressing international problems for UK foreign policy. The next government will need to be alert to the war’s impact – and to the longer-running costs of ignoring the Middle East, and of historically failing to reinforce the upholding of international law on issues such as the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.
The UK cannot have intensive diplomatic engagement everywhere, and needs to prioritize. Nonetheless, the next government would also be well advised, as a priority, to extend its conflict resolution expertise into other flashpoints. The UK has historic ties with Sudan, for which it is the penholder at the UN Security Council, and before the outbreak of a new war in 2023 played a role within the ‘Quad’ – a grouping consisting of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the UK and the US – in addressing the humanitarian crisis and long-running conflict-related instability there. Since the outbreak of the war, the UK approach on Sudan has seemed less vigorous and lacking the necessary high-level engagement, perhaps due to other claims on ministerial time. Nonetheless, the spread of instability across western, central and eastern Africa, extending to Sudan as well as Ethiopia, is likely to continue to demand UK attention.
In short, the next government should reconsider its priorities in aid, development, mediation and peacebuilding. The Sahel deserves more attention than recent strategic reviews have given it, and the spillover of instability from that region into Sudan and vice-versa has illustrated the perils of ignoring the risks. Ethiopia is also in a tenuous position following the war in Tigray, with a linked conflict in the Amhara region and an insurgency in Oromia. The UK has historically spent significant aid funds and had strong bilateral engagement in Ethiopia, which has been a partner on regional security. While aid cuts may have reduced some of the UK’s traction with the Ethiopian government, some analysis suggests the UK could still, working with influential regional partners, play a role in managing tensions and supporting peacebuilding. Even if judged only in terms of national interest, supporting stabilization in these regions would help avert the disruption that protracted regionalized wars and their spillover effects, including increased refugee flows, could bring to Europe.
Reprioritizing international development
On global development and global health, the UK’s past outsized influence has suffered from the merger in 2020 of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) with the Department for International Development (DFID), and from a 21 per cent cut to the aid budget in 2021. By the end of 2022, Andrew Mitchell, the development minister, openly stated to the House of Commons International Development Committee: ‘Let’s not beat around the bush. We are not a development superpower at the moment.’ The current government’s development white paper, published in November 2023, has set out plans for recapturing UK development leadership. It has focused on areas of traditional UK strength: addressing extreme poverty and debt distress. However, the diversion of more than a quarter of the aid budget to spending within the UK – on housing refugees and asylum seekers, and associated costs – has muddied priorities and diminished the government’s scope for spending abroad.
The Labour Party, which finds international development in many respects the easiest area of foreign policy to address, has set out its programme for government on the basis of explicit ‘missions’. This might be a useful guiding framework for its development policy too, avoiding the trap of focusing too much on institutional structures and spending. Supporting the rollout of promising malaria vaccines (one of which was successfully developed in the UK), scaling up the use of effective programmes for the extreme poor (such as through cash transfers), improving poor countries’ access to climate finance and pushing for a better approach to developing-country debt are all potential areas for action by the next government.
An opportunity for leadership on climate and the energy transition
On climate policy, the UK has a good claim to be providing international leadership already. It has set relatively ambitious domestic targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions – although the current government’s retreat from some goals has weakened credibility somewhat: the Climate Change Committee recently described its confidence in the UK meeting its 2030 emissions target as ‘low’.
Nonetheless, the opportunity remains for the next government to play a prominent role in international action on climate change. The UK has promised to spend £11.6 billion on climate finance for overseas partners by 2026. It also spearheaded efforts during its presidency of COP26 in 2021 to strike funding deals between international partners and fossil fuel-dependent emerging economies to help the latter mobilize investment in the green transition. Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs), as such arrangements are called, were agreed with Indonesia, South Africa and Vietnam in 2022. The UK’s export credit agency also announced in late 2022 that it would allow poor states struck by climate disasters to defer debt repayments – in practice, this will apply to only a fraction of low-income-country debt, but the approach is intended to serve as a model for others.
Many of the states with which the UK seeks strategic relationships are low- or middle-income countries under threat from climate change. Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and South Africa all have historic ties to the UK and face urgent climate risks. Yet all abstained from the UN vote on Ukraine in 2022. While the broader Global South has been split on the Ukraine conflict, the vote challenged Western assumptions that some of these countries would act in solidarity. Forging stronger partnerships on issues of concern to low- and middle-income countries – such as climate change – might strengthen these alliances. China also competes in these areas, seeking to provide influential investment and public goods to potential middle-income allies through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), especially those elements focused on sustainability and decarbonization. The next UK government could seek to counter Chinese influence by delivering or coordinating more climate and resilience investments from the UK and its allies. This will not be easy, given budgetary constraints. Nonetheless, the next UK government should continue to seek to be part of country-driven, tailored JETPs for middle-income countries.
Many low- or middle-income states are also resource-rich; their critical minerals are indispensable to the net zero transition. The UK has historically been a leader in governance of extractive industries, and London is a global centre for fundraising, minerals trading and industry bodies related to extractives. The UK can build on bilateral partnerships as well as on its membership of the Minerals Security Partnership (see also Chapter 2), a grouping set up by the US to provide public and private investment for mineral supply chains to countries with critical mineral resources. It should aim to support standard-setting, compliance and the sharing of economic benefits from the green transition. The next government should also use its oversight of London’s global financial centre to demonstrate how the vast flows of climate finance needed for the net zero transition in the developing world can be protected from corruption and weak governance.
A UK role in more effective development finance
In many policy areas, the UK is not a significant actor alone. But it can work with mid-sized powers and developing countries with which it shares common causes to be part of coalitions seeking reform. One example is the Bridgetown Agenda proposed by Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, which seeks better access to climate finance and credit for lower-income countries. The UK can also try to maximize its position in the G20 and the Commonwealth, both institutions where it maintains links with Global South countries. Similarly, the UK’s position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council continues to give it diplomatic leverage within the UN system; the UK is a frequent drafter of key texts and its diplomatic skills are still rated highly.
As a prominent contributor to multilateral institutions, the UK can be a voice for their reform. It can help to address strains in the post-1945 architecture of international financial institutions, development banks and standard-setting bodies. The UN’s own analysis finds that poorer countries are especially affected by high borrowing costs, financial market volatility (leading to periodic debt distress), underinvestment in global public goods (such as pandemic response and climate adaptation and mitigation), and slow access to emergency finance.
Development finance will be less effective if poorer countries are caught in a cycle of spending their budgets on servicing debt. Working with others, the UK might usefully continue to design model debt relief instruments.
Multilateral development banks remain one of the most important sources of climate finance for developing countries. The UK has some tools to mobilize such finance without spending much more of its own money. It is already putting these tools to use: its provision of loan guarantees to increase multilateral development bank support to poorer countries has, by some estimates, generated an additional £5 billion in lending from such institutions. The UK should continue to focus on ways to get multilateral development banks to provide more and faster support to developing countries facing climate challenges, and it should work with others to reform the wider system.
A priority must be to address developing-country debt. As of 2023, around 60 per cent of low-income countries were either in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress. Efforts to restructure such debt – as in Zambia – have been prolonged and difficult. But direct development finance will be less effective if poorer countries are caught in a cycle of spending their budgets on servicing debt. Working with others, the UK might usefully continue to design model debt relief instruments. It should engage with private creditors, which now account for a bigger share of developing-country debt than in the 2010s, to create debt relief packages or restructure debt outside existing frameworks. The fact that sovereign debt owed to private creditors is often governed by English law also points to a useful role for the UK in this area.
In addressing developing-country debt distress, the UK will have to confront the role of China. China has a big and complex agenda in international development, even though it now regards the massive infrastructure projects associated with its BRI as much less feasible. There was a clear shift to smaller projects, and a reduced focus on infrastructure, in China’s most recent international economic programme, the 2021 Global Development Initiative. Many of China’s BRI investments are also now more focused on sectors and technologies related to the green transition. Nonetheless, as of 2022, China was the largest official creditor in over half of low-income countries, and it will remain an important player in any attempt to manage developing-country debt.
The UK is unlikely to have influence over China on its own, but working through international institutions to encourage Beijing to agree to debt relief or debt restructuring – as China did for Sri Lanka via an IMF deal – may be one way to exert leadership.
China also has an important role in the multilateral architecture. Lack of agreement on whether China’s voting weights in the IMF and World Bank should be adjusted to reflect its growing economic strength blocked efforts to increase the resources of the two institutions at their recent annual meetings in Marrakesh, Morocco. China has also sought to build its own multilateral institutions. One example is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), conceived to some degree as a Chinese ‘answer’ to more Western-dominated regional development banks. There remains controversy over the degree to which the AIIB is dominated by the Communist Party of China. The UK, as a founding member and the first country outside Asia to join the AIIB, might usefully push for clear governance, including a rotating presidency, a resident board or other oversight mechanisms.
Technology governance
A further area for cautious engagement with China is the governance of technology, as seen in the UK government’s efforts to bring Chinese representatives to the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park in November 2023. Though it attracted fewer world leaders than originally targeted and was arguably dominated by Big Tech, the summit was a good demonstration of the UK being a broker of solutions to global problems. Pulling together a summit that managed to get the US and China to sign up to shared language on the risks from artificial intelligence (AI), a technology which the two countries actively compete to develop, was an achievement.
AI governance offers broader scope for UK leadership. The UK needs to work out its domestic regulatory approach, but rather than see the AI Safety Summit as having been a single event attached to the current prime minister, it could continue to mediate between interests: the two influential AI poles of the US and China; the regulatory force of the EU; and the major tech companies developing frontier AI models. As most of the world outside these blocs is excluded from the governance debate and lacks sufficient visibility of technical developments, the next UK government could play a useful role shaping the governance of AI risks and working out how to include tech companies in multilateral discussions or processes.
Leading by example: the use of reputation
If the UK seeks to be a leading voice in global governance, international development and reform of the multilateral system, the next government should recognize the damage to the UK’s reputation and influence that occurs when the country disregards (or threatens to disregard) international agreements or is perceived as taking law ‘to its fringes’ at home. The UK has historically championed international law; when it departs from such principles itself, it undermines other countries’ respect for the rule of law.
The power of example is all the more important in these times, when the post-war system is contested so vigorously. A new government will struggle to advocate that lower- and middle-income countries, many of which host far more refugees than the UK, should abide by international law in relation to refugees and migration if the UK itself is stretching definitions of the law at home – including through recent legislation to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda. The Rwanda policy goes beyond some of the offshore processing schemes proposed by some other developed countries, and its implementation is likely to face challenges in international courts.
The UK also needs better plans for increasing its representation in multilateral institutions. It should make the most of its new status as an ASEAN dialogue partner. And it must ensure it can reliably supply high-calibre candidates for senior positions in international institutions. This means nurturing talent, encouraging the nomination and appointment of well-qualified UK personnel to major institutions (including in the international judiciary), and making provision for succession planning. The UK should continue to invest in high-quality specialist international legal advice for government ministers and research analysts, who together provide the UK’s expert institutional memory for foreign policy.
The next government might also usefully take a more consistent approach to what the 2021 Integrated Review called the UK’s ‘soft power superpower’ status. The global reach and recognition of the UK’s cultural assets are massive. However, the UK tends to conflate a positive global image with real influence; soft power is more complex than global recognition or regard, requires investment, and is also not a substitute for hard or economic power.
Having world-leading media in particular can translate into strategic influence, especially as disinformation becomes a more frequent tool of authoritarian and hostile states. An estimate from the BBC suggests that China spends $6–10 billion annually on its state media network, CGTN. The UK government has long claimed the BBC World Service – with its estimated reach of 365 million people each week and ability to provide news and information in closed states and conflicts – as a soft power asset. But it has failed to fund the service consistently. It removed consistent FCO funding in 2014, leaving programming to be covered by the BBC licence fee and ad hoc government support – which has been forthcoming, but only covering the most recent government spending review period to 2024/25. A one-off grant of £20 million set out in the Integrated Review Refresh also only covers the period to 2025. As AI and new technologies undermine the reliability of information, there is an opportunity for the UK to play a strategic role as a trusted backer of impartial media. But it needs to provide long-term funding for this.
